The end of the myth, p.44
The End of the Myth, page 44
* By this point, most national elections, either for the presidency or Congress, had become a contest between Whigs and Jacksonians over the “question of who could kill Indians with more fanfare,” as the historian Daniel Scallet writes in his study on the second Seminole War.
* Later, as president, Theodore Roosevelt, in signing some of the world’s first multinational legal treaties, attempted to subordinate the United States to international jurisprudence. But at home, he couldn’t even subordinate the frontier justice he had earlier celebrated. In The Winning of the West, Roosevelt said vigilantism would transform into law. It didn’t. Faced with what he called an “epidemic” of lynching, President Roosevelt blamed the victims: “The greatest existing cause of lynching,” he said in 1906, “is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.” Worse still, having been forced to lynch, white men debased themselves, falling to “a level with the criminal,” spreading chaos. “Lawlessness,” Roosevelt said, “grows by what it feeds upon; and when mobs begin to lynch for rape they speedily extend the sphere of their operations and lynch for many other kinds of crimes.”
* The war in the Philippines gave English a successor word to “frontier,” used to refer to remoteness: “boondocks,” from the Tagalog, “a distant, unpopulated place,” adopted by U.S. soldiers fighting a shadowy war against hit-and-run enemies. Its usage was expanded in World War II and then shortened in Vietnam to “boonies.”
* Debs in 1902: “The rise of class-conscious trades-unionism in the West was not the result of mere chance or personal design, but obedient to the rising tide of the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat of the rugged and sparsely settled mountain States, a composite population composed of pioneers, the most adventurous, brave and freedom-loving men from all States of the American continent.” In 1924: “The bold, assertive spirit of the pioneer—the one-time ‘free’ American could not survive in this generation of concentrated wealth and power and intensified wage-slavery. The spy system and the black-list are especially effective in these one-company towns—be they lumber, coal, copper, oil, or money—to destroy the free spirit that once was the glory of America.”
* Some civil and religious leaders urged African Americans not to take the bet—that is, the bet that if they proved their loyalty and demonstrated their bravery they would be admitted as full citizens into the nation. Henry M. Turner, a bishop in Atlanta’s African Methodist Episcopal Church who had earlier worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau, advised staying out of a “death struggle for a country that cares nothing for their rights and manhood.” Turner said, “Negroes who are not disloyal to the United States deserve to be lynched.”
* The Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner was a racist anti-imperialist, with little regard for African Americans, but in an 1899 lecture he precisely captured the way the seizure of Puerto Rico and the Philippines bought national reconciliation on the backs of African Americans. “For thirty years the negro has been in fashion, he has had political value and he has been petted,” Sumner said. But now, with the war against Spain, northerners and southerners “are all united. The Negro’s day is over. He is out of fashion.” Freedmen and freedwomen were anything but “in fashion” in the decades prior to the war, but Sumner’s point is important: that victory in the War of 1898 affirmed the racial logic of Jim Crow. The conquest of racially distinct peoples, and the categorization of them as subjects, not citizens, reinforced the arguments of white supremacists, who wanted to do the same thing to African Americans. Northern expansionists were “enunciating doctrines which proved that, for the last thirty years, the Southerners have been right all the time”: that if it was correct to deny Puerto Ricans and Filipinos the vote on the grounds that they weren’t ready for citizenship, then it was correct to do the same thing to African Americans.
* Leading the United States’ invasion of Okinawa was the Kentuckian Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., whose father, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, fought in the Mexican–American War and the Civil War. Before Okinawa, Buckner, Jr., was in charge of the military defense of Alaska, where he objected to the deployment of African American troops, writing his superiors that he worried they would stay on after the war: “with the natural result that they would interbreed with the Indians and Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which would be a problem.” As to the Confederate flag over Okinawa, most of the Marines present cheered when its hoister gave out a rebel yell: “Yip-tjip-yeee!” The flag reportedly flew for days with Buckner’s support: “My father fought under that flag,” he said.
* In 1865, during the last months of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers and southern slavers fled into Mexico, ahead of advancing Union troops. So many of them had landed in Mexico City that the ornate Hotel Iturbide was turned into a kind of Confederate capital-in-exile. A few had been in Mexico before, as conquering troops during the U.S. occupation in 1847. Now they came escaping Reconstruction and the rule of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Maximilian was sympathetic, granting Confederates five hundred thousand acres near Veracruz to establish a colony. Though slavery remained abolished in Mexico, some southerners had taken their slaves with them into Mexico, as Tejano settlers did years earlier. But one Confederate complained, “All our Negroes decided to leave us upon our arrival here.” The colony collapsed in 1867 after Maximilian’s execution.
* On January 28, 1917, a group of migrant day laborers, led by a domestic worker, Carmelita Torres, refused to strip naked and submit to a delousing cryolite bath at the El Paso crossing, leading to three days of protests. A year earlier, a similar “bath” at the El Paso jail had ignited a fire, killing scores of Mexicans. In the 1920s, writes the historian David Dorado Romo, “U.S. officials at the Santa Fe Bridge deloused and sprayed the clothes of Mexicans crossing into the U.S. with Zyklon B”—subsequently used in Nazi death camps—in a room that U.S. officials called “the gas chambers.” Romo also cites an article in a German science journal published in 1938 that “praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B.”
* “Twenty-five years ago, when we had all the land in the world,” Roosevelt explained, in off-the-cuff remarks he made from the rear platform of a train as he inspected drought conditions in Colorado in 1936, there was no need for government intervention. “Today the unlimited land of the old days of the frontier is gone,” he said, making a pitch for the rational use of land for flood control.
* The supporters of the Bricker Amendment were especially concerned about a 1919 Supreme Court ruling that foreign treaties—in this case, an agreement between Canada and the United States to protect migratory birds—might indeed override states’ rights and grant power to the federal government that wasn’t explicitly stated in the Constitution. The claim that “states alone were the repositories of the power to regulate migratory birds,” as some conservatively interpreted the Constitution, was ludicrous on its face, revealing the speciousness of much of the “states’ rights” legal reasoning and opening the door to expansionary interpretation of federal power.
It’s fitting, at least as vivid imagery, that migratory birds became a flashpoint between New Dealers trying to create new multilateral institutions and conservatives holding dear to the Jacksonian sanctity of state sovereignty. Similar to two elements essential to modern economics—migrants and capital—birds not only couldn’t be contained by borders but were too economically important to be left to individual states to regulate. In the 1920s, both sides in the debate about whether to exempt Mexico from immigration quotas often referred to Mexican workers as “birds of passage.” Opponents of quotas argued that migrant laborers, like birds, came and went without leaving a trace. Those who wanted to keep “poverty-stricken” migrants out said, “Keep your Mexicans and your birds of passage out of the country.”
* Selma, a recent popular film, took this point to heart: that it’s best to keep war abroad and social justice struggles at home separate, lest matters be confused. The film provides an up-close reenactment of the negotiations between King and LBJ over voting rights, without once mentioning or even alluding to Vietnam or how the war “eviscerated” King’s program.
* Clark, a libertarian rancher, pushed Reagan to take a more ideologically aggressive stance against the Soviet Union. “I prefer to speak of personal or individual rights,” Clark said in 1981, in a meeting called to discuss how to use the language of rights to criticize revolutionary Iran while avoiding affirming the principle of social rights. Some at the meeting expressed concern that too great a stress on “individuality” limited the ability of the administration to advocate on behalf of ethnic “groups,” such as “Jews in the Soviet Union” and “Armenians in Turkey.” A Reagan official, though, said that “the important thing is to be out there pushing for individual rights. It is an effective way to fight communism. Emphasis on the individual is the best way to be forceful.”
* The Koch brothers, for instance, began their involvement in national politics in 1980, as David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket, pushing for an even more extreme deregulatory agenda than Reagan did and rallying his supporters around the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion. Sagebrush emerged in opposition to “end-of-plenty” legislation passed by Congress in the 1970s to better manage western public land, including the Endangered Species Act. Financed by big ranchers, land developers, miners, lumber companies, and independent oil mavericks, Sagebrush was a largely contrived movement to weaken environmental regulations and federal control, with “rebels” fashioning themselves as cowboy-hat-wearing frontier Jacksonians, waging war on federal despots. Reagan, too, supported Sagebrush, and in office he increased the amount of public land open to gas and oil drilling. Over the years, the Kochs have continued to finance so-called wise use campaigns, funding politicians and organizations aimed at privatizing federal land or transferring it to state authority (as well as reducing the size of protected natural reserves and federal land monuments, as the Trump administration has done with Bears Ears in Utah).
* That same day, the Iran-Contra story broke in a Lebanese newspaper, generating a scandal that nearly brought down Reagan’s presidency. “No comment,” Reagan said at the signing in response to a reporter’s request to confirm the story.
* The NAFTA amendment of Mexico’s constitution could be compared to the United States’ 1887 Dawes Act, which privatized communal Native American land holdings: “In less than fifty years, some 150 million acres, or three quarters of the 1887 Indian land base, and generally the most productive, was lost,” as smallholders sold or otherwise were forced to transfer their titles.
* Where Cuban and Nicaraguan migrants were considered “political refugees”—in flight from leftist governments and thus given good treatment—Salvadorans and Guatemalans were dealt with roughly. Many wound up in the penitentiary system. Treated as criminals, they became criminals, organized by gangs, including what became known as MS-13, and they continued that membership after being deported back to their home countries. (One of the reasons Nicaragua doesn’t suffer greatly from such gangs is that its refugees weren’t shuffled into the prison system and then deported home.)
* According to the Washington Post (March 20, 2018), in focus groups conducted by the social media data-harvesting firm Cambridge Analytica prior to the 2014 midterm elections, themes related to “race realism,” including a proposal to build a “wall to block the entry of illegal immigrants,” tested well among alienated “white Americans with a conservative bent.”
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth
