Charles Guggenheim Quotes
I think he was explicit that it was a slave labor situation, but I was not alarmed at that point, because there were so many tragedies involved in that war. That was the first time I had any indication that something was sort of strange.
Guggenheim, Charles. "Filmmaker Interview." Berga: Soldiers of Another War, PBS, 2003.
Indian and Black slaves were outlawed very early in Connecticut, not on moral grounds of concern for the Indians and Blacks, but because of the negative effects on the white poor. Why would anyone pay the poor any more than the amortization costs of a slave? Therefore there was no way a poor white could make a living wage if slavery were to coexist.
Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.
This was the an early history of the brutal 1298 Muslim Invasion of Gujarat a large state of India that was then Hindu. The Islamic Armies spread out from the Middle East and converted a large proportion of the worlds people to Islam. Force or “conversion by the sword” was one of the tools, but millions of people welcomed Islam and saw it as a great modernizing force for the dignity and equality of people—especially in Hindu India where the caste system made all inferior to the Brahmins and the lowest cast literally “untouchables.”
This is one of the major reasons that Slavery was so hard to end in the South. At the time, the dollar value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, inventory, and capital equipment of the South. Slaves were not only capital, they were the largest component of Southern capital and Southern wealth. There were numerous ideas of paying slave owners for the freedom of their slaves, and if this was done, it would have been far less expensive in money alone than the Civil War cost. However, the Southern leadership, like Fitzhugh, were totally intransient with culture and customs—indeed the Southern concept of manhood—was dependent in Slavery. The result was that no compensation was paid to slave owners and the South was impoverished as a result of its capital loss and it would not recover for 150 years.
John Sutter was an immigrant to California from Switzerland where he became a Mexican citizen. Slavery was outlawed in Mexico and its territories, yet Sutter and others maintained Indians as slaves. The Roman Catholic Missions of California also kept Indian slaves. This quotation is historically important because many people never realized that slavery was prevalent in California.
Charles Eli Guggenheim was an American documentary film director, producer, and screenwriter. He was the most honored documentary filmmaker in the Academy history, winning four Oscars from twelve nominations.
