Author Brant Randall (aka Bruce Cook) Guest Post

I want to deeply thank author Brant Randall (aka Bruce Cook) for taking the time to stop by Cafe of Dreams and posting a wonderful guest post. If you haven't checked out his book, Blood Harvest (click here for my review) please do so - you will be thrilled that you did!

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Does history exist?

Does an author owe anything to the historical record? Is history a verifiable, testable, provable thing?My recent novel, Blood Harvest, is an attempt to give a new perspective to a past in the United States that is still within living memory. When most people hear the background of my story they express either astonishment or disbelief. A few confirm it and add more details to what I have learned.

In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had as many as six million members in 35 states. It controlled state legislatures. It controlled the Democratic National Convention in 1924, stalemating the nomination of Al Smith (a Catholic) for 103 ballots.

Its power base was NOT the south. It was the northeast and Midwest. It certainly was anti-black, but in the 1920s it was especially anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic. There was a rally of 20,000 Klansmen in Worcester Massachusetts in 1924 that ended in a riot, where the opposition was the Knights of Columbus. There are films of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania in front of the Capitol in 1925, fifteen thousand strong, in full Klan regalia.
My question to you is this: where was all this information when I was falling asleep in high school history class during the height of the civil rights movement?

This all started because of a story my grandmother told me. She lived to the age of ninety-six and died in 2002. She was a Scotch-Irish girl from rural New England, one of twelve children, though two died in infancy.

I knew she had married young, perhaps at sixteen, though she sometimes claimed she had been eighteen. She said that after her wedding day she never returned to her home town. I assumed that she eloped or otherwise angered her parents. At one point I asked if her parents disliked my grandfather, who I remembered as personable and charming.

She claimed that they liked him very much. He was a perfect example of the immigrant success story. Came to America from Greece at sixteen, without any English. Started working the next day. Within five years he owned his own restaurant, and in another five he added a chain of candy shops and drug stores.

"So why didn’t you ever return to your home town?"

"It was those dumb clucks." She used this expression only when quite angry. "My brother-in-law didn’t think it right for a white girl to marry a non-white European."

This was new territory to me, but when I read my grandfather’s immigration papers I found that southern Europeans—the Greeks, Spanish, Italians, and Turks—were classified thus until 1912. But it was her next revelation that stunned me.

It wasn’t dumb "clucks." It was dumb "klux." It was the KKK that had driven my grandparents from the town. This was not consistent with what I had learned in my history classes, and so I began to research.

I read a number of histories of the period, then histories of the KKK. I did research on the net and found photos and film of KKK rallies in front of the White House in the. I read contemporary accounts in newspapers of the day. (You can see the film on my YouTube book trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJM6Nbbq9Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJM6Nbbq9Q )

Best of all I interviewed friends and family whose memories extend back to the 1920s. Their reminiscences were wonderful and invaluable. I found that as they spoke of their childhood they often dropped into the jargon and slang of the times.

In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much? Have I told a "true" story in my novel?

Since three eyewitnesses to the same event come up with three different (sometimes contradictory) accounts, I don’t put too much value on "history" as written by historians. They always write with the filter of their own culture and education.

And anyway the word history contains the word "story" within it. As long as I’m not preaching I can shape the story—and history—as I wish.

Still, all this elision and revision of history is troubling. I currently teach cinema at a college where 50% of my students are attending on international visas. In one discussion I was asking what the name for World War II was in their home country. (Since not all countries fought in WWI, I expected there to be some variation.) Mexico calls it the Great War, a term used in the United Kingdom for World War I. Vietnam has no name for it. And a Japanese student told me it is the War Against American Imperialism.

As Nietzsche said, "There are no facts, only interpretations."