Blind Quest: Avoiding Pitfalls

By Bert Tucker

This story quotes real historical references. Truth should not offend. For example, the author could easily read the Uncle Remus story in dialect from having learned that dialect as a child.

The 20th century was beyond doubt the most globally threatening period of world history up to that time. Almost everything changed from the old comfortable ways. Avoiding Pitfalls continues the experiences of seven modern fictional characters as they meet real historical characters. Those historical figures continue to often speak their own words from their writings and speeches thus keeping their story close to their real history.

The story takes General Charles Anderson, MD Emily Cromwell and Dr. John White into the deep South encountering Booker T. Washington (Up From Slavery including incidents from his early life as a slave) and Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus actual slave folk tales). Anderson then moves on to meet his ancestral relatives in a Louisiana village. A pilot project develops modern sanitation and a rural electrification program with futuristic (1915) dynamos from General Electric. Dr. Cromwell moves on to work with San Francisco leaders preparing for the most devastating natural disaster of the century, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (includes excerpt from PBS documentary).

Ultimately the moderns travel to Europe where Anderson meets Tsar Nicholas and the emerging Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin. Anderson then goes on to the Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam for a summit meeting of royal European leaders to confront the malignant forces bringing Europe to the brink of World War I.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462035632

Bert Tucker

Bert Tucker holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from West Point (1956) and a master’s degree plus in physics and mathematics from Louisiana State University (1964), including an experimental and theoretical thesis on the fluid dynamics of superfluid liquid helium under a grant from NASA. He was a lieutenant and captain in the Corps of Engineers, engineer company commander (Germany, 1960), airfield operations officer (Fort Polk, 1961–62), and served as an airplane pilot, helicopter pilot, and helicopter instructor pilot. He was an FAA-qualified commercial pilot and was qualified as a military parachutist. He participated in a course presented by senior NASA instructors on the design of early spacecraft and implementation of the then new Apollo project while he was a graduate student at LSU. No missions have carried men beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo project sent the first men to the moon. For further background, see the acknowledgments. He worked with and consulted to Wall Street firms for more than a quarter century. He developed and managed the data quality of financial market data systems that employed early global satellite communication systems, acquiring data from one hundred exchanges around the world. He pioneered early derivative securities reporting methodologies. He developed systems to calculate many instantaneous, complex market data indices. He developed encryption methods to secure proprietary market data. He is a member of the West Point Society of the Mid Hudson Region and was the chair of a series of seven West Point conferences on leadership and ethics development for high school students sponsored by the WPSMHR. He is a member of the Wayne, New Jersey Rotary Club and has served as chair for Rotary District 7490 for ten leadership and ethics conferences sponsored by numerous Rotary Clubs. The seventeen conferences were presented by West Point officers and cadets who were leaders in the West Point Cadet Honor and Respect programs.

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Copyright © 2011 by Bert Tucker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. If there are only a few historical figures or actual events in the novel, the disclaimer could name them: For example: Edwin Stanton and Salmon Chase are historical figures… or The King and Queen of Burma were actually exiled by the British in 1885. The rest of the disclaimer would follow: However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-3562-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-3563-2 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 07/21/2011

Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

ENDNOTE

Also by Bert Tucker:

Blind Quest: Deceived by Experience

Life Force Mars: Creating a New Home for Mankind

For Diane, Robert, Rob, Tim, and Bill

PREFACE

This is a sequel to Blind Quest: Deceived by Experience.

First, referenced material in this book is real history as reported in books written and experienced at the historical time by contemporaries. Those books are present in the author’s comprehensive library of antiquarian books. Largely this is consistent with modern interpretations, but there are times where the original sources present a different view from revisionist history written to be politically correct in modern times. This is not intended to offend in any way but hopefully allows our ancestors to present their views as held in their time.

Deceived by Experience was intended to be seven modern people experiencing 1905 without unduly distorting real history, except by revealing how events in 1905 influenced the future. This volume, Avoiding Pitfalls, begins with that approach, but the moderns then become active agents of change, seeking to avoid the real pitfalls evident in the original future—their past.

In the twenty-first century, the US national government was a 24/7 operation throughout the year. In 1905, the United States was not yet an international power, and the national government worked at a much slower pace.

Newspapers carried the latest news with an occasional extra edition. The president in 1905 took extended vacations and had a personal life.

In April 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt actually attended an extended reunion of his Rough Riders in San Antonio, which was followed by actual hunting expeditions in Oklahoma and Colorado. In the first book, the Columbians landed their time-traveling space shuttle, Columbia II, near Salt Lake City. Adventurous President Roosevelt heard of this event from a newsman traveling with him and immediately set out to see what was happening.

That takes place in Blind Quest: Deceived by Experience. A pretext in that story carries seven moderns back to 1905. The pretext used was a global catastrophe ignited by terrorists expanding their activities in the Middle East, leading to nuclear warfare. The pretext could just as well have been sparked by economic failure or environmental collapse.

The 1905 era was a time of extremes foreign to modern culture. You will find an entrepreneurial spirit and a sense of teamwork that arose during the actual recovery from the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 that was missing in responding to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. The recovery after the earthquake was miraculous.

Theodore Roosevelt is the central historical character in Blind Quest. In February 2010, sixty some eminent historians judged all the presidents of the United States to date, ranking Theodore Roosevelt fourth of them all.

Roosevelt rose to the presidency by an extraordinary chain of events beginning in 1898 and culminating in 1901, a period of barely three years. He had gained popularity by leading his Rough Riders to victory (on foot) during the Spanish American War, fighting fiercely in Cuba in 1898. He returned home and was immediately asked to become the Republican candidate for New York governor. He was elected and two years later ran for vice president with William McKinley. McKinley and Roosevelt won. McKinley was assassinated in the fall of 1901, resulting in Roosevelt’s succession to the presidency. Roosevelt became exceptionally popular and ran for president on his own in 1904, winning by a landslide.

This is a sequel to Blind Quest: Deceived by Experience, a historical novel and an adventure with a strong modern twist. That story is based upon real history represented by real historical personalities and events. In many ways, the fictional modern characters see the real historical scene though historical personalities, who often express themselves with extensive personal quotes and experiences documented with footnotes.

Conduct and speech in polite society change with the times, both to become more genteel and to accommodate changing mores. The former is evident in our speech becoming both more politically correct and allowing rougher and more vulgar expression under freedom of speech.

That is particularly apparent in this novel. It is most evident in regards to speech between or within the races. This story offers an example of some of this language from Uncle Remus African American folk stories. The quote from Booker T. Washington is politically incorrect today but was used in the original published material. Dialect was taken directly from the original—no offense intended then or now. Both practices were highly regarded in their day.

Deceived by Experience is a getting to know you and where you live experience.

This volume, Blind Quest: Avoiding Pitfalls, is more of a shirt sleeve cooperative experience of the moderns working with real historical personalities. The group tackles the overwhelming problems of the 1905 era that would normally lead to devastating consequences during the following quarter century and beyond.

The title, Blind Quest, refers to the fact that nineteenth-century experiences did not prepare the nation’s leaders at the turn of the twentieth century to handle the challenges of their radically changing world. Avoiding Pifalls refers to the moderns steering the historical characters through the greatest failures of that day, human or natural. They not only warn of dangers ahead, but they punctuate those warnings with graphical evidence from the future.

In Blind Quest: Deceived by Experience, the story began when an American scientist conceived a theoretical way to carry seven people back in time, an uncertain prospect at best. Time travel would not allow transporting through solid matter, so the vehicle first must carry the time travelers up into the vacuum of Earth’s orbit. A plasma shield projected upstream into the solar wind, enveloped the ship, and guided it to its destination in time and space, still in Earth orbit.

The President authorized development of the concept and selected General Charles Anderson to lead the project. General Anderson and the NASA leaders then selected a team to conduct a voyage through space and time to a period of relative calm at the turn of the twentieth century should nuclear disaster materialize.

Today, mankind possesses the ability to imperil Earth with ultimate devastation as a habitat for modern civilization. Since the mid-twentieth century, the most powerful nations repeatedly imperiled humanity in their quest for power. But the twenty-first century only increased that danger as lesser nations and peoples obtained nuclear weapons, leading to precipitous actions allowing no evasion of the consequences. There was only the slim hope that seven modern people might be able to bridge a century with the sole purpose of rescuing humanity from its fate.

Six men and one woman made the leap through time in a renamed space shuttle (Columbia II). They were General Charles Anderson (mission leader), Dr. Neal Collins (space shuttle pilot, astrophysicist, African American), Dr. John White (geologist, shuttle co-pilot), Dr. Robert Hussey (physicist), Dr. Emily Cromwell (medical doctor), Dr. Will Hoffman (pharmaceuticals), and Dr. Jesse Wall (materials processing). Collectively, they were referred to as Columbians.

The abuses in their targeted historical era were terribly hard for the Columbian team to accept. Racial abuse was so extreme that one hundred or more people were lynched in each of the preceding twenty years. In 1905, the world’s colonial powers were poised for world war. The wealthy industrial barons on Wall Street knew few limits, leading to monopolistic attacks among the titans. Most extreme was the rape and abuse of the natural world, slaughter of wildlife, clear cut timbering, and severe poisoning of the air and water—damn the consequences.

This volume begins with three members of the Columbian team on their first journey into the racially embittered and rigidly segregated Deep South. General Charles Anderson, medical Dr. Emily Cromwell, and Dr. John White visit Atlanta, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and New Orleans

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Appendix The Last Yellow Fever Epidemic that reprints a reference that is out of print. Because this story is set in 1905, the vast majority of non-original material is from sources whose copyrights are long since expired. Some material is in quotes from government officials or documents. Much of this reference material is from antiquarian books in the author’s library and may not be in print today.

The author appreciates permission to include a large excerpt from a program transcript of PBS’s American Experience, The Great San Francisco Earthquake; www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/earthquake/filmore/pt.html, courtesy of WGBH-TV Boston. A Moira Production film for American Experience, copyright © 2006 WGBH Educational Foundation.

CHAPTER 1

RECAP FROM BLIND QUEST: DECEIVED BY EXPERIENCE

The chaos erupted early on the morning of September 11, 2001, when groups of radical Arab terrorists hijacked four passenger jets. They crashed two into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. Passengers on the fourth plane were attempting to overpower the terrorists aboard their airplane when it crashed. The world would never be the same. Open warfare was launched by the United States with a preemptive strike at Iraq, seen as a conspirator in the WTC attacks, thus beginning one of the longest wars in American history.

While war raged on overseas, back home in the United States, a space shuttle was modified to make time travel possible in the event matters got out of hand. The shuttle was launched in 2012 carrying a crew of seven unique people. The ground crew rushed the count down after terrorists exploded seven nuclear bombs in the United States and Europe.

The Columbia II rose from Cape Canaveral and climbed to high orbit. Mission Commander Neal Collins received instructions to proceed with their mission even before they settled into orbit. The crew immediately continued to their planned time-travel launch point in space.

The crew was stunned. While they knew their mission and its plan, none of them had expected such an event would actually be needed. After all, those initiating the attacks were humans, and no responsible person could conceivably take an action that would destroy most of the only habitable planet in the solar system. The consequences landed heavily on the crew. Earth was now shrouded in murky, dark clouds from a war the United States certainly had struggled to avoid.

Behind them lay the dark days of the slide into nuclear terrorism. Collins was also the shuttle pilot. He confirmed for mission control that their ship was at the time-travel launch point. There was no reason to delay.

Bob Hussey was the physicist who had invented the device that should carry them through time. He warned the crew that he was activating his equipment. There was a moment of discomfort. No one knew if the time shift had actually taken place. Computers then checked their position and movement through space. The current date was calculated from the locations of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn relative to the fixed stars in the celestial sphere.

Miracle of miracles, it appeared that they had indeed reached their target year of 1905—a time when there was still peace in the world, and Theodore Roosevelt, the current American president, was one of the most extraordinary of all time. Below them lay Earth, the familiar blue globe with wispy white streaks that they had called home.

The Columbia II was not in stable orbit. A number of maneuvers using their auxiliary rocket placed them in low orbit. Commander Neal Collins gave notice that they were positioned for commencing their descent to their planned landing point in the Utah desert.

However, the crew had more hurdles to clear before their hoped-for touchdown. They needed to land on an extended stretch of level ground. One of the few suitable natural locations was near Salt Lake City. There was no NASA Houston facility to guide them. There was no prepared landing space. They were on their own. It was now April 19, 1905.

They paused in orbit to drop off an observer satellite. This satellite would serve as insurance in case they crashed upon landing. It could warn people on Earth of the nuclear terrorist disaster and give them some other warnings as well. Hopefully, mankind would reach the heavens on some later date, and this message from the future would await them.

The satellite was very special. It was able to optically survey Earth and transmit images by radio back to Earth upon command. This observer could serve as their global eyes once they were on the ground.

Commander Neal Collins was in charge while they were in space, and General Anderson would take charge when they reached the ground.

The Columbia II space shuttle descended to an altitude that allowed detailed RADAR inspection of their landing location. The two pilots were searching for a landing spot alongside the Union Pacific Railroad tracks about fifty miles west of Salt Lake City.

A transcontinental express train streaked across the near barren desert, billowing smoke from its steam locomotive. The space shuttle descended those last few thousand feet seeking a firm surface that could carry its huge weight. A successful landing was not certain. NASA copilot, Dr. John White, strained his eyes looking for significant obstacles on the ground ahead and lowered the shuttle’s landing gear.

The ship skimmed the surface, nose high, holding to its diminishing atmospheric lift as it lost speed. The wheels touched the ground, and immediately the drag parachutes were deployed. They would help keep the ship aligned straight ahead as its wheels plowed along the natural surface. Everyone aboard was apprehensive as the ship shuddered, slowed, and then came to a bumpy stop without incident. They had arrived on April 20, 1905.

By their arrival, the seven people from the future were already changing the course of history. Their shuttle spaceship was their opening card to the historical people of this time.

Medical miracles by Dr. Emily Cromwell were intended to prove their good intentions after making contact with the natives. President Theodore Roosevelt was expected to arrive on the scene soon from one of his Colorado bear hunts. Everything depended upon Roosevelt’s thirst for adventure.

The Columbians contacted the Union Pacific Railroad offices by jumping the telephone lines strung along side the railroad tracks. The people on the train had witnessed their landing. A team of railroad people came out to the landing site and inspected this extraordinary flying machine with a fifty-star American flag on its tail. That was the convincing proof that they came from the future.

They Columbians further introduced themselves to the historical public in Salt Lake City using numerous motion pictures. They began by showing Disney’s Aladdin, because the subject matter was well known in 1905 and friendly.

The next motion picture shown was True Grit starring John Wayne, because it fit the times, and silent films were already being shown in 1905. The setting for the film was familiar and nearby.

Roosevelt was indeed bear hunting in Colorado and soon found the Columbians. Their subsequent journey was across country on the president’s private train. Roosevelt took the opportunity to hold lengthy conversations with the Columbians. The President also introduced them to the turn-of-the-century American public and made them all instant public celebrities. Their photos appeared everywhere. General Anderson used a photo of Earth taken from lunar orbit over the shoulder of the moon to illustrate that people of the future had actually gone to the moon. The photo had been taken in December 1968.

Their contacts with the influential and the powerful began a process that gave the Columbians insights into the challenges they would face if the course of history were to be changed for the better.

They crossed the country with Roosevelt, meeting the powerful, the inventive, the rich, the poor, and the tycoons. They picked up three future greats for their team along this journey. They became part of the Columbian team—young Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, and Harry Truman. MacArthur and Marshall were army lieutenants. Both had actually just returned from fighting the Spanish American War aftermath in the Philippine Islands.

Along the way, they visited the ghetto near the slaughterhouses in Chicago and met Upton Sinclair, the self-appointed guardian for the emigrant poor. Emily Cromwell met an elderly Susan B. Anthony, who had fought for women to gain voting rights; and the Columbians spoke at length with the conscience of America, Mark Twain, at a Columbian outpost in New York.

Roosevelt’s White House staff found the Columbians housing in a large Georgian mansion in the embassy section of Washington DC. Roosevelt introduced them to the powerful in the nation’s capitol.

The seven Columbians were intensely active in various aspects of their mission. Anderson was in charge overall and was setting goals. Emily Cromwell was by far the most visible, continuously working with the medical institutions and lecturing on public health and modern medical practice. Will Hoffman was their pharmacologist, seeking to revolutionize a world of homeopathic witchcraft. Hussey knew modern technology that had brought them through space and time. Now he was working with the great inventors, the likes of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman, Lee DeForest, and Guglielmo Marconi. [see cover photo]

Jesse Wall was their materials scientist, which is to say a metallurgist and chemist. Some future materials would become critical. Producing PVC (polyvinyl chloride) and stainless steel were immediate goals. The Columbians were getting their home and office/workspace in order in downtown Washington. They had established remarkable contacts that required nurturing—for example, the Wright Brothers, the politicians, the movers and shakers, and the press.

But there was one hypersensitive subject the Columbians had been studiously avoiding until they became well accepted. Racial prejudice was very evident in those historical days. The strong bias was still apparent just forty years after the Civil War with veterans of that war still around. The need to heal the Union led to the current journey of Charles Anderson, John White, and Emily Cromwell, which resumes their story from this point forward.

Anderson ran through the dispositions of his other team members as he, Cromwell, and White rode a train through Virginia.

Neal Collins was running the operations of the Columbians out of Washington. He was expanding their staff, their business facilities, and their domestic household. He was also adjusting resources to meet emerging needs. He was effectively their chief of staff.

Will Hoffman had the most pressing responsibility. Will was the second part of the medical team with Emily. She could do only so much with the medicines and equipment available in 1905. Will was working to produce a dozen or so critical medicines with the primitive pharmaceutical manufacturing firms of the day.

Jesse Wall was working with manufacturers to produce new materials. He was teaching them how to make useful products like PVC pipes, sinks, tubs, and toilets. He was also replicating Cromwell’s own stainless steel medical implements to share with the physicians and surgeons of the day.

Douglas MacArthur was working with Lieutenant Colonel George Washington Goethals using futuristic computer systems to evaluate the historical designs of the Panama Canal. At this point, Goethals would be forty-seven years old. Historically, Goethals would normally be taking over this enormous canal project within just a few months. MacArthur would become the manager of a new community sanitation project.

Neal Collins and George Marshall were working with Congressman Carter Glass in Washington, writing the first modern laws for control of stock market and banking practices. They were beginning with the law Glass would have authored in 1912. They were working in cooperation with the powers of the financial industry crowned by J. P. Morgan. Marshall, working with Collins, was absorbing the gamesmanship on Wall Street and was begrudgingly being accepted as their point man in working with international business interests.

Charles Anderson himself would be chasing down problems and providing much of the visible image of the Columbian team. He would need all of his stature as a full four-star general from the future and as leader of the Columbians. He was initiating arrangements with imperial foreign governments and monopolistic businesses, as well as steering sensitive labor relations with the industrial powers. The labor perspective of the captains of industry urgently needed to be humanized. New laws were needed for minimum wages, maximum work hours, child labor and safe manufacturing processes. That was going to be a huge hurdle to clear.

Anderson, Cromwell, and White had departed on their southern tour on Sunday afternoon, May 14, 1905, a journey that would take them to Atlanta (Joel Chandler Harris and his folksy Brer Rabbit animal stories told originally by the slaves among themselves), Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (Booker T. Washington and his innovations toward black education), and then to New Orleans (where a Yellow Fever epidemic was emerging). Anderson would meet his ancestral family and confront militant racial prejudice).

Anderson was deep in thought, contemplating what lie ahead, as his train continued onward to Atlanta. He pondered the overwhelming scale of the task they had undertaken.

How could they build a framework for a safe transition into the nuclear age? How could they guide these people and these governments into a sense of ecological responsibility for the natural world? How could they preclude the global warming that was likely to become the ultimate global disaster? The people of this day were largely illiterate.

How could the Columbian group encourage a thirst for scientific and technical discovery that would lead to enlightenment? How could they encourage democratic reforms in this world dominated by kings and dictators? How could they preserve religious beliefs without flaming those beliefs into fanaticism? How could they help science become a companion to religion while avoiding the obvious conflicts? They were learning that the obvious way often was not the best way. There were pitfalls everywhere.

Anderson was coming to realize that humankind had repeatedly overcome these extreme hazards. Remarkably, they had survived, if only barely, on their own. The cost was often very high, but nations had learned. Perhaps the Columbian approach needed to be less rather than more. Perhaps Mark Twain had been right