Donald Trump’s supporters fished the broken pieces of a destroyed Christopher Columbus statue out of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. They commissioned an artist to repair and reassemble it. And now, “resurrected,” it stands behind the White House barricades, directly in front of the Executive Office Building. It bids defiance, Trump would have us believe, to the “woke mob” who consigned the original to the sea on the Fourth of July in 2020.
Yet Trump’s Columbus is a Zombie, a golem. He is not exactly dead, but he does not look very good at all. Indeed, Trump’s display is a loser’s defiance, a middle finger in the air flashed at the crowds who booed him off the field as he enters the safety of the stadium tunnel. Nothing courageous or principled about it at all. Trump’s Columbus statue can only survive in his compound, after all, protected by electronic surveillance, steel gates, and the high-powered weaponry of the Secret Service. Thanks to the efforts of generations of Indigenous activists and their allies, a revisionist effort took root late in the 1980s. As a result, nobody with more than half a brain will ever discuss Columbus’s voyages without considering the brutality, avarice, and enslavement that rested at the heart of his “New World” enterprise.
I READ ABOUT TRUMP’S LATEST COLUMBUS FETISH after boarding the Island Packers boat that would carry me back to Ventura from the north shore of Santa Cruz Island, in the Channel Islands National Park. I had spent the day hiking at this beautiful, beautiful place and, resting on the boat, realized I had a signal on my phone for the first time in several blissful hours.
When I was born, it’s important to remember, the Indian policy of the United States was still known as “termination.” During my lifetime, the United States looked forward to the destruction and dissolution of Indigenous nations, and the assimilation of individual Indigenous peoples into the American body politic. Teachers in Ventura, where I grew up, told us that the Chumash, who inhabited the mainland and the Channel Islands, were extinct. They knew no better. It was likely what they were taught as well. Nobody could tell us where the Chumash had gone, and in grade school I can remember constructing a model of Mission San Buenaventura as part of our social studies curriculum. At the Catholic School I attended, the notion that these two things were connected—disappearance and the missions—was never discussed. Father Junipero Serra, who established the Ventura mission in 1782, was to be revered. It was easy. We never learned anything that would cause us to question the purity of his heart, the fierceness of his commitments, and the piety of his Christianity.
But the Chumash did not disappear. While home this past week my dad and I drove up into the hills above Santa Barbara, onto what now constitutes the Chumash reservation. We visited the gorgeous Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center. Signage at Santa Cruz Island, meanwhile, and the presentation by the National Park Service ranger, both featured prominently the island’s original Indigenous inhabitants and the Island’s Chumash name, limuw. Two years ago, once again making my way out to limuw, I shared the boat with a large number of Chumash people traveling to the island to hold ceremonies. And whatever you think of Indigenous casinos, Chumash gaming operations are very profitable. The Chumash are alive and well.
That is an incredible achievement. If the Spanish, the Mexicans, or murderous Californians had their way, no Chumash would have survived. They defied their colonizers. They refused to disappear. And in all sorts of ways, they are teaching non-Indigenous southern Californians how they did so. The museum does a fantastic job of this.
DONALD TRUMP IS A LOSER, and all that he represents is a loser’s cause. He and his supporters will never admit their obvious commitment to white supremacy as they try to bring back the past. The best these racists and their sycophants can do is reanimate a broken zombie Columbus and keep it behind the barricades where nobody will ever see it. They are afraid of a frank debate. Several years ago, Venturans debated what to do about the large Father Serra statue that stood outside City Hall. Some people wanted the statue removed. Others wanted to preserve it. The debate took place during the pandemic on Zoom. It lasted several hours. Many people spoke. I am proud of how my hometown handled this. In the end a compromise was reached: the statue of Father Serra was moved from City Hall to the Mission, just a short distance away. If you want to see it, you know where to go. But Trump, unlike the people in my town, won’t even engage. He really is a chicken-shit, whiny-ass, little bitch. It continues to amaze me that roughly sixty percent of white people voted for him in each of the last three elections.
The Serra statue, at its former home.
If in the 1960s, federal authorities still looked forward to the assimilation and disappearance of Native Ameircans, now we see Indigenous peoples laying claim to their stolen homelands. In places, the “Land Back” movement has had small but significant success. Offensive Indigenous mascots have been eliminated; Indigenous place names have been restored. Even Donald Trump, briefly, responded to pressure from Indigenous activists when he became the first American president to address directly the problem of “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” He appointed a commission (“Operation Lady Justice”), and proclaimed the 5th of May “National Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.” He has abandoned this in his second term and he has tried to undo President Obama’s decision to restore Mt. McKinley’s Indigenous name, Denali, but, again, Trump is a loser, fighting against the forces of time.
When I was out on limuw I hiked from Scorpion Landing to Smuggler’s Cove and back. It was listed by the National Park Service as a “strenuous” eight-mile hike. I felt it during the return trip, as the heat increased and there remained a number of mile-long climbs . I looked forward several times and appreciated how much farther I had to go. I also looked behind me, to see how far I had already ascended. We should do something similar when we counter Trump and the old world his followers wish to restore. He wants to pull us back, to drag us down. He has nothing constructive to offer. Most of us are so far ahead of him. He really is a fat old man, bloated and out of shape, who has been left behind not because of any unfairness but solely because we have judged him by the content of his character. He will stir up the hatred of the racists and the fears of the homophobes and transphobes. He will drag some people down, destroy some careers, and do great damage to the institutions and values we cherish. He will attempt to hurt those of us who climb past him, and push them off the trail. He will scream and yell and pout and posture, as he works to bring back a world in which people like him—white, rich, male and mediocre—were assumed to be the only parties able to hold real power. That belief, perfectly represented by his Columbus golem, can no longer survive in the wild. Talk to young people. Talk to people whose eyes, hearts and minds are open. Trump and Zombie Columbus are so far in their rear-view mirror. These terrible, retrograde, old racists, at the end of the day, are worthy of nothing, least of all your respect. The war is not over. There are many battles ahead. But from the shores of limiw, to the palisades that surround his creepy, caged Columbus, you must know that we are going to win. There is no reason to yield to them an inch.
Last week President Trump posted a “Presidential Message” on the “Anniversary of one of our Nation’s earliest displays of military might.” He wanted to “honor the memory of the brave men” he said, “who gave their lives in service to our Nation” during the Mexican War.
It is not uncommon for a president to take the anniversary of a historical event as an occasion for reflecting on the policies and goals of his administration, but invocations of the Mexican War are relatively rare. But Trump, as we well know, is not like other presidents.
“Guided by our victory on the fields of Mexico 178 years ago,” his message reads, “I have spared no effort in defending our southern border against invasion, upholding the rule of law, and protecting our homeland from forces of evil, violence, and destruction.” Trump claimed that he was stopping the flow of drugs into the United States, halting the “invasion of illegal aliens,” and “dismantling narco-terrorist networks all across the Western hemisphere.” Trump also, he said, had secured control of the Panama Canal from foreign takeover, a very odd claim, and that his administration was “aggressively pursuing an America First policy of peace through strength and will continue to reassert the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to ensure the Hemisphere remains safe, prosperous, and free.”
For white people.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s policies, and however much one might agree or disagree with his party’s belief in the magnitude of the border crisis, it is easy to see how Trump both invoked and found justification for his policies in the virulent racism that preceded the war.
Late in the 1980s, when I knew I wanted to go to graduate school to study American history, one of the first books I read was Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny. It is a fantastic book that got me thinking. Horsman wrote about the origins of “American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,” tracing its roots back to the Tudor antiquarians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Trump speaks the language of these racial Anglo-Saxonists. After the War of 1812, for example, Trump asserted, the United States was “guided by the steadfast belief that our Nation was destined by divine providence to expand to the golden shore of the Pacific Ocean.” After “Mexican forces launched an ambush along the Rio Grande, killing 11 and wounding 6 American troops” (a highly dubious proposition), and “with the promise of Manifest Destiny beating in every American heart” (another highly dubious proposition), President James K. Polk commenced a violent invasion that seized more than half of Mexico’s territory and even more of its arable soil. (Trump, of course, did not call it that). It was a war of territorial aggression that led to the United States claiming much of Mexico, many of its citizens, and many thousands of Indigenous people as subjects of an aggressively expanding American empire.
Not all Americans supported the war, and the notion that Manifest Destiny beat in every American heart is simply not true. Mexicans and Indigenous people, after all, did not feel that this war was a good thing, and they are Americans, too. But many white Americans were deeply concerned about the American aggression in Texas and beyond.
The Mexican War is a big subject, and I suspect that many of us in our survey courses do not do it justice. One way I have found useful to get at this in the classroom is by looking at the career of John Quincy Adams, the greatest ex-president in American history. Leonard Richards’ old, brief biography of Adams’s congressional career is wonderful. I am sure there is more recent work out there, but because my department long ago dispensed with its survey courses, a decision I gradually came to support, I no longer have occasion to teach these classes.
It is important to remember that by the middle of the 1830s a national two-party political system had emerged. The Second American Party System, as it is called, was the product of the politics of the Market Revolution. These two parties, to a very great extent, disagreed over the economic and political future of the United States. They were struggling to define this thing called a “Republic,” a vague concept which all embraced but over which different people could disagree. By 1840, these two parties, Whigs and Democrats, were competing in all parts of the country, a product of the extraordinary political talent of Martin van Buren, who worked harder than anyone to try to keep the slavery issue out of politics.
The territorial expansion of the United States, the fulfillment of what newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan called its “Manifest Destiny,” would introduce questions about race, slavery, the economic and political future of the United States, and the definition of the Republic that could not easily be avoided, and Adams played an important role in this story. He did not retire after his presidency. He was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1831 and would serve for the next seventeen years until his death in 1848. Throughout these years, Adams was an enemy of the Slave Power conspiracy, premised on the belief that slaveowners and their allies would do anything to protect the institution of slavery, even if that meant depriving white people of their constitutional rights. Adams, for instance, led the fight against the Gag Rule, through which pro-slavery members of the House and Senate managed to shut off all debate on antislavery petitions which floated into Congress.
If you teach this material, you will need to remind your students that the first amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their legislators, a cornerstone of the Bill of Rights. The gag rule, Adams argued, was obviously unconstitutional. Adams we should point out, was not an abolitionist—he thought they were troublemakers, but he did believe strongly that the constitution mattered. Adams considered the gage rule to be “in direct violation of the constitution of the United States, of the rules of the House, and of the rights of my constituents.” Because the gag had to be renewed at every session of Congress, there were frequent opportunities to excoriate southern slave-owners and northern Jacksonians for denying the right to petition, and to savage them on constitutional grounds. John C. Calhoun, obviously a supporter of slavery, called Adams a “mischievous bad old Man.” The gag rule, it should be pointed out, served the interests of slaveowners, and the Jacksonians quite well. How could Van Buren and others focus attention on banking and currency reform if Congress had to continually deal with the slavery question. The Gag Rule was consistent with Van Buren’s goal of keeping slavery out of politics.
Adams was able to bring up slavery despite the gag rule. In February 1837, for instance, he tried to introduce a petition from nine women in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He tried to present it, arguing that they wanted the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and not abolition in toto. No matter, the resolution was tabled. Then Adams asked the speaker to rule on another piece of paper, one that looked like a petition, but was filled with scratches and marks “purporting to come from slaves.” Could this, he asked, be presented? The question produced an immediate reaction as southerners jumped at the implication that slaves had the right to petition congress. Adams sat back as confusion reigned. Some said he should be expelled for introducing a resolution from slaves. He pointed out that he had said “purported.” Later he said that the resolution did indeed come from slaves, but they were slaves that preferred slavery to abolition and wanted Congress not to tamper with slavery in any way. This made his opponents even madder. This went on for five days, to Adams’ great satisfaction. Adams was receiving nearly a dozen assassination threats a month.
During his years in Congress he had other opportunities to annoy proslavery zealots. In 1841, he defended 39 Africans before the Supreme Court after they had seized control over the slave ship Amistad. These Africans, sailing from one part of Cuba to another, had rebelled and captured the ship they were on. They hoped to sail to Africa, but they were deceived by their Spanish hostage crew, and ended up on Long Island Sound. Adams and his associates won the case and the Africans were returned to Africa on the grounds that Africans were never the legal property of the Spaniards. Rather, they were “kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.”
In many ways, the Jacksonians played into Adams’ hands. In no way was this more so than over Texas. The Jacksonians were, in general, land hungry and beholden to frontier interests. They were an aggressively-expansionist party. Many Whigs, their opponents, did not share their enthusiasm for acquiring additional chunks of land. They wanted to develop what the United States already had, they said. They worried that adding “inferior races” could weaken the republic. And they could not help but notice that Jacksonian expansion seemed to benefit the plantation south more than the rest of the country. Adams became convinced that Jacksonian expansion was part of a larger “Slave Power Conspiracy.” Most of all, the Jacksonians wanted Texas.
The Texas issue, of course, grew out of the Mexican Revolution. Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1821. In 1823, in order to create a buffer zone between Mexico’s interior and the United States, the Mexican government encouraged migration into Texas. Land hungry Americans came in droves, in greater numbers than expected, outnumbering Mexicans by 2 to 1, and this produced alarm in Mexico City. The Mexican government, after all, abolished slavery in 1829, and in 1830 it enacted a law directing immigrants to abide by Mexican Law and custom, part of which was Roman Catholicism. But the Mexican government was too weak to enforce its authority. Then in 1834, General Santa Anna seized control of the Mexican government and established a dictatorship. Texans revolted and Santa Anna, with 6000 men, stormed into Texas in 1836, killing 188 at the Alamo and 300 more at the Goliad.
The Texans, with aid from the southern states, fought back and when they won their independence, they appealed to the United States to recognize Texan independence. Adams had little use for the Texas rebels. Like many northerners, he suspected that the Texas Revolution was part of a plot hatched by slaveowners to further southern interests. Adams accused the supporters of the Texans of being racists. He asked speaker of the house James K. Polk, “Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves and abolisher of slavery?” Adams’s stand was popular, especially his belief that southerners hoped to carve up several slave states out of the Texas region. His claim that the Texas Revolution was a criminal act set off by enslavers and land speculators had instant appeal throughout much of the Northeast.
Andrew Jackson was unable to do anything about annexing Texas. Van Buren, his successor, had little interest in doing so, as he was firmly committed to keeping slavery out of politics. William Henry Harrison, a Whig, was elected President in 1840, and he too had little interest in annexation, but he died soon after taking office. He was replaced by John Tyler, who was scarcely a Whig at all. In fact, Tyler’s stand on banking was similar in many ways to Jackson, and that alienated Whig power broker Senator Henry Clay and others who largely read him out of the party. Tyler became a president without a party. He saw the Texas issue as his only hope for political salvation.
Adams watched Tyler with suspicion. In a speech to his constituents, Adams insisted that “Your country is no longer a democracy, it is no longer even a republic—it is a government of 2 or 300,000 holders of slaves, to the utter exclusion of the remaining part, and all the population of the other states in the Union.” Now Tyler’s trump card was that British politicians had made antislavery speeches for home consumption, and they had stated that they favored a free and independent Texas as an alternative to southern cotton and as a barrier to further American expansion. Thus Tyler’s supporters could throw back at Adams that the was abetting a foreign conspiracy, one orchestrated by the British, designed to reduce the growing economic power of the United States.
After February of 1844, Tyler’s secretary of state was John C. Calhoun. Tyler charged him with completing negotiations for the annexation of Texas. In April 1844, Calhoun sent the treaty to the Senate, along with a copy of a letter he had written to Richard Pakenham, the British minister to Washington. The “Pakenham letter” was a bombshell. Besides denouncing Pakenham’s government for interfering in Texas and supporting abolition throughout the world, Calhoun sang the praises of slavery and cited statistics to prove that blacks were better off as slaves than freedmen. He justified annexation as a means of defending the institution of slavery. So what? The letter strengthened Adams and the northern whigs, because it proved that Texas annexation was about acquiring additional land for the institution of slavery. The annexation treaty was defeated overwhelmingly in the Senate.
Adams knew that the election of 1844, which pitted Clay against the democrat James K. Polk, would revolve around Texas. Speaking to a Boston audience, Adams said that “your trial is approaching. The spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are drawing together for the deadly conflict of arms. The annexation of Texas to this Union is the blast of the trumpet for a foreign, civil, servile, and Indian war, of which the government of your country, fallen into faithless hands, have already given the signal—first by a shameless treaty, rejected by a virtuous senate; and again by the glove of defiance, hurled by the apostle of nullification, at the avowed policy of the British empire peacefully to promote the extinction of slavery throughout the world. Young men of Boston: Burnish your honor, prepare for the conflict, and I say to you, in the language of Galgacus to the ancient Britons, think of your forefathers! Think of your Posterity!” (I had to look up who Galgacus was, too, but even if you don’t, I think you can catch the urgency of his tone).
Despite Adams’ efforts, Polk won the election, and Adams expected gloomy days ahead for the republic under Tyler’s successor. Now Tyler had submitted a joint resolution annexing Texas to the United States. A joint resolution requires only a majority vote of both houses, rather than the 2/3 required for the ratification of a treaty. The Texans were wary, and to sweeten the pot, Polk accepted the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas. The Texas he saw added to the union, in other words, was larger in a sense than the Texas that had broke away from Mexico. THAT Mexico had its southern border at the Nueces River. Polk was an incredibly hard-driving and aggressive president. He was willing to compromise his territorial ambitions when it came to a dispute with Britain over the Oregon boundary, but never on the question of gaining additional territory from Mexico. Polk sent John Slidell as his emissary to Mexico City with authority to buy California and New Mexico from the Mexican government, and to get Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas.
Word of Slidell’s mission arrived in Mexico before Slidell did, and soon after his arrival the Mexican government was overthrown by general Mariano Paredes and some 7000 soldiers. The new military regime refused to have anything to do with Slidell, and asserted Mexico’s claim to all of Texas. Polk regarded this rejection of Slidell as cause for war. Then he got word of General Zachary Taylor losing the eleven men Trump mentioned as the result of a supposed Mexican invasion of American soil. To Adams, Polk had provoked this war to extend slavery. Not everybody agreed with this interpretation. Some simply did not believe that the President would do this, or that it made sense for him to do so. But the point is clear. The Mexican War was an immense watershed. The two-party system was beginning to fall apart along sectional lines. This combustible situation was made clear in August of 1846, when a congressman from Pennsylvania, a democrat named David Wilmot, introduced an amendment to an appropriation bill that the President’s supporters tried to push through Congress at the last second.
Wilmot and his co-sponsors hoped to ban slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico. He was not an abolitionist. Wilmot said “I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
The Wilmot Proviso did nothing that would have destroyed the institution of slavery, but it did say that slavery should not expand. That implied that there was something unclean, something dishonorable, about slavery. The Wilmot Proviso thus made clear a number of significant cracks in the Second American party System. Both northern Democrats and northern Whigs supported the Proviso. Many of these northerners were coming to believe in the Slave Power Conspiracy. Slaveowners, the story went, were members of an anti-democratic aristocracy that was willing to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions to protect the institution of slavery. The south already had unequal representation in the House because of the 3/5 clause. Slavery was now spreading, subverting institutions wherever it went. Looking on these events, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson could see that “Mexico will poison us.”
I MARRIED INTO A MEXICAN-AMERICAN FAMILY. I don’t speak Spanish well at all, but I can understand it. Watching Bad Bunny with my Mexican-American partner, her sister, our children, made it even more clear than it otherwise would have been how well he struck so many notes that resonated with his audience. It really was a fantastic performance, and I am sure I will watch it again to catch things that I missed—some of which were pointed out by observers far more astute than I.
Manifest Destiny. Ask an American about their nation’s history, and I find that even if they do not know the subject well, they will be able to tell you something about manifest destiny. It is one of those odd concepts, or bits of information, that really seems to stick. When I ask, students recite pretty easily that it meant that it was God’s plan that the United States expand across the continent. But expansion is such a bland word, isn’t it? Invade. Seize. Colonize. Take, steal, rob, exploit, and conquer. All these words seem to get at the underlying reality with more precision.
For those of us who teach Indigenous history, the expressions of this manifest design are so easy to see in the Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, all helpfully digitized by the University of Wisconsin. Indian Commissioner William Medill in 1848 argued, for example, that “Apathy, barbarism, and heathenism must give way to energy, civilization, and Christianity, and so the Indian of this continent has been displaced by the European.”
You see it, don’t you? “Manifest Destiny” meant the dispossession of Indigenous people. And as Horsman showed so well, Mexicans, too, were viewed as a race vastly inferior to the white Anglo-Saxons Americans idealized and idolized. So Bad Bunny ended his performance at the Super Bowl by reciting the names of the nations of the Americas. He showed the audience a football inscribed with the words, “Together We Are America.” Trump, meanwhile, who clearly was watching, posted on his silly Twitter knock-off a racist screed. He was angry, it seems to me, because Bad Bunny showed that Manifest Destiny was a racist fantasy. Americans’ attempts to fulfill that manifest destiny, to be sure, ruined the lives of millions of people, but Bad Bunny proved that it was a racist lie, an invocation of God to seize the life, liberty, and property of an enormous number of perfectly innocent people. Manifest Destiny was genocidal, in that if God’s plan was fulfilled in the way the white supremacists wished there would be no Spanish speakers left on this continent. It seems like maybe, just maybe, God did not want that after all. If there is a god, I would like to think that they are far more happy with the splendid color and beauty on display at halftime than the swinish grunts of the racist pig who leads the Republican Party.
I was at a bar not far from my house when I watched the ball drop above Times Square, ringing in the New Year. On its flashing surface were the words, “America 250.” A couple of days later, I was leaving a hotel in Westchester County very early in the morning. I was going to drive my daughter to JFK so she could catch a morning flight to South America. In the hotel lobby the TV sets were replaying football highlights from the previous day. On the sidelines appeared, once again, the words “America 250.” We got in the car, started driving towards the airport. After the kid made it through ticketing and security, I waited at the airport for a bit for her text telling me she had boarded successfully. I watched my phone while I waited and learned that American special forces had swooped into Caracas and seized Venezuela’s head of state. And, of course, not long after that, I watched the videos of an ICE agent murdering Renee Goode in Minnesota. I am sure that many of you did, too. And yesterday, I listened to our President denounce Somalians in terms only the most savage racist would use, and threaten to blow up the NATO alliance by invading, of all places, Greenland, because Norway did not award him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Yay America.
None of this is funny.
This new year will be one of commemoration, the Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Events will take place across the country. In museums and libraries large and small exhibits and events will explore the meaning of American Independence. Much of this work will be provocative, clever, inspiring and interesting.
But in Trump’s America, what does it mean to commemorate the Declaration? The Bicentennial in 1976 occurred when I was in grade school. Looking back on that year, I agree with one of my professors who described it as an orgy of self-congratulatory nonsense. Fifty years later, I wonder what we have to celebrate. I’m not in the mood.
Several years ago I attended a planning meeting for New York’s 250th celebration. I cannot remember who invited me, but the event was held at the Ganondagan State Historic Site not too far from where I live. It was part of a larger national movement to make sure that Americans, across the United States, appropriately commemorated this important event. Several speakers addressed the audience, each of them saying basically the same thing: The Declaration of Independence is the source of our nation’s highest ideals, a shining example of liberty at home and abroad, worthy of celebration. “We’re not quite there, yet,” each of the speakers said. They acknowledged, almost sheepishly, that after 250 years a considerable gap remained between American ideals and American reality. But they were in no mood to focus on that. This was going to be a celebration of all that the American Revolution accomplished. It’s going to be huge!
I found this frustrating. I raised my hand. “Was the Revolution a good thing?” A gentleman who sat a couple of rows in front of me turned and answered my question. He said that it was not job of a historian to say whether something was good or bad.
“Bullshit,” I thought.
“Penicillin,” I said. “Pol Pot. See? It’s easy.”
I did not receive any invitations to subsequent planning meetings. The Semiquincentennial is going to be a celebration of how great we are as a nation, but maybe we are not that great. And I certainly do not feel like celebrating.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that Donald Trump decides that he wants to run for reelection in 2028. Of course, the Constitution prohibits this, but we have seen that our national charter has provided little comfort for those who believe in rights and freedom and liberty and restraints on the exercise of executive power. And whatever the Constitution says, have you seen any evidence at all that Republicans in Congress would stand up to him? What about the Supreme Court? Fat chance, right? It is entirely possible that if Trump decides he wants to run again he may be permitted to do so.
And I believe firmly that if he did run again, he would run on those issues that worked for him last time: fear and loathing towards immigrants and people of color; fear and hatred of transgendered people. These issues appeal to the sort of “low information” voters who have flocked to Trump. There are indeed a lot of low information voters out there, enough to swing an election to him. But nearly sixty percent of white Americans voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. And although I do not doubt that they would deny strenuously that they are racist homophobes, they would vote for him anyways.
That’s a pretty sorry state of affairs. The existence of Trump, and Trumpism, makes me feel like there is a rot at the heart of our institutions and, as a historian, it seems to me that it has been there for a very long time.
It is difficult to deny the power of the language of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote beautifully. But I am not convinced that most Americans believe that all people are created equal. The Declaration, written by a rapist enslaver who never lifted a finger to abolish that horrible institution, also denounced the “merciless Indian savages” and dangerous slaves that he believed the king had unleashed upon innocent Americans. Hatred and fear of the other is baked into our national DNA. It may have been easier to pull white Americans together around their hatred of the other than their love of liberty and freedom. Alongside those who believe fervently in the ideals of the Declaration there always has been another group that does not believe in an egalitarian and democratic republic premised on a respect for the rights of all. And those people are in charge, right now, of all three branches of the federal government and they will be in charge when the celebrations of the Semiquincentennial ramp up in a couple of months. They control much of the nation’s media, and many of the hugely popular websites where you and I waste a lot of our time.
Trump’s executive orders about the teaching of history are intended to proscribe those educators who point out this nation’s shortcomings. Show the well-researched documentary, “The 13th,” in your class and you will be in trouble. In some states discussing the 1619 Project can get a teacher fired. These orders are intended to undermine the very principle that equality matters. They are intended to defend a racist status quo. To prohibit teachers from talking about past injustices that continue into the present is to deny that those injustices exist, and to effectively dismiss and delegitimize the concerns of those who say we are not all right as a nation. I have seen the protests in the streets of the Twin Cities. I know that there are many, many people who oppose Donald Trump. Some of those taking part in the resistance are heroes. Their humor, their love of their neighbors, truly is inspiring. Some, like Renee Good, have become martyrs. But that does not alter my belief that the opening lines of the Declaration are a rhetorically bombastic lie. As a nation, I think the evidence is pretty clear that most of us do not believe that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
After 250 years we have yet to live up to those ideals, which seems to me compelling evidence that most of us never really believed in them at all.
When I began my teaching career in Montana in 1994 I found myself often feeling homesick. I had left all of my graduate school friends behind in New York, and my family remained in California. I did not know anyone in Montana yet, and I could already tell that my department was a colossal dumpster fire. I was lonely. Sometimes, at night, I drove my car up on to the Rimrocks that loomed above the city of Billings. There I could tune in to KNX News Radio, a powerful AM station from Los Angeles. It came in pretty clearly. I could hear about what the Dodgers were up to, the frequent traffic reports, and the weather back home. Connections, you know? We find them where we can.
Montana seemed like a foreign country to me. No metropolitan area (if you can call Billings “metropolitan”) is as far from another metropolitan area as Billings. I felt isolated. The music, the food, and the people I cared about–it all seemed very far away.
So I threw myself into my teaching. I had a heavy load, including one section each of the early and recent US History surveys every single semester. I had a lot to do. I felt more tired than I did when I was preparing for my comprehensive exams. What’s more, there was the surprise of teaching a methodology course my first semester. Underprepared, I asked the students to write about a historical event that they remembered with particular vividness. I wanted to talk about matters of memory, and how we measure the historical “significance” of this or that event.
There was one student sitting in the front row. A bit older than his peers. Shocking, white supremacist tattoos appeared on his arms. This was the 90s. Tattoos were still relatively rare. And I had never seen someone with swastikas on their arms before in real life, sitting right in front of me. This student would, by the end of the semester, write a paper about Jacob Thorkelson, a one-term Congressman from Montana who was elected in 1938. Thorkelson was a rabid anti-Semite, and avowedly pro-Nazi. This student clearly looked up to Thorkelson.
All that was to come. In his first essay, this student described hearing of the death of the “Freedom Fighters” in Waco while sitting in a federal penitentiary in Minnesota. It was an effective opening. I’ll give him that. I was hooked. I wanted to read more.
Waco, of course, was the site of the raid by federal authorities on the Branch Davidian compound commanded by a messianic and well-armed rapist and lunatic named David Koresh. Koresh and his followers set fire to the compound rather than surrender, and 76 of his followers died.
My student wrote this seven months before the Oklahoma City Bombing, and I was entirely unfamiliar with this sort heavily-armed, High Plains, Right-wing nuttiness. It was a fringe view even in Montana. But it did not take long to stumble across this frightened, angry, and racist rhetoric–on weak AM radio stations, especially, broadcast over the sparse landscape of Eastern Montana. I was surprised by the number of my students who believed some truly vile things. But it was the fringe.
Montana is beautiful. There are things about it that I miss. I would love to visit it again. I met some fascinating people. I never expected that the sort of conspiratorial insanity I heard on the High Plains of eastern Montana would move to the mainstream of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. And though this dim-witted tyrant and bully will soon lope off the national stage, I have no doubt that the sort of violent, racist, civic illiteracy that has fueled Trumpism is alive and well. Feed Trump a diet rich in fresh greens instead of Big Macs, and slap an Ivy League law degree on him and a larger vocabulary, and you get something looking and sounding a lot like Josh Hawley.
In the morning before the assault on the nation’s Capitol building, I taught my students about the Paxton Boys. It is a story that really pulls at me. A group of racist thugs, in defiance of authorities who had no interest in standing in their way, murdered peaceful Christian Indians. They killed small children with hatchets, and they mutilated the bodies afterwards. Later that day, while listening in on an AHA Panel featuring the great Tisa Wenger, I received a text from a friend telling me to drop what I was doing and turn on the TV. Another mob, this time determined to disfranchise millions of American peoples of color by throwing out their votes, while carrying symbols of white supremacy, stormed the Senate and house chambers. Two mobs, both racist and violent, both utterly and undeniably American.
We are not special. Our body politic is badly diseased. See how we are.
Four years ago on Election Day I took my daughters to Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Among the local luminaries buried there was Susan B. Anthony, the famous champion of women’s rights. The cemetery was kept open late. We went to visit Anthony’s grave on the day I cast my ballot for what I fully expected would be America’s first woman president.
We were not alone. The cemetery was packed. We never made it to Anthony’s grave. The lines were too long. But we did stand in a crowd filled with women young and women old, who shared our sense that something momentous was going to happen that night. The atmosphere was hopeful, at times festive. With a woman succeeding the first African-American president, maybe it was possible to see another ceiling shattered, a change for the good.
I watched the coverage that night. I sensed early on that Hillary Clinton was going to lose. I could see the tension in James Carville’s face relatively early in the evening as he watched the returns coming in from Florida. That is when it dawned on me that it was over, and that sixty-two million Americans had voted for a monster whose only qualification was a puffed up financial resume, an infinite capacity for dishonesty, and a lethal ability to combine corruption, vindictiveness, racism and incompetence.
Over the past four years I have cut people out of my life who continue to support this monster. For each of his crimes they have had an excuse or a denial. At times I am disappointed in myself for doing this, but I no longer believe these individuals can be reasoned with. Why continue to bash my head against a wall? They are toxic people, and for my own health I have cut these toxins out. So much of the past four years has been toxic. So much rot. So much sickness.
As I write these words I think of a song by my favorite band, X, called “See How We Are.” We are not well.
I was never among those who thought of the policies pursued by Trump and his supporters as “Un-American.” From his fear and hatred of immigrants, his racism, his predatory behavior toward women, his greed, his avarice, and his civic illiteracy, he strikes me as a perfect representative of what this country has become, and in a large measure always has been. I know there are people committed to what many consider this nation’s ideals, but at times it feels like they lose more rounds than they win. My only hope is that there are enough sane people in a handful of states who will defy efforts to disfranchise them and vote to save what’s left of this tattered republic. Sometimes I worry that this election already has been stolen, that the republic cannot be saved.
The last four years have been hard. This year has been especially hard. Trump was not the sole cause of all of this. Or he was both a cause and a symptom. And the underlying causes of Trumpism, those American toxins, will remain in the body politic, even if he is somehow prevented from stealing this election. Look at the Republicans already maneuvering to run for President in 2024: Tom Cotton, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, that vicious empty suit from Missouri and Crenshaw from the district where I briefly lived in Texas–they are no better than him.
I am not hopeful for the future. I do not believe that this country is an exceptional place. We contend with problems that other countries have addressed more successfully. Sometimes I do not believe I will be able to forgive those who continue to support this violent monster.
Vice-President Biden has called for a return to decency. Watching him on TV, I am willing to believe in his basic decency and kindness, even if I wish he took different stands on some of the issues that matter to me. I voted for him last Saturday. But I know he is just a guy, the candidate of a political party whose moderate leadership has failed to effectively counter the President’s tyranny. They continue to appeal to norms that long ago were torn asunder.
Trump’s regime–and I hope it lasts only one term–will have been a historic presidency. It has demonstrated how bad things can become when a significant number of the American people forfeit their civic responsibility to be informed, critical, and compassionate citizens. These have been painful years, but for the love of God do not tell me you were surprised by any of this. It is not just Trump. Tens of millions of Americans share in the guilt for what has happened over the past four years and, like Frank Bruni, I will never be able to look at this country the same way again.
Long ago Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Richard Price expressing his faith in the people. He said that “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” Maybe the election of 2020 will serve this purpose. Don’t bet on it. That the United States was founded on principles of liberty, justice, and equality has always been the biggest lie in American history. And the past four years have shown that the forces of racism, fascism, illiberality, callousness and corporate greed are not going anywhere. We will live with the illness for a long, long time. I am not certain we will ever recover, whatever the outcome of the election.
During his visit to Arizona at the beginning of May, President Donald Trump took some time out to comment on his administration’s efforts to help the state’s large Native American population combat the Coronavirus pandemic and, as he put it, to bring attention to “the unprecedented actions my administration has taken to support our treasured Native American communities.” The President said that his administration has improved “the lives of Native American families and tribes more than any administration has done by far.”
That is quite a claim, and it’s not supported by the evidence.
Trump touted the eight billion dollars Congress appropriated to assist American Indian nations, which he claimed, “is the largest single investment in Indian Country in our history.” The President announced as well that the Navajo Nation will receive an additional $600 million in assistance. “That’s a lot,” he said. Trump then asked, according to the White House transcript of the meeting, “Should I renegotiate that? Can we renegotiate that? (Laughter).” “Only if you go up,” said Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer.
Lizer can be forgiven for not laughing. As of May 28th, the Navajo Nation had suffered more than 5000 active cases of COVID-19, and 167 deaths, and the third-highest per capita rate of infection in the Country.
“Since I took office,” Trump continued, “my administration has also worked to repatriate precious Native American artifacts, to protect children in the care of the Indian Health Service, and to make eagle remains more easily accessible for cultural and religious purposes, and to highlight the contributions of Native American veterans throughout the history of our nation.” None of the items on this list are unprecedented, and all are required by laws that predated Trump’s election in 2016.
Make no mistake, Trump’s presidency has been mostly bad for Native Americans. His racist name-calling directed at Elizabeth Warren reinforced damaging stereotypes about Native American identity. Within days of taking office, he authorized completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and ignored the protestors at Standing Rock, and rolled back protections on sacred sites like the Bears Ears National Monument. His fetish for Andrew Jackson has bothered those who know anything at all about that president’s record concerning Native America, and Trump’s budgets have imposed cuts on the Indian Health Service at a time when additional funding was badly needed. In fact, the $800 billion in funding has been tied up in court as tribes have clashed with the nation on who should receive the payments. He has ignored the problem of police violence towards Native Americans. The President has been more talk than action, and those actions are usually bad.
With one exception.
In November of 2019, the President signed an Executive Order establishing a task force “on Missing and Murdered American Indian and Alaska Natives,” charged with consulting tribal governments “on the scope and nature of the issues” related to missing and murdered women and girls, developing “model protocols and procedures to apply to new and unsolved cases of missing or murdered persons in American Indian and Alaska Native communities,” as well as the “establishment of a multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional team” including representatives from tribal law enforcement agencies and the federal Departments of Justice and Interior.
Dubbed “Operation Lady Justice,” the task force held consultation/listening sessions in January and February of this year but had to shelve the rest of its schedule, which was to have run through the end of July, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
This is a serious problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control found that 49 percent of Native American women have experienced sexual violence. The Department of Justice reported that 34.1 percent of Native American women will be raped during their lifetime, more than for any other ethnic or racial grouping. As President Trump indicated when he signed the Executive order, “the statistics are sobering and heartbreaking.” He said that “more than 5,000 Native American women and girls were reported missing,” and though the majority return home or are found, “too many are still missing and their whereabouts are unknown—and they usually don’t find them.”
It was this task force about which he spoke during his visit to Arizona. He issued a proclamation making May 5th “Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.”
Many of these missing women have been caught in a web of human trafficking, the exact breadth of the problem unknown. It is a problem of great magnitude but hazy borders. In this sense, the President’s effort to bring additional attention to this issue is welcome. More resources are needed. Nearly half of tribal law enforcement agencies who responded to a Government Accountability Office called for the information reported that they believe human trafficking is occurring on tribal lands within their jurisdictions. The President can educate Americans about the problem of missing and murdered women and girls.
These are crimes on the margins. Native communities are poor. They are isolated. The Supreme Court has made the prosecution of non-Indians by tribal law enforcement officers difficult where it is not impossible. Native American history is a story of tragedy, violence, crime, theft, and plunder. It is, at other times, a story of blundering goodwill. Even those who want to do right often do damage. But the harm is not inevitable, and nations, like individuals, have choices. In this one instance, the President and his handlers have made the right one. The Task Force is still on schedule to report to the President sometime after the election. Let’s hope, whatever the outcome in November, that this important first step is not one wasted.
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.
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 have told myself that I would not write about Donald Trump, but the guy is the gift that keeps on giving, if by gifts one means a series of outrages that forebode some national or global calamity.
This week, on the Ides of March, our Bronze Creon visited the grave of Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. Trump’s affection for Jackson is clear–a portrait of Jackson hangs in the Oval Office and, in a tweet, our current president thanked #POTUS7 for his service to the country. New Orleans? The slaughter of Creeks at Horseshoe Bend? Perhaps. Or was it Jackson’s distaste for the 1st Amendment in the form of his support for the congressional “Gag Rule,” or restricting abolitionist materials from the US Mail? Did Trump like Jackson’s desire to go medieval on the Nullifiers in South Carolina? Maybe it was because Trump embraced the myth that Jackson was an outsider, the people’s candidate, a kindred spirit of sorts, even if based on a flawed historical analogy. Or the ruinous Bank War? Or Jackson’s brutal embrace of majority rule whatever the consequences?
For students of the Native American past, Andrew Jackson is identified with the policy of “Indian Removal.” (God, I hate that euphemism.) More than any of his predecessors, Jackson advocated removal as national policy toward native peoples. His supporters included many southerners and westerners who wanted Indian land. He called for removal in his first annual message. He signed the Indian Removal Bill into law in 1830. He argued that removal was not mandatory, but that native peoples who remained upon their lands must subject themselves to the laws of the states in which these lands were located. Those states offered no protection for the persons and property of native peoples. Earlier in his career, Jackson negotiated massive land cessions with southeastern Indian nations, and he appointed during his presidency the commissioners who used all means fair and foul to obtain signatures on removal treaties. During his presidency, thousands of native peoples left their homes in the east for new homes in the west. There is no doubt that thousands of native peoples died as a direct result of the policies pursued by Andrew Jackson.
Our Bronze Creon told one interviewer that though he is very busy doing tremendous things to make America great again, he did find some time to begin reading a book about Andrew Jackson. I doubt that he learned much. The same day that Trump visited Jackson’s grave, a federal court in Hawaii struck down the president’s second attempt to ban Muslim immigrants from a handful of countries. Mike Huckabee, the Le Fou of GOP politics, said that like Jackson when confronted by a Court that challenged a fundamental assumption of his Indian policy, Trump should resist the judicial branch of the federal government. Huckabee became, in effect, the first person in the 21st century to see Jackson’s dismissal of the Court’s authority as admirable, and created the impression that this is a presidency run by men who have little knowledge of this nation’s past and less regard for the historic sufferings of its people of color.
I have written about all of this before. Jackson is a bad guy. He ruled by anger. He shot people in duels. He menaced his enemies. He held grudges with such ferocity that he makes Nixon seem chill. He trashed the economy, and seems not to have understood banking. We should not shed a tear that he is slated for removal from the twenty-dollar bill. He is rightly associated with America’s long history of ethnic-cleansing.
But here’s an unpopular point. Removing Jackson from our currency, or denouncing him as the author of a genocide against Native Americans, does not absolve any of us of the sins of our nation. Removal is a fact of life in Native American history. It began before Jackson took office, and continued long afterwards. (If you have not seen it, take a look at Claudio Saunt’s interactive map illustrating Native American land loss). I teach, for instance, at a college called Geneseo. I routinely drive through or visit places called Canandaigua or Irondequoit, and pass by on the highway places called Onondaga and Canajoharie and Nunda and Cohocton. The place names remain, after the people were removed, or consolidated on reservations in remote corners of New York state. A half dozen archaeological sites, all previously Seneca towns, are within a half-hour’s drive of where I sit. I walk along the old path of the Erie Canal, that symbol of New York’s rise as the Empire State that could not have been constructed without Iroquois dispossession. Both its original path and its current path pass by within a half mile of my house. In other words, look at the ground beneath your feet. It was once Native American land, and if you live in the east, like me, you likely have benefited from the relocations and removes that turned native peoples into refugees and exiles.
A more astute politician, not to mention a more sensitive human being, might have acknowledged the costs of Jackson’s policies–policies that were popular at the time, and from which millions of non-Indian Americans continue to reap the benefits. A more historically aware President might have talked about the complexities of the past. But that is not Donald Trump’s style. He is not a deep thinker. A man who recently congratulated the long-dead Frederick Douglass for the good work he is doing, Trump has shown no signs that he has any interest in or knowledge of America’s troubled past. And that is especially the case when it comes to the victims of American history.
