It might be worth noting that on the same weekend that witnessed the anniversaries of the the ATF raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building–both terribly violent events involving anti-government, gun-crazy extremists–the President of the United States encouraged armed protests against state governors who have asked their citizens to stay home in order to “flatten the curve” and halt the spread of the Coronavirus. These governors recognize that various “social distancing” measures have saved many thousands of lives.
The President’s call to “liberate” the states nonetheless brought out hundreds of heavily-armed protestors, social distancing be damned, to state capitol buildings. Some of them believe that the economic costs of the shutdown are greater than that of the many thousands of lives that will be lost through a premature re-opening of businesses and public spaces. Others say that they are in good health and will be able to survive the infection should they contract it. Others rehearse crazy conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus as some sort of subversive attack on the President. These protestors–frightened, infantile racists who cling to guns and a deviant version of Christianity that makes a fetish of violence, represent much that is wrong with this country. They neither read nor reason, and they believe that the solutions to problems can only be achieved through the threat of violence. That they engaged in this paramilitary cosplay on the eve of the anniversary of the Columbine Massacre and Hitler’s birthday tells you all you need to know about the President and his most hysterical followers.
We recently completed a search at my institution for a historian of the Islamic World with a specialization in the vast period before 1800. I chaired the search, and am chairing another search in a different department right now. From the isolation of my family quarantine, I have thought a lot about the search. I am very excited about the person we hired. Still, as I reflect upon the process and what I hear from my younger colleagues, it seems to me that there is much that we as a profession might do better.
When I began applying for jobs a long time ago, the system was very different from today. Credentials stuck in files at the AHA, or mailing in letters and a CV with letters of recommendation to follow. All carried out through the U.S. Mail. Administrators and their so-called efficiencies have changed the way we conduct searches.
My campus, like many, uses an online employment system. Applicants upload the documents we ask for (a letter, a CV, and a statement of teaching philosophy). The system generates automatic emails acknowledging receipt of the applicant’s materials. If I let it, the system will also generate automatic emails informing applicants that they did not get the job. This is the default setting. That seemed a bit harsh and disrespectful to me, and a bit inhumane, but I have come to understand that these robo-mails, or no message at all, have become the norm. Applicants can be forgiven for feeling chewed up and spitted out, scorned and abused. It takes a lot of work to apply for an academic job. The opportunities are few and the stakes are high. An automatic email seems an unnecessarily callous ending in a world filled with callousness.
We must do better.
So I sent sixty-one emails personally, one to each of the applicants. It took a bit of time, but not much. I wanted the applicants to know that I appreciated the time and effort they put into their applications. I acknowledged the rottenness of the job market, and how I wished we could have interviewed more people. I told them how impressed my colleagues and I were with their credentials, and how difficult a time we had narrowing the applicants to a number of candidates we could meaningfully interview.
I expected nothing in response, but thirty-one of the applicants replied to my email. This surprised me. Though one was gently and reasonably critical of the time the search took, all were appreciative and thanked me for treating them with courtesy and respect. All of them either said, or strongly implied, that such minimal courtesy is all but unheard of in today’s academia.
I spend a fair amount of time on Twitter, so I read a lot from recent Ph.D recipients describing their searches for a tenure-track job. These are tales of desperation, despair and depression, with not a few instances of shabby treatment by hiring institutions along the way. We who are lucky enough to be tenured or on the tenure track must, and can, do better. Writing a personal message is only the start.
Decency matters.
Decency matters so much that it is worth the extra effort to treat job applicants as you would like to be treated. Yes, the market was brutal when I went out twenty -five years ago, but it is much worse now. Believe recent graduates when they tell you that.
We must recognize that we are so fortunate to have the jobs we have. Colleges and universities, I know, as workplaces can vary widely in quality. I spent the first four years of my career at a dysfunctional hellhole in Billings, Montana. But even in the midst of the shit-show that was that college, I enjoyed my students, the teaching, and the advising. I enjoyed the moments I squirreled away to work on my first book. Once I closed the classroom door or my office door, I was happy.
And even if you feel justified in whining about your place of employment, remember this: there are literally hundreds of people who would like to do what you are doing, but will never get that chance. This brutal reality imposes upon all of us the obligation to be the best historians and teachers we can be. You must remember, no matter how good you think you are at this work, no matter how paradigm-shattering you consider your research, it is almost certain that there is someone better than you, shut out by the brutality of the academic job market. One of my colleagues at the dysfunctional hellhole, who doubled as an associate pastor at a local Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, told me during my on-campus interview that being a college professor was the best part-time job in the world. I suspect that we all know people who take this approach to academia, who do not produce or take their teaching seriously, but I can think of no attitude more loathsome and disrespectful to the many hundreds of talented historians who will never get a chance.
We cannot undo all the macroeconomic changes in higher education. I recognize the magnitude of the fiscal challenges facing colleges and universities. But let’s push back against the increasing bureaucratization of the job search and the increasing role played by computers in the hiring process. Perhaps you have an Ivy-League pedigree, and you feel your research is so important that you cannot be bothered to pay attention to the lowly peons who want to join your department. Perhaps you went to a second-tier school and never looked back. Whoever you are, wherever and whatever you studied, there is no excuse for not being kind. Resist every institutional protocol, and every barrier, that keeps you from treating job applicants the way you would like to be treated. If you are that barrier, and find that you cannot find the time to treat applicants with decency, perhaps you ought to step aside. Be kind and be decent. Most of all, show compassion. It matters.
We are entering a period of uncertainty. For me, part of that uncertainty involves the effort to continue offering quality instruction through a computer. I cannot tell you that the transition will be seamless or easy. There are going to be some significant bumps in the road. I have a lot to learn about using Canvas, Zoom, and a host of other platforms my more knowledgeable friends have recommended to me. I will communicate with you all as thoroughly and completely as possible. If going home poses difficulties for you, let me know. If you do not have reliable internet access at home, let me know that, too. You can email me, or message me on Twitter (@NativeAmText).
I know you took your books home with you for Spring Break. You will need them over the course of the next two months. I will be working in the coming days to learn how best to continue our class discussions online. Because I do not lecture, and because I do not use Powerpoints, I suspect there might be some reasonably easy fixes for our classes. But I don’t know for sure, and I will keep you informed about what I learn, and I am open to any suggestions you might have. We will get through this.
You are living through historic times, I suspect. I think back to the Great Depression, when the collections of shacks and shelters thrown together by the homeless were called “Hoovervilles,” after the particularly ineffective President who watched the Nation’s economy flow down the drain. I wonder if we will someday soon call the quickly constructed emergency medical centers, should they be required, “Trump Hotels,” or something like that, given our current particularly ineffective President’s bumbling response. Still, I remain hopeful that if we are smart and conscientious, and that if sensible precautions are followed, that the impact of this deadly virus will be blunted. It is best to err on the side of caution.
As a historian, I might suggest you keep a journal of this plague year, a record of the events you witnessed, your fears, and your concerns. That one of your eight semesters at college was significantly disrupted by a global pandemic is something I suspect you may remember for the rest of your life. I am willing to bet that the historians of the future would love to read about your experiences during this crisis. And if keeping a journal is not your style, do something creative. Do some art, if that is your thing. Write some poetry or some music. Take care of yourselves and those who you hold close. The coursework, whatever form we agree it will ultimately take, is not as important as your health and the health of those people you care about. I can be flexible. We are all in uncharted territory.
I spent the end of last week and the beginning of this one sitting in a hospital room, and then in a skilled nursing facility. My mom had a major health crisis that has really thrown all of us in my family for a loop. Your health is a fleeting and a fragile thing, and it can be gone in a second. I think about this a lot, about how quickly our fortunes can turn.
—
The “In-Person” part of our semester in the Humanities class ended with the Gospels. As we move forward, we will make our way through Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno, More’s Utopia, Father Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart, and Hamlet. All of these texts can be read in such a way that they force us to consider how to live meaningful lives in the midst of grave crisis. In a world that can seem so cruel and foolish, so short-sighted, empty and mean, it is worth considering the significant questions these readings raise: How to be virtuous, brave, and compassionate. Some of us may be tested in the days and weeks ahead.
We can stand in a circle, as I told you in class, with no one excluded. No us and them–just us. No one excluded, cast aside, or discarded. Help those in need. Be generous and kind. Remember that we all have a lot weighing upon us. Maybe, with compassion, we can emerge from this crisis wiser and better than we were before.
I will stay in touch. I hope you will, too. I look forward to reading what you write, and hearing your thoughts as we move forward together.
This past June a congressman from Washington state named Denny Heck introduced the “Remove the Stain Act,” which would rescind “each Medal of Honor awarded for acts at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890.” This may be old news for many of you, but I have wanted to write about the bill for some time. Deb Haaland and a Republican from California named Paul Cook co-introduced the measure, which was promptly referred to the Committee on Armed Services, where it currently sits. The fate of the bill is uncertain.
A friend who is active in the organization Veterans for Peace told me about the bill, which his organization supports. The Democratic presidential candidates Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, John Delaney, and Marianne Williamson all have expressed their support. Each has joined in calling upon Congress to rescind the nation’s highest military honor from twenty cavalrymen who took part in the massacre at Wounded Knee.
Wounded Knee was one of those defining moments in the history of the American West, central to so many historians’ understandings of the Plains Wars and the place of native nations in the United States. Think back to Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a flawed book which nonetheless influenced me greatly in my development as a historian, to the much more recent book by Heather Cox Richardson entitled simply Wounded Knee. Richardson’s book is well worth your time.
I tell the story of Wounded Knee in Native America. It is a story of native peoples searching for answers as they tried to adjust to life under the federal policy of concentration, and the brutal realities of the reservation system. Far out in the west, a Paiute shaman named Wovoka began to preach a message that combined Christian themes with nativist principles that answered their concerns. Wovoka, a messiah, had received visions, and he promised his followers peace if they lived honest lives and performed the Ghost Dance. He called for a return to ritual. The Ghost dance offered a way to restore balance to the world.
Word of the new religion spread rapidly. Native peoples sent emissaries to learn from Wovoka. Some rejected his teachings. Others found in them important truths, and as they adopted its central ritual, they transformed and altered elements of the original message. Lakotas, for instance, who returned from visiting Wovoka in March of 1890, taught that performing the Ghost Dance would bring back the buffalo and cause white people to disappear. The Lakotas had many grievances. Hunger constantly hounded reservation Indians. The government broke up the Great Sioux Reservation in 1889, reducing the lands held by the Lakota and severing the binds connecting communities together.
Sensing discontent, federal troops remained a heavy presence in Lakota country. The Lakota believers wore “Ghost Shirts” that some believed would stop bullets, and this made the federal authorities nervous. They worried that Sitting Bull, the great Lakota leader, would join the movement. When American authorities and the newly-constituted tribal police tried to prevent this, Sitting Bull resisted arrest. He and seven others died in a gunfight on 15 December 1890. It is hard to overestimate how crushing his death must have been.
Another group of Ghost Dancers, led by Bigfoot, and consisting of many women and children, fled out onto South Dakota’s badlands. The government sent nine thousand troops to South Dakota, and five thousand of these to Pine Ridge. Fully a third of the United States Army, in its largest mobilization since the end of the Civil War, took up positions to suppress this peaceful protest. Federal troops surrounded them at Wounded Knee Creek in advance of moving them back to the Pine Ridge Agency. When the cavalrymen went to disarm Bigfoot’s followers, a shot was fired, perhaps accidentally, when a deaf young man refused to surrender his weapon. The federal troops opened up with rifles and artillery. 146 Indians died, including forty-four women and 18 children. It was the last military engagement between native peoples and American soldiers on the Plains, and the Wounded Knee massacre wiped out a religious movement among the Lakota Sioux that offered them hope for the future and a means for making sense of their life on reservations.
Charles Eastman, the newly-appointed doctor at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, learned of the massacre at Wounded Knee when the wounded started coming in. Most were women and children. “Many,” he wrote, “were frightfully torn by pieces of shell, and the suffering was terrible.” A blizzard blew in, and it took Eastman a couple of days before he could return to the battlefield. The first physician to arrive at that frozen and bloody ground, the experience affected Eastman deeply.
He saw the mangled bodies, and did what he could for the small number who had miraculously survived the federal artillery and gunfire. When he reached the site of Big Foot’s camp, he “saw the frozen bodies of men who had been in council and who were almost as helpless as the women and babes when the deadly fire began.” Eastman struggled to keep his composure. All about him he heard the “excitement and grief of my Indian companions, nearly every one of whom was crying aloud or singing his death song.” He found a few survivors, all babies. All were adopted by white people.
The massacre at Wounded Knee received condemnation at the time it occurred. Of the 350 or more native peoples who died, fully two-thirds were women and children. General Nelson A. Miles, he who ran down Chief Joseph’s followers just shy of the Canadian Line more than a decade before, wrote in 1891 that “I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee.”
When and if the “Remove the Stain” becomes law, the Medals of Honor will be rescinded, and the names of the twenty recipients will be removed from the Medal of Honor Roll. No family members will be required to return their ancestors’ medals to Congress, and the bill states that it “shall not be construed to deny any benefit from the federal government,” but its intent is clear. A symbolic act to be sure, passage of the bill will offer an important statement that in this instance Congress does not consider the slaughter of native peoples in any way to be meritorious, and that the stories told by the government about Wounded Knee are wrong.
It is worth talking about this bill in your classes, for it bears much in common with other, better known, efforts to revise American history. Activists have taken on Columbus Day and are replacing it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and they have commenced a powerful movement to remove racist commemorations of the Confederacy. They call for renaming buildings dedicated to slave owners and they are trying, I hear so often, to fix other places and spaces with names deemed offensive. The reaction of the right has been predictable. You heard it if you listened to the President’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly several weeks ago. He singled out academics who have launched an all-out assault on American values.
I think it is important to talk about all of this in our history classes. In places we have seen vandalism and destruction, but I would suggest that part of what we are seeing is a desire to fix a story that is broken, to revise and edit and set things right. What some might see as wanton destruction, others might see as an attempt to revise and reinterpret. It is raucous and rude, but it has provoked vital discussions.
Occasionally I will hear one public figure or another denounce “revisionist” history, or historians whose work they dismiss as “politically correct.” You can believe these people if you want to, but if that’s your choice, it is only with a poor understanding of what it is in fact that we historians do. Maybe we need to do a better job of explaining how we work to the public. We are the people, after all, who demand to see the evidence. We are the ones who relish the opportunity to hunt relentlessly for every scrap of relevant information. Never underestimate the tenacity of a historian determined to find what you might prefer to remain hidden. If we do not know where to look, we will figure it out, and we do not care what names you call us. We will debate you and insist on engaging you and we will make sure you understand that we are not in the business of repeating comforting myths or making you feel good about yourself. We look closely at the evidence. We keep receipts. Heck’s bill is a response to calls to set our stories right. It shows that many Americans believe that the time for an accounting is long past due.
There was a period
several years back when I can remember feeling deeply unhappy. I was living in
Houston’s soulless suburbs, on the margins of a city I did not yet know, having
a relocated for a job that I was beginning to think was not quite right for me. I went for a walk, and I saw above me a bird
that I later learned was a swallow-tailed kite.
I had never seen a bird fly like that before. It was stunning, and, for
reasons I cannot fully explain, it put me at peace. It was a rare feeling and
that moment, ten years ago, remains important to me.
I have just finished a month in
Oxford where I taught my college’s required Humanities course to a group of
nine students, all of whom are from New York State. It’s a course I love teaching. I have written about it on this blog before.
In a number of ways, teaching it revitalized my career. But the course can also be a downer. The readings are heavy. We attempt to find in Antigone’s refusal to
heed an unjust law, and in the defiance that brings about so much destruction,
some semblance of meaning; or in the Melians’ futile resistance to the
monstrous tyranny and massive injustice of the menacing Athenians; or in
Jesus’s fears in Gethsemane as he approached his martyrdom, and the cry of
abandonment that came at the end of his life; or in Augustine’s troubled quest
to account for the evil he saw in the world around him. There is viciousness,
violence, injustice, and despair. They
course through the readings like blood. I punctuate these readings with poetry,
and stories yanked from today’s news.
They show that the questions these texts raise we have not yet succeeded
in answering.
I end the course with two readings:
Martin Luther King’s “Letter
from a Birmingham Jail,” and Robert Rosenblatt’s “The
World is a Thriving Slaughterhouse,” a text I have discussed here many
times. King spoke about law, power, and
injustice, and how to act when confronted with an unjust law. He did so knowing, in his heart, that he
would die a martyr to the cause so closely identified with him. Rosenblatt looks at thirty years of his life
as a war correspondent, as a witness to humankind’s seemingly endless capacity
to serve up despair, violence, and pain.
During the month I have been here,
the President of the United States has stoked up racial and religious
hatreds. He told four congressional
representatives, all women of color, all of whom are citizens of the United
Sates, to go back to the countries they came from. In an earlier outburst Trump referred to
these parts of the world as “shithole countries.” The President is a white nationalist. He is a monster, but the greater monstrosity
has always been that sixty-two million Americans voted for him, and they did so
with their eyes wide open. They knew
what they were doing. The problem, then, has always been bigger than Donald
Trump. All the problems are bigger than Donald Trump. I saw that, from across
the Atlantic, as I watched an audience in North Carolina stroke the President’s
boundless ego and join in a chant calling for the exile of Representative Ilhan
Omar of Minnesota. “Send
her back,” they yelled.
It
was a sickening display. Some politicians said things along the lines of, “this
is not who we are.” I suspect most
historians who write about Native American history, or about the history of
African Americans, would join me in disagreeing. That crowd in North Carolina showed the
racism that has lived for so long, secreting its hateful bile. This evil
metastasized long ago.
And
the hits kept coming. A white nationalist shot up the annual Garlic Festival in
Gilroy, California, the site of which I drove by more than a few times when I
lived in California. And during my last
weekend in England, two killers in one day opened fire in El Paso and Dayton,
killing thirty-one people between them. One of the killers was a racist who
hated Mexicans, and who absorbed the President’s rhetoric in his “Manifesto.”
The other appears to have leaned to the left, based upon tweets he liked, but
displayed the toxic masculinity we now associate with so-called “incels”: women
who knew him feared him. He kept an
enemies list and a rape list. Texas
Senator John Cornyn, a man whose spinelessness makes Lindsay Graham look like
Lincoln, gloated
when he learned that the Dayton killer was, refreshingly, not a white
nationalist. “The Dayton killer was a
left-winger,” Cornyn tweeted, “but don’t blame Senator Warren.” Just weeks before he had
tweeted out his fear that the Mexican population was outpacing that of
White Texans at a rate of nine to one.
Blood and soil. Cornyn may as
well have tweeted “the Mexicans will not replace us.”
Decades
from now, the historians of the future will look at Cornyn’s tweets and say,
“What an asshole.” Because the problem
is not partisan blame games. It is guns.
No place on earth makes it as easy as the United States for those who hate to
kill. I tried to make this point some
time back when I wrote an angry
manifesto after the slaughter of innocents at Parkland. A couple of days
ago I thought that maybe I should revisit it, because of the prevalence of
white nationalism and racism in the recent shootings. But that misses the point, for the racism has
always been there, as Eddie
S. Glaude pointed out in a powerful, two-minute long history lesson on
MSNBC. Ours is a country steeped in racism, built on stolen land with labor
from stolen and enslaved black bodies.
The better angels of our nature have appeared from time to time, but
they have never banished the fundamental evil at the heart of our history. In a beautiful tribute to the writer Toni
Morrison, who died this week, Damon
Young said that her importance rested in how she “articulated the truth of
America’s amniotic fluid. What we’re really
swimming in. What we’re really swallowing.
What we’re really choking on. And when that sting is burning your eyes, who
has any space left for a lie?” I feel this observation deeply.
So
I stand by what I wrote in my own manifesto.
I have followed the news since the massacres in Texas and Ohio. The Lt.
Governor of Texas said something stupid about how the shooting might not
have happened if there were prayer in schools, even though Texas has a moment
of silence at the beginning of the day and prayers at school functions like
sporting events. Others have trotted out
equally spurious, but predictable explanations for the carnage: violent movies, violent video games,
homosexuality and the presence of transgendered people, Colin Kaepernick
(somehow).
I do not think any of these explanations are funny. They are either dishonest or dangerously and obscenely stupid. In any event, they are dangerous. I do not care why you want to kill. It does not matter to me in the slightest. A white nationalist and a racist? An “Incel”? A Nazi, or a revolutionary or an End-of-Timer or a sullen kid or a sociopath? I could not care less. Because no matter who you are, and no matter who you hate, I do not believe you should have a weapon of war at your disposal. You have no right to kill, and no matter your irrational fears, your macho fantasies, your martial cosplay, or your fevered dreams, there is nothing you can say to convince me that there is a place for killing machines in a civil society. Some of you will trot out the 2nd Amendment. Screw you. Bearing arms does not mean what you think it does. Some of you will invoke your Christianity. Show me if you can one line, from the first verse of the first chapter of Matthew to the last line of Revelation, that in any way justifies violence.
Look
around the world. There are violent video games and violent movies all over the
place. There are many countries where
almost nobody prays, where far more people identify as Atheists than in the
United States. They do not have mass
killings. 40,000 people die from gunshot
wounds in the United States each year, whether from suicide, accident, or
homicide. That comes out to one death
roughly every fourteen minutes. To those who say nothing needs to be done, that
your rights are sacred, and that guns are not the problem, I ask you how many
more deaths will it take before you concede that this is wrong. 50,000? 100,000? A million? When and where
will it end?
I
believe firmly that this man-made and entirely preventable slaughter will soon
consume us. I feel it coming
closer. My father-in-law, who I have not
seen in years, shops regularly at the El Paso Wal-Mart. The slaughter in Thousand Oaks is not far
from where I grew up. I felt it
approaching when my
daughter messaged us that an active shooter was on her campus, though it
turned out to be a false alarm. Thoughts and prayers. From Melania and Ivanka, from the President
and from Mike Pence and scores of Republican lawmakers. They offer their prayers. The words of
Isaiah come to me, as he confronted the hypocrites whose empty prayers, he
said, meant nothing to an angry God.
When
you spread forth your hands,
I
will hide my eyes from you;
even
though you make many prayers,
I
will not listen;
your
hands are full of blood.
Wash
yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove
the evil of your doings
from
before my eyes;
cease
to do evil,
learn
to do good;
seek
justice,
correct
oppression;
defend
the fatherless,
plead
for the widow.
The
readings I assign are dark. I know
that. I can see the students’ reactions
when I give them news stories that raise probing questions about our violence
and viciousness. As an antidote at the end of the semester I hand out Jack
Gilbert’s popular poem, “A Brief for the Defense.” “To make injustice the only measure of our
attention,” he writes, “is to praise the Devil.” I know I do not always
practice what I preach.
I
walked a lot during the five weeks I spent in England. Eight, nine, sometimes ten miles a day or
more. It was a way to escape from the tourist hordes crowding the center of
Oxford, but also to have some uninterrupted time to think. On many of these
walks I saw red kites, an English cousin of the bird I saw swirling high above
the Houston suburbs. It flies beautifully, with an assuring grace. I found myself watching these birds, and I
could have stood there for a long time.
Augustine, who my students read, opens his Confessions, his prayer, with the assertion that “our heart is
unquiet until it rests in you.” He found his quiet heart in God, but wherever
or whatever it is, you need to find it somewhere. So. Kites.
There
is reason to be hopeful. These shooters
are generally young men, it is true, but for most young people I meet this new
world is not one to fear. The issues
that concern the white nationalist and the loony right they see as normal and
worthy of defense. You can read laments
about the oppressive atmosphere on college campuses but I have seen nothing in
my thirty years of college teaching that leads me to believe that these are
anything other than crude caricatures written by frightened, old, white
people. And because so many parts of our
current national government are dominated by frightened, old, white people, we
need these young people to march, to hit the streets, to challenge the
frightened old white people in primary elections. The kids are all right. We are going to need them to be.
I am going to go see Hamilton this weekend, and I have been
invited to share my impressions of the award-winning musical on a local
NPR-affiliate the week following. I will
be teaching the American Revolution next semester, and as some of my
posts over the past several months make clear, I have been thinking about
the stories we should tell quite a bit.
I have also been thinking a lot
about the American constitutional system that emerged from that Revolution,
what the Founders intended, and what they might think about our current
mess. I have never thought much of “Framer’s
Intent” as a style of constitutional argument that carries much weight, but
still, we are historians, and comparisons for us come easily.
We have a president elected by a
minority of the voters whose administration shows levels of mendacity, greed,
and spite that stand in stark contrast to that of his predecessor. The president’s supporters work to restrict
the right to vote of poor people and peoples of color out of fear that these
constituencies will vote against him.
Some of his sycophants, led by the besotted Jerry Falwell, Jr., have
suggested that the president unconstitutionally extend his term. Indeed,
the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi expressed
her belief that the President will not voluntarily leave office if he loses
the election. Meanwhile, the Attorney-General
of the United States and the Secretary
of the Treasury defy subpoenas from the House of Representatives, that
chamber of the legislature that most directly represents the American people.
THE REVOLUTIONARY
GENERATION believed that republican forms of government were inherently fragile
because they relied upon the wisdom and the civic-mindedness of “the people.” The revolutionary generation, as historians
like Bernard Bailyn, H. Trevor Colbourn, and Gordon Wood showed long ago, had
no reason to expect that a republic could last forever and, indeed, all the
examples they could point to had descended into tyranny and corruption. Perhaps our time is running out, I sometimes
think. Perhaps we have had a good run that
now is ending. I legitimately worry that
the American constitutional system will not survive my children’s generation in
any meaningful or recognizable form. The
system is broken, as so many politicians have pointed out. It is broken because cynical, cowardly, and
corrupt Republicans, aided by timorous Democrats, smashed it to pieces.
The Revolutionary generation
believed that the purpose of government was to secure the Commonwealth, the good of the whole. In order to pursue the good of the whole,
citizens must exercise and practice virtue. A virtuous citizen, in the parlance of the
time, was one who could set aside his or her narrow self-interest and willingly
make sacrifices for the good of the whole.
Corruption, in this sense, was the exact opposite of virtue. In order to
practice virtue, citizens required independence.
They could not be subject to the will of another. That is part of the reason
why women (subject to the authority of their fathers and husbands), tenants
(subject to their landlord’s authority) and wage-earners (subject to their
employers) could not vote in elections.
In addition to independence, citizens had to remain active. They had to practice citizenship. They had to
inform themselves, remain vigilant, because liberty was a fragile thing. A supine and ill-informed citizenry made
fit-tools for tyrants.
While agreeing broadly that these
concepts were important, the revolutionary generation could disagree intensely
over what these terms meant. But few questioned the importance of these values.
Commonwealth, Virtue, Independence, and
Citizenship: by these standards we
are not doing very well.
The Trump Administration has
revealed itself as a smash-and-grab operation operated by liars and
grifters. The Republican Party has
become a haven for hacks and fools, an unholy alliance of the super-rich and
the ill-informed. The President who proudly
proclaimed his love for the “poorly-educated” on the campaign trail treats
government as little more than an opportunity to generate wealth for his family
and bile against those he views as enemies. He lies ferociously. He casts his legitimate
critics as “enemies
of the people.” He calls names. He
vilifies. For him there is no common
good. He is incurious and unlettered, a
brute and a tyrant. He knows nothing of the Revolution or the Constitution.
Of course, there are Republicans who
believe that we are part of something larger than a political party. There are patriotic Republicans who disagree
intensely with Trump’s policies and behavior. But none of the Republicans
holding office have had the courage to oppose him in any meaningful manner.
Instead, they furrow their brows, hold their noses, and dive headfirst into the
cesspool, the smell of the crap no longer bothering them once they are in.
Tens of millions of people continue
to support the President, seemingly unaware of his administration’s utter
contempt for the Constitution. Some of them embrace the President’s politics of
spite. They find room under his big, hateful tent to express their own fears,
and a racism nourished by the fevered rants of the megalomaniac who stumbled
into the White House. Perhaps his fervent supporters know so little about the
Constitution, and their civic illiteracy is so great, that they do not
understand the dangers this president and his party portend. The citizen who does not know what the
Constitution says is poorly-equipped to know when its provisions are stripped
away.
AS A STUDENT OF
THE REVOLUTION, I fear for the future.
The founding generation knew that republics did not last for log and
that corruption, selfishness, and ignorance posed fundamental threats. Many of their most momentous debates centered
on questions of how to avoid these threats. As he watched the government
struggle during the Confederation period, Alexander Hamilton expressed his
distrust of the people. They could not
govern responsibly. “All men of respectability
who have been witnesses of the despotism and iniquity of the legislature, are
convinced that the principal people in the community must for their own
defense, unite to overset the party I have alluded to.” High stakes were
involved, he felt. “The safety of all
those who have something to lose,” he wrote, “calls upon them to take care that
the power of the government is intrusted to proper hands.” He called for a much more powerful central
government than was established by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. When he
became George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, he argued for policies of
broad political significance.
Admittedly, it has been a long time
since I read in any depth in Hamilton’s work.
I am not as up-to-date on the literature of the 1780s and 1790s as I
want to be. Still, it seems to me that Hamilton’s
experience during the war had convinced him of the necessity for a vigorous
government. He did not believe that He
did not believe that one could rely on “Virtue” as the basis for a framework of
government. He believed, in fact, that mankind was in general so selfish and
ambitious that virtue alone could never provide the basis for a system of
government. A government based on virtue
assumed that people would think of the common good. Hamilton
thought all of that was nonsense.
Government should appeal, he argued, to
the well-born, the wealthy, and the able if it were to succeed. He considered these people a sort of natural
aristocracy. Hamilton admired Great
Britain and especially its commercial power.
He wanted the same for America. He thought that this could be obtained most
easily by pursuing two general policies:
First, Hamilton wanted to use the power of the federal government to
encourage manufacturing and commerce in order to make the United States
economically strong and independent for Europe.
He did not believe the United States could remain politically
independent of Europe if it remained economically dependent. It must move beyond a colonial economy.
Second, he wanted to link the rich and the wealthy to the government. These were the secure part of the body politic,
he believed, the stable people most capable of taking the long-term view of the
issues. These were the stable
people.
How
to achieve this? Hamilton laid out his
program in his Report on the Public Credit, a white paper arguing that the
government could take steps to strengthen the nation’s finances. His program consisted of two things: Funding
and assumption, and the creation of a National Bank. Hamilton asserted that the
government needed two things in order to prosper: revenue and Credit. It needed capital, money, but it also needed
the faith of merchants and other governments that it would repay its
debts. Without that faith, the
government would lack the ability to borrow money, which sometimes governments
have occasion to do.
All told, the Confederation had
accumulated a debt of $52 million dollars.
Hamilton said that this debt should be paid in full, or funded.
Also, the several states had accumulated debts of $25 million. He believed that the federal government
should assume responsibility for
these debts and pay them in full. How would
this work? For funding, Hamilton
asserted that all those holding certificates of the confederation debt, these
bonds, would be paid the full face value for those notes. The money for funding
this debt would come from the issuance of new notes.
Holders of the
debt would be paid in full, unless they preferred to receive the newly issued
notes. These notes would serve as a form
of currency, so long as confidence existed that the government would continue
to survive. For the assumption of state
debts, the same principal applied. The United States would pay to the holders
of state paper the face value or, if they chose, to deliver to them new bonds.
What
was Hamilton after?
He claimed that the failure of certain
states to honor their obligations undermined American credit in overseas
markets. He saw the assumption of state debts as a means for the federal government
to secure the gratitude and loyalty of state creditors by honoring their claims
before the states could manage to pay them.
These creditors would look to the new national government, rather than
the state governments, securing the allegiance of an important class of
citizens.
Hamilton also wanted to establish a
national bank. Banks, he argued, could
create capital. A national banking institution was an unprecedented idea. Hamilton
recognized that a large financial institution could act as the fiscal agent of
the United States
government.
This bank would be
a joint public-private venture. 4/5 of
the stock of the national bank would be held by private investors. The bank, he argued, was a public
institution, thus the stock ought to be available to the public.
There
were many critics of the Bank. There
was, many of these critics contended, nothing in the Constitution that
authorized the United States government to establish a national banking
institution. The Bank took the notion of
implied powers too far.
Congress deadlocked over Hamilton’s financial program. Many southern states, especially Virginia, were unhappy about assumption, because they had already paid their debts and did not relish the prospect of possibly being taxed to assist heavily indebted states like Massachusetts.
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson met with Hamilton. They reportedly worked out a compromise over dinner. They agreed to support his financial program if, after ten years, Hamilton agreed to support the notion of establishing the permanent seat of the national capitol in the south. .Funding and assumption passed the Congress, the Bank of the United States was granted a 20-year charter, and the national capital was built in the District of Columbia.
PERHAPS HAMILTON
INJECTED A POWERFUL STRAIN OF CYNICISM into the American political system. His distrust in the capacity of ordinary
people to rule responsibly is powerful and he stated it frequently. I have not read a lot on Hamilton recently,
but the thing that strikes me as I reflect on this period we have entered is
that he did expect those chosen to lead in the republic’s extended sphere to be
wise, and men of character and integrity. It seems like we the people have
chosen poorly lately, and part of that is our fault. And if the President is reelected, whether by
fair means or foul, I am not sure the system can be saved. Soon, we
are told, 50% of the American people will live in 8 states. Half the
population will have 16 senators, and half will have sixty-four. Show me a political leader with vision calling
for reform of these deep structural problems, and I will show you a woman or a
man marginalized in our political life, denounced as a dreamer, a demagogue, or
a “socialist.”
MY DAUGHTER IS
FINISHING HER first year of college. At her high school graduation ceremony
eleven months ago, the Superintendent opened his remarks to the graduates with
an apology. I am sorry, he said, on
behalf of my generation, for leaving your generation with so many problems to
solve. We failed you. But looking out at
that auditorium filled with kids, he expressed some optimism, too. Your generation is better than ours is so
many ways. Save us, he said. You can do
it.
I found this profoundly moving. We need to help these young people. We need
to encourage them to be braver than us. These
young people, after all, now live in a world that you and I have helped to
create for them where too many people confuse their feelings and their fears
for facts, where being smart and engaged and critical and willing to ask
questions can make one an object of scorn.
They live in a world as well where complexity is so often dismissed,
where big and difficult answers to the big questions are avoided, that asking
these sorts of questions can take a certain amount of courage. Rational, reasoned, and just public policy is
difficult if not impossible without an informed, engaged, and rationally-thinking
public willing to ask tough questions, to engage.
Here is what a student of mine wrote
a couple of years ago for her Humanities final.
The assignment I gave asked students to write about human nature,
justice, and the problem of evil, as they contemplated an article by Roger
Rosenblatt I have mentioned many times on this blog, and works by Sophocles,
Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, More, the Bible, and Shakespeare. “The question remains,” this very talented
student wrote, “how do we account for all of the hatred, violence, and
injustice that we witness? What words do we use to describe it? How can we
possibly rationalize it and make sense of it? Where do we find its opposite in
the world, and how do we eagerly point at that, so as to say, ‘See, this is
also us. This is also me.’
“In a world and a human history overwhelmed
by hatred, violence, and injustice, what counters it, I argue, is love,
compassion, faith, and the courage to rise above it.”
I
agree with the superintendent. This rising generation is already better than us
in important ways—its open-mindedness, its tolerance, its acceptance of
difference. I really believe that. As educators we must encourage courage. We
have a lot of influence. Or at least we
have the potential to be highly influential:
a cruel or an uncaring word from us, for example, even when cast off
thoughtlessly or uncritically, or because we are stressed out or too busy, can
do so much damage, while a simple kind word, a single note of encouragement,
can do something that these students might remember for the rest of their lives,
something that can help them write a beautiful life story.
So let’s do better. Let’s encourage fearlessness, even where we
have failed to demonstrate it ourselves.
Each and every day, I have the opportunity, if I choose to truly be
present, to truly listen, to be awed by their achievements, humbled by the
obstacles they have overcome to get to this college, inspired by their creative
thinking, pushed by their challenging questions, and amazed by the alacrity
with which so many of them seek out injustice, attempt to correct oppression,
and in thousands of small ways show the vital courage to make the world—our
world—a better place. Our future is in
their hands.
The other day we began to read of explosive devices arriving at the homes and offices of prominent Democratic politicians. The unknown bomber targeted two former presidents, a former Vice-President, a former Secretary of State, a former Attorney-General and a number of Democratic members of Congress. It was the largest attempted assassination of American political leaders in many decades.
The President and his supporters, meanwhile, denounce their critics as a “mob,” view any press coverage that does not fawn over their leader as “fake news,” and characterize any criticism or questioning as “hostile.” Meanwhile, they practice a politics of marginalization: they stir up their almost entirely white base against the LGBTQ community, refugees, and the victims of sexual assault. They construct and nourish the false-equivalency that the actions of “Antifa”—yelling at public officials, hounding them out of restaurants, and in one instance tossing the Senate Majority Leader’s lunch—are somehow equal to the much greater violence of the Proud Boys, or the White Supremacists (“Fine People,” our President said) who murdered a woman in Charlottesville, or those who call for the imprisonment of their opponents, the silencing of dissent, restrictions on a free press, or violence. They lock frightened refugee children in cages apart from their parents. They do all that they can to suppress the votes of people of color in North Dakota and Georgia.
Many of the President’s supporters loudly and proudly describe themselves as Christians. His support among self-described Evangelicals remains high and unwavering. I keep coming back to that. Too many people are choosing fear over compassion, a fear that rests at the black heart of the American republic.
Nearly every semester at Geneseo, I teach the early portion of the college’s Western Humanities course, a “Great Books” course of the sort that many Conservatives used to appreciate, back when conservatives appreciated books and the universities where they were taught. At one time, we required students to take both halves of the course, which together carried them from the Ancient Greeks to the very recent past. Declining resources and changing academic fashion have combined to make that approach no longer sustainable, but we still do require that all students complete at least one of the two courses.
In my section, we spend about four weeks, one-quarter of the course, working our way through the Bible. The students read Genesis and a chunk of Exodus. They read from the two books of Samuel and from Isaiah. From the New Testament the students read the Gospel of Matthew, portions of the other Gospels, and Paul’s letter to the Romans.
I am not a religious person, in the sense of belonging formally to any organization, but I am a reader and a thinker who wrestles with the questions these texts raise.
“WWJD.” I have seen that on those little rubber wristbands that people sometimes where. “What Would Jesus Do?” I look at our current politics, and our current leader, and see as the greatest threat to our republic not just apathy, not just ignorance about the theory and practice of American constitutionalism, but a stunning lack of empathy and compassion.
We live a politics based on hatred and resentment and fear. No false equivalency narrative here. I‘ve asked my students to write essays based upon their reading of the Bible. I asked them to think about any political or social issue that they feel is important, that has raised questions that we struggle still to answer. What does the Bible say about that problem?
The students will write about the environment. They will discuss empty consumerism, acquisitiveness, excessive ambition. But most of all, they write of the Bible’s call to believers to practice compassion at a level that is so radical as it is viewed as completely impractical today. But that imperative to show kindness to the stranger, to love not just your neighbor but your enemy, to seek out injustice and correct oppression, to free ourselves from our attachment to our material wealth and to love all, unconditionally—this has always been difficult, and it has always been impractical.
In March of 2017 I went to hear Gregory Boyle speak at a nearby college. He is the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. I’ve admired him for a long time, and it was an honor to shake his hand. Father Boyle spoke of a world of compassion. It was frightening, he said, to enter that world: a world where we stand with those who are demonized, in hopes that the demonizing is brought to an end; with those who suffer, so they will not suffer alone; with those who are despised and excluded, so that they know that they are welcome. It was, he said, a world with no “us” and no “them.” Only “us.”
So, again, “WWJD”? What would our politics look like were we to practice the compassion the Bible asks believers to show to everyone, regardless of who and what they are? I sense that we would not demonize those in the “caravans,” refugees from homelands where they do not feel safe, and dreamers yearning to breathe free and provide for their families. We would not warn of this approaching army, and attempt to convince our based that they are an invading army, a horde that our armed forces must stop. We would listen to and honor the victims, and not reward the perpetrators of violence against women. And children. Our leader would not try to exclude and divide and nourish the worst demons in our nature. He would not wink at violence, endorse through action and inaction white supremacy and anti-Semitism, and he would stop preying upon the poor.
He is banking, I expect, on the possibility that we who are not in that growing circle of the despised will not show empathy or compassion. That we will be too busy, to wedded to the small computers we carry with us everywhere we go, from bathroom to bedroom and beyond. That we will not care, and that we will become convinced that we will lose if someone from the circle of the despised is elevated. Or that fearing retribution or criticism, we will stay silent. Judging by the events of yesterday, and the stuff I saw appearing on the Internet Machine, many of the President’s supporters do not believe that an extremist sent bombs to a few prominent Democrats, or that this is anything other than a Democratic plot, somehow, to make the President look bad. Perhaps they are not aware of how bad all of this looks already.
So we must speak up. We historians, who know the past, and have seen these sorts of alarming practices before, should engage ourselves in countering this violence, these lies, and the lack of empathy and compassion. We who take these stands will receive criticism. Some will receive threats. So we should think of that text that so many of Donald Trump’s supporters hold sacred. In so many ways, across so many pages, it urges us to compassion, and to “be not afraid.”
I write these words early on a Saturday morning. Sometime later today, I expect that the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. Republican leadership in the Senate corrupted the nation’s institutions to force through a justice who stands credibly accused of sexual assault, and who appears to have perjured himself in his testimony before the Senate. Democratic Senators never managed to view all the documents on Kavanaugh’s career, including his time in the White House, or to obtain answers about Kavanuagh’s curious financial dealings. A political operative who worked to bring down the presidency of Bill Clinton over that president’s sexual “misconduct,” Kavanaugh’s accusers never had the opportunity to present their case to the committee. It likely would not have mattered. They crammed Kavanaugh through, the ends apparently justifying any means. In our class discussions, many of you thought this process was grotesque. Don’t give up. Fight on.
A long time ago I served as an expert witness in a federal land claims case. I worked for a non-profit law firm representing the Tonawanda Seneca Nation. They asserted that the State of New York had purchased from them Grand Island, a large island in the Niagara River, in violation of the Federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, and as such, that the transaction was null and void. I will not go into the details, but one of the many historical questions in the case involved whether the federal government had ever returned land to an Indian tribe that earlier had been acquired by a state. Attorneys for the state of New York, the defendant in this case, said that the federal government had no right to do so and that no such return of land had ever happened. I wrote reports highlighting two instances where the national government had done just that. In the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell, the United States returned to the Cherokees lands purchased from them by the upstart and outlaw “State of Franklin.” Five years later, at the Treaty of New York, the United States returned land to the Creeks purchased from them by the state of Georgia in a number of coercive treaties. And at Canadaigua, in 1794, the United States returned land to the Senecas that included the islands in the Niagara River.
I wrote my report, spent a day in deposition. Other experts testified on the Tonawandas’ behalf. It did not matter. The federal district court in western New York dismissed the case before it ever went to trial. I was upset. I told my friend, one of the attorneys in the case, that I felt like I was playing tennis against an opponent who could raise and lower the nets at will, and widen and narrow the lines while the ball was in the air. It was unfair. I felt like there was no way we could win. She said, and I have always appreciated this, that you still have to do the work, and that you still have to fight, because otherwise the injustice is uncontested and rewarded.
Those of you who have protested against Kavanaugh have been described as a mob by the Republican leadership and their allies in the Right-Wing media. In the callousness with which Dr. Ford’s story has been dismissed, I know that many of you feel as well that your stories do not matter. In the cynical manipulation of the political system by Leader McConnell and the rest of the Republican leadership, you might feel that there is not much that is democratic about this government at all, that we are led by men old and white who do not care about people like you. You might think the system is so corrupt that it is beyond redemption, or that because 63 million Americans voted for this travesty that all hope is lost.
But you need to resist. You need to question each of their assumptions, each of their spurious claims. Engage them fervently in dialogue and discussion. You need to make your voices heard. They will try to denigrate you and dismiss you. They will call you “Snowflakes” and “Feminazis” and propagandists of “Political Correctness” and part of a mob. Keep at it. Your protest is patriotic, your expressions of your dismay important exercises of citizenship. They are working to achieve a revolution, a new America with little government regulation, unfettered corporate power, restrictions on who can vote when and where, and a truncated democracy.
And they will not stop. I expect that many of you see that now. They will not stop.
“Civilization or Death to all American savages!” That was one of a number of toasts offered by the officers who accompanied James Sullivan’s invasion of Iroquoia during the American Revolutionary War. Planned and plotted by George Washington himself, the “Sullivan Campaign” burned dozens of Haudenosaunee towns, destroyed crops, orchards and fields, and forced the Iroquois to flee from their homelands toward the British post at Niagara. There they suffered and died in large numbers during one of the worst winters on record. In a letter to Lafayette, Washington expressed his hope that the expedition would eliminate the considerable threat hostile Iroquois posed to the rebel movement, “distract and terrify” them, and “extirpate them from the Country.”
I tell the story of the Sullivan Campaign in Native America. You can also read a rather dry, nuts-and-bolts military history that focuses exclusively on the American side in Joseph Fischer’s A Well-Executed Failure. Most recently, Colin Calloway in his fine examination of The Indian World of George Washington covers the expedition in all its brutality, from Van Schaick’s rape and murder of Onondaga women, to the atrocities committed by Sullivan’s men. And it is not just academic historians with an interest in the story. The Empire State Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, with financial backing from the William J. Pomeroy Foundation, has introduced its “Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779 Historic Marker Grant Program.” The ESSSAR ( try saying that without sounding like Kaa) invites you or your organization “to help commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779 by erecting a specially designed Historical Marker.” The Pomeroy Foundation “will provide full funding for the marker, pole, and shipping.” Installation is up to you.
If you want to submit a proposal for a historical marker, your time is running out. The deadline is September 14th. You can fill out the form here.
The website includes a small sample marker you might use as a template. “Chugnut,” the sample reads, “Native American village near mouth of Big Choconut Creek destroyed by General Enoch Poor, August 18, 1779, Sullivan-Clinton Campaign.”
If this marker is an indication of things to come, it looks like this will be a history uninformed by the important recent scholarship on native peoples, focusing mostly on what Continental soldiers and officers did with little attention to destroyed towns and and shattered lives, the uprooting of a people and their transformation into refugees, and the atrocities committed against non-combatants. Chugnut is there, but then it is not. No sense of what it was before, or what became of the people who lived there. No sense that the rise of New York as the Empire State could not have occurred without war and violence, and without a systematic campaign of dispossession carried out by the state against the Haudenosaunee.
The ESSSAR campaign information came to me during the summer. To some extent, I am still catching up with some of that email. I do not have time, regrettably, to submit a proposal for signs. That is my fault. I would very much like to send a large number of suggestions. I get that I am too late.
But I hope the sponsors of this project will seek out Haudenosaunee voices and solicit their suggestions for marking the path carved by Sullivan’s men, and measuring the destruction it wrought. The Sullivan Campaign was designed expressly to eliminate the Iroquois as a force in the western reaches of what came to be New York State. The Americans wanted to erase their towns, destroy their food supplies, force them from their country, and drive them to starvation over the winter outside of Fort Niagara. You might call this an invasion. You might say this was war. But you could also call it ethnic cleansing. Or genocide.
There is that tired cliché: The winners write history. Might makes write. Well, yes, they do, but it is usually not very good and it is almost always incomplete. If you have used Native America, or if you have managed to keep abreast of the massive literature in Native American Studies written by anthropologist, archaeologists, and historians, you will note that there are a wealth of sources that can be used to reconstruct native experiences during the Revolution. You can ignore them if you want when you commemorate acts of war, but we historians have a name for that, and we will judge you harshly if you do so. We will judge you in the same way we judge those who continue to defend the racist monuments celebrating the Confederacy erected after the Civil War. Like them, you will be encouraging a history of erasure, one that conceals the misdeeds of the past, and obscures the sufferings of those who became the victims of history. Good historians remember and understand that what some people choose to “commemorate,” others are compelled to mourn.
Every couple of months I read on Twitter another denunciation from someone in the Native American/Indigenous Studies community of Woody Guthrie’s famous song, “This Land is Your Land.” It’s a “obvs hella-colonial” song, the critique goes, because Guthrie’s claim that the entire continent “from California, to the New York Island” belonged to you and me ignored the original Native American owners of North America. As such, Guthrie erased the reality of Native Americans’ antecedent claims to the continent and, in effect, whitewashed the long history of American Indian dispossession in the United States.
As scholars we need to counter the colonialist project of erasing native peoples and their histories from the land, but this critique of Guthrie is facile at best. Those who teach and write about Native American history, those of us who have worked with these communities in their present-day struggles to regain control of their ancestral lands, have bigger problems than a 75-year-old folk song.
Here are the full lyrics to the song:
This land is your land This land is my land From California to the New York island; From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and Me.
As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway: I saw below me that golden valley: This land was made for you and me.
I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; And all around me a voice was sounding: This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.” But on the other side it didn’t say nothing, That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.
Guthrie wrote the song after hearing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a patriotic anthem that borders on the jingoistic. (If you want a song that celebrates an “America: Love It or Leave It” ethos, this ought to be your target). Guthrie wrote during a period in American history when the economy had failed catastrophically, where millions of people were out of work, and federal efforts to provide relief, recovery, and reform, as radical as they were for the time, did not fundamentally challenge the basic structures of American capitalism.
Guthrie stood against the injustices in American society, the exploitation of labor, the impoverishment of hard-working, ordinary people He stood against the selfish rich, those who gamed a system already rigged in their favor. This was protest music of the first order.
So, yeah, you can hate Guthrie’s lyrics if you want, but as scholars we have an obligation to read deeply, honestly, and thoroughly. Unlike, say, Fox News, we are not allowed as scholars to take words out of context, not if we are to claim that we are hard-working, honest, and open-minded in our approach to the past. And as citizens, we could use more voices like Guthrie’s, willing to denounce the injustices of a system that seems to spiral farther and farther away from its expressed highest ideals every day.
