14-09-2017, 01:41 PM
(This post was last modified: 14-09-2017, 01:56 PM by Tom Scully.)
Peter Lemkin Wrote:.....I can find very little on Ganis and how he'd be in a position to know any of this. ......
Quite a bit of recent background here,
Quote:https://web.archive.org/web/201102111619...ly-county/
..............
Ganis explained the multiple connections with his family and the James family....
Recent Ganis "rodeo" does not seem to have been all that well received....
http://ericjames.org/wordpress/2011/01/0...s-history/
....and, from a 2015 thesis...
Quote:https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Sherril...0final.pdf
BASED ON A TRUE STORY: JESSE JAMES AND THE REINTERPRETATION OF HISTORY IN POPULAR MEDIA
A Thesis by ALLEN M. SHERRILL
Submitted to the Graduate School at Appalachian State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS
......................
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new breed of amateur historian is trying to supersede all others with their conspiracy theories.60
Ralph P. Ganis published two books on the outlaw. One suggested that James was a
member of a pro-Confederate secret society, The Knights of the Golden Circle, and the other
claimed that he was involved with the Ku Klux Klan. Despite these propositions, much of
his work stems from research originally undertaken by Yeatman and other legitimate James
scholars. With such connections to legitimate history, Ganis's theories seem plausible to
many within the general public who enjoy the idea of great historical conspiracies.
Ganis's first book, Uncommon Men: A Secret Network of Jesse James Revealed
(2000), examined Jesse's life during his years in Tennessee following the Northfield disaster.
It focused primarily on relationships James developed with two North Carolina bootleggers,
Andrew Moorman Diggs, "Mome," and Lorenzo Merriman Little. The James brothers met these two while all four worked at a barrel factory in Nashville, Tennessee.61 Jesse, in
particular, befriended the bootleggers and carried out several operations with them that took the Missourian as far into North Carolina as Stanly and Anson counties.62 Much of this
information is a great addition to the research of scholars like Yeatman. However, Ganis
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ruins much of it by then trying to connect the James brothers and Merriman Little to the Knights of the Golden Circle, with little evidence to support such claims.63
For his works, Ganis relied mostly on oral histories as his primary source material. In
his Preface, Ganis noted that oral history accounts are seen by most historians as unreliable,
but yet he chose to depend on them. On top of that, he gathered many of these accounts at a
family reunion to which he provide no documentation or transcriptions as to what he actually
heard. These oral histories connected with other skeptical material may work for Ganis, but
they do not do much substantiate his arguments to any trained scholar. Yet, they may seem highly plausible to the average person, and therefore his conspiracies become appealing.64
Ganis's other book, Desperate Measures: Jesse James and the Klan Battle of
Reconstruction (2007), does not do a much better job. He again relied on oral history
evidence to attempt to substantiate a connection between James and KKK members in North
Carolina. For an ex-Confederate guerrilla, such as Jesse James, to have friends in the KKK
is no surprise, but Ganis does not provide enough legitimate documentation to ultimately make James's relationship with the Klansmen as probable.65 Of this work, a reviewer argued
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that the book began well in tracing its roots in history, but ultimately morphed its story into a fantasy.66
Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.