The Americans
American Samizdat: A Hard Look
Surely, never in human history have the people of Earth lived their lives with more varying beliefs in the nature of the humanity to which they belong than they now do.
In societies of deep faith or of pervasive religious observance – for Western, industrial societies, that would be the in the past — faith in the capacity of humans for goodness has generally contested with an equally strong sense of people’s innate capacity for sinfulness in separation from God. Even in the significantly secular Western world, many hopeful people believe that human beings are “basically good.” Not unlike what the religious think of their faith — how spiritually hard it is to live life without it — the lesser commitment of the secular among us, in believing our fellows to be basically good, seems necessary for most people to keep their spirits up in life.
What could this life possibly come to (like the macabre, speculative fancy of an evil God) if human beings — we, the animating centers of our connected universe — were basically bad? Of course, that is not the only alternative. People’s moral value could simply be neutral. Evidence for the human capacity to be drawn to do both what is right and what is wrong, to be attracted to good or to evil, is fairly strong.
The character of the American people, to choose an example, has been much at issue over the past decade. Americans, like the populace of most nations, have been inclined and socialized to think well of themselves. The unique history and motley constituency of the American people, shaped in ideal formulations of independence, fortitude, ambition, pious decency, and energy, tended further to support the self-regard. Between the frontier spirit and the refining process of immigration, both standing on the founding’s ideal philosophy, Americans were, they told themselves, the crème de la crème.
Like all examples of national self-esteem, the self-regard is a story the citizenry exchange with each other to comfort and congratulate themselves. Something closer to the truth, though, may be found in the admixture of dualities we considered last time, in “The Lost Humanism of Political Discourse.”
To begin, yes, the United States was founded on the noblest principles and arguments ever presented to justify creation of a nation. The Framers then sunk that foundation by reaching as debased a political compromise as ever was shaped to pursue an elevated end — the acceptance of institutionalized slavery in nearly half the new country. That matched in its contamination the dehumanizing disregard of the native inhabitants, the expropriation of whose land through murderous warfare and double dealing, in order to ground the new nation, was already in progress.
By the time of the 1790 Census, the U.S population was 3.9 million, 80% of whom were white, mostly of English extraction, with Dutch, Scotch-Irish, German, and French Huguenot in the mix. Most of the remaining 20% was enslaved African, with free Black about 10% of that number. Only 1 in 20 people lived in an urban center.
Later, we find the first of the nation’s two moral highpoints balanced in its own, perfect duality with its greatest low. Part of the nation seceded and fought a war for the expressed purpose of preserving the dominant population’s right to enslave other human beings. The other part of the nation provided members of that same dominant population offering and giving their lives to free those slaves from bondage. Afterwards, just as the American South worked to cover its shame in bogus mythologizing of a principled fight over states’ rights, rather than slavery, some American critics have been ideologically loath to acknowledge the nobility of the Union dead. But the typically multiple and mixed motivations and causes found behind human action don’t dilute the good reasons among them. The record is clear that increasingly, over the course of the war, white Union soldiers saw themselves as fighting not just to preserve the Union but also to oppose the moral offense of slavery. They risked and gave their lives for that cause.
By 1860, after four decades of the first great wave of immigration, the U.S population had grown to nearly 31.5 million, nearly 86% white and 14% of African descent, almost 4 million of whom were enslaved. Of the nearly 5 million immigrants during the period of 1830-60, three fourths were Irish or German. The nation remained overwhelmingly rural.
The second moral high point comes during World War II. No doubt, the record reflects much ignoble behavior before and during. For a long time during the 1930s, while China and Southeast Asia suffered the barbarities of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Nazis initiated their early antisemitic persecution, and then began their international aggression, the vast majority of Americans opposed any involvement overseas to protect vulnerable populations or to help defend other nations. The isolationism that naturally grew from geographic separation from Europe and Asia, the disillusionment of First World War Wilsonian internationalism, the domestic struggles of the Great Depression, along with homegrown ethnonationalism and antisemitism, all worked to diminish any generous, empathetic responsiveness. In fairness, that is a nobility of spirit not much seen among other national populations either.
For much of this period, President Roosevelt demonstrated no greater inclination to intervene than the people he led. He faced challenges enough domestically and he knew the popular sentiment. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, however, he recognized an inevitability. He saw the collision course with Japan, too. Developing events and Roosevelt’s efforts gradually turned Americans’ views, and the Pearl Harbor attack made the final inarguable case. Whatever the practical arguments, the record is clear that the Roosevelt administration made little effort specifically on behalf of Europe’s Jews. The State Department contained elements notably unsympathetic to the Jews (and, soon enough, to Israel) and actually hampered minimal rescue efforts.
This, however, is when it is important to distinguish, as observers too rarely do, between governmental action and popular sentiment in support of it – also the crucial role of strong, morally compelling leadership. Lincoln’s had been critical during the Civil War. Roosevelt’s was, too, during the Second World War, as it had been during the Depression. His failures notwithstanding, Roosevelt made not only the obvious case for self-defense against Japan but also the moral case for an internation community of mutual connection and implication and thus for the defense and rescue of Europe. One can point to all the elements of national self-interest available. One can argue how many American men waited to be drafted, with their social and legal conformity the compelling spur to obedience; one can raise the vulnerability of ordinary citizens, then as now, to patriotic propaganda, and note the natural and common disgruntlement of ordinary soldiers drawn into great bureaucratic and mechanistic movements of whose grand strategies and small decisions they have little cause for understanding. Still, millions of Americans believed themselves to be serving an altruistic cause, risked and gave their lives for people who lived thousands of miles across oceans — over 400 thousand dead, a million total casualties. When, in human history, has a whole population not commissioned as saints borne such a burden or paid such a price not in self-defense on their own land but instead for far-off others?
In the 1940 Census, 89.8% of the U.S. population of over 132 million people was counted as white, which included people of Middle Eastern and North African origin and four decades worth of unparalleled immigration from Europe, until the 1920s, that brought 4 million Italians and 2 million Jews. Of the remainder, 9.8% were Black. “Other” included people of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Hindu descent. The nation was now 56% urban. Seven million African Americans were living under the now 70-year-old post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow regime in the South. About 1.6 million had already left the South as part of the first half of the Great Migration away from the institutionalized oppression and poverty of Southern life. By 1940, Americans had become a majority urban populace.
Myriad national events and policies between these landmark events evince similar complex representations of what might be called an American “character,” and we always find popular sentiments profoundly shaped by government and the influence of leadership, for good or ill.
During the Vietnam War era, many Americans believed the nation to be engaged in a similar altruistic enterprise to that of World War II. When they began to be told otherwise, largely by fellow citizens but also by dissident national leaders, the social rupture it represented and caused was historic. Particular to that era was a challenge to the cultural consensus of what America was and should be as a nation, unlike any that had been made before. By that point, in contrast, a presiding national ethos had taken hold, of cultural greatness, not only regarding America then but America all along — the America of Civil War virtue and the Statue of Liberty and entrepreneurial opportunity and World War II and Radio Free Europe. The challenge asked Americans to include in their self-conceptualizing, also, genocidal wars of conquest against Native America, seventy years of institutionalized slavery, nearly a hundred of Jim Crow oppression. Challenge regarding that last came particularly in the Civil Rights Movement, another one of those dualities that married American nobility, in response, to American sinfulness as cause.
For all the disruption and the civil rights achievements, through the 1960s and 70s until the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, a majority of Americans did not want to hear that challenge and continued, even, to be provoked by it.
Too, the United States never really held itself accountable for any of these wrongs, the Civil War and the early civil rights legislation notwithstanding. National reckonings outside of civil war are something the United States has evaded since soon after the end of that war, when, in another morally corrupt bargain, Reconstruction in the South was terminated with the Compromise of 1877. Evasions of national responsibility continued in modern times, from Watergate, in the Nixon pardon, to Obama’s failure to pursue accountability for the Bush-era, War-on-Terror torture regime, to the same blind eye turned to the CIA’s destruction of the torture tapes. Amid the ever-expanding American self-regard – one of Reagan’s greatest achievements – and even as the rotten seeds of Trumpism were being gathered and sown, the United States regularly sought accountability from other nations for their transgressions while demonstrating none of its own.
Thus, the point is not to argue that the United States as a nation-state is uniquely transgressive; it is to argue that it isn’t unique at all. Its scope and power have enabled great achievements but also great failures, with character flaws to match the virtues. Now, beyond the prideful rejection of any self-correction, represented by the elections of Nixon and Reagan and in the American triumphalism of George W. Bush, more than half of the voting public has been led blindly, ignorantly, like those of so many nations before it, to embrace a malevolent spirit of corruption and cruelty in Trumpism, deluding itself, even, that it is Godly and virtuously patriotic in the process.
Just before the New Year, Heather Cox Richardson posted her annual remembrance of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, about which she fifteen year ago wrote a book. Thirty-four years ago, in the late summer of 1991, I visited the Wounded Knee memorial. I strolled the small, hilltop graveyard of the massacred. It was a transformative experience. It isn’t that I’d ever been insensible to the history of the Native conquest. But having lived most of my life, at that point, in New York City, Native America today was never a presence in my life, as it isn’t for urbanites in general. In New York, the citizens are surrounded by Indian place names, from the Rockaway I grew up in to Manhasset to Montauk to Manhattan, but New Yorkers are as oblivious to those as they are to the Dutch names, from Van Wyck to Spuyten Duyvil. Obviously, nonetheless, something had taken hold in me — the reason, when I had opportunity, that I visited Wounded Knee to begin.
By the mid 2000’s, I had been activated by the insensible offense of Indian sports team names and mascots — how perfectly they demonstrated the way in which a conquering culture becomes inured to the offensive reality of its own dominating patronage and oppression. In March 2008, I published “Aboriginal Sin” in Tikkun. Later that year, Julia and I began our yearlong motorhome travels through America and Indian Country. Among the Tribes with whom we spent an extended amount of time were the San Carlos Apache, Navajo, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Pamunkey of Virginia. The Choctaw and Cherokee are two of the Tribes that had historically been labeled (along with the Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole) the “five civilized Tribes” because of their extraordinary early Nineteenth Century efforts to adapt to the inevitable and assimilate to the encroaching European American culture, including adopting European dress and pursuing higher education in English. American Indian Removal and The Trail of Tears – among Andrew Jackson’s damning achievements – demonstrated how no more successful in self-preservation an accommodation to European-American ascendance was than violent resistance to it.
The Pamunkey Reservation, about an hour due east of Richmond, is the oldest Indian reservation in the United States, in fact, predating the United States, having been established in treaty with the English colonial government in 1646, after nearly 40 years of general mistrust and conflict with the settlers. The Pamunkey were part of the Powhatan Confederacy, which was so central to the Jamestown Colony story. Pocahontas (Matoaka) was a Pamunkey Indian. During our time on the reservation, Julia and I visited the remote gravesite of Powhatan. One day, out on the Pamunkey River, I was excited to be brought by our hosts in sight of the spot where Opechancanough, Powhatan’s successor, is said to have captured John Smith.
Despite its long reservation treaty, recognition of which was later assumed by the State of Virginia, the Pamunkey did not receive Federal recognition as a Tribe, with its benefits, until 2016. Among multiple contributors to that state of affairs was the 34-year reign of the notorious white supremacist Walter Pecker as registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. During that reign, Virginia’s General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which victimized, and set against each other, both American Indians and African Americans.
It was during this period of our visit that I was contacted by an established, libertarian-leaning conservative blogger, much longer at it than I, a psychiatrist from the New York City area. He had been reading me and thought me a good choice for his proposal. The proposal was that we, with our respective readerships, participate in an ongoing series of exploratory debates, by essay, on the topics of the day that divided liberal from conservative. He was very complimentary and personable and thought we two might stand a chance of avoiding the typical vituperative exchanges. We wouldn’t be looking to change each other’s minds, or necessarily those of any of our readers, but with luck and good will, we might come to understand better where and how our ideas divided us. I readily accepted his proposal. We called the series of exchanges The Open Mind.
Shrink and I each wrote introductory essays to our readers on our respective blogs, with links to the other. We had established between us procedures and guidelines, and one of them was to guide our readers back and for the between the two blogs. For as long as the series lasted, about nine months, Shrink and I maintained friendly, agreeable, and cooperative relations behind the scenes. He sometimes read my nonpolitical, creative work and was responsive and complimentary. We got along.
Such was not to be the case between me and Shrink’s readers, who never were capable of arguing ideas with me rather than the representative stereotypical liberal of their minds. Often intelligent, educated, and well read, they were also eccentric in their understanding and extreme in their passions. Though the series struggled ahead for that nine-month period, the experiment blew up at the start and never truly recovered from the damage. What led to the explosion?
In my introductory essay, I made all kind of prefatory remarks I thought appropriate, as did Shrink in his introduction, and I drew to a close by noting that bitter ideological divisions and argument, even among newly self-created democrats and republicans, had been a feature of American democracy from the start. Very near the end, I stated,
Of course, they agreed about much more: democracy, the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, the freedom to pursue our individual destinies, and, you know, it is time to remember and never forget – that all this land should be taken, through innumerable wars and countless deceits and abuses, from the people who first lived on it.
I was traveling on a year-long sabbatical project to report on contemporary Native American life. That was the originating purpose of my blog, which stated its mission in its heading. The bolded clause seemed the very least I could obligatorily offer under the circumstances in recognition of my current professional commitments. It also has the virtue of being true.
It was as if I were Guy Fawkes and I had actually managed to ignite the gunpowder under the English Parliament. That one clause ignited our own parliament into flames from the start.
I share below just the smallest sampling, in extracts, of the responses I provoked. I’ll say in preface that the comments include many gross misrepresentations, e.g. nothing I wrote that these readers read ever advocated reparations or that any contemporary American should feel “guilt.” But my purpose here is not to argue particular points and ideas but rather to show the character of the response I provoked. At the heart of it — which has always been so with unsympathetic people when I have argued for a national consciousness of historic responsibility — lies a still presiding contempt for what is perceived as an inferior culture and a blind and steadfast resistance to distinguishing different meanings of the word “responsibility,” here between a commitment in care and culpability and guilt.
Right, white man, you're tainted with original sin and don't forget it! Though I wouldn't think this kind of preemptive thrust is necessarily out of the bounds of civility or ad-hominem in itself I wouldn't want it to become acceptable either. Too many liberals tend to use this crude gambit in their dialogue and for some it appears to be their one and only trick. I'm assuming that we all know enough history to not have to be reminded of those basic facts.
The so-called native peoples of the Americas came here from Asia. We don't know if they supplanted a group of people that preceded them. Some evidence of that is beginning to show up. It is also obvious that various native Americans in South America regularly conquered and displaced other tribes. When we delve deeply into history it becomes clear that almost all so-called native groups in various places all came from somewhere else and supplanted the people that preceded them. The demise of the native Americans is just the most recent and well documented example.
The American Indian was ALL about tribalism. Tribalism, by definition, devalues the 'other'. As example; The Navajo name for their tribe translates into English as simply "The People", implicit to that term is the corollary, that 'others' are NOT 'people' and therefore somewhat less than fully human. / Native Americans had no concept of mercy and compassion. Those concepts were entirely foreign to their culture. The proverbial 'law of the jungle' was fully operative in their cultures. They regularly conquered each other and when they did, they killed all the men; 13 and up, enslaved the women and strictly as a survival tactic, so as to strengthen the tribes' numbers, 'adopted' the youngest children. And the adopted children did not stay with the enslaved women. / As for 'stealing the land' from native americans...stealing was the native American's standard 'modus operandi'. You 'couldn't do the right thing' and buy the land from the Indians in an honest trade for they had no concept of private ownership, nor of tribal ownership beyond that of 'might makes right'.
I do not accept any of these Original Sins. I do not accept that any Original Sin falls on the descendants of earlier generations of Americans. I do not accept that any other human being can mark another set of human beings with an Original Sin. I am an atheist, but even so, would say that only God or a God can attribute an Original Sin to other human beings.
Reading through Adler's Tikkun article I feel like I'm being fed a huge dose of guilt. Like getting hit in the face with a cream pie. I think I can sniff out a con game as well as the next person and I'm getting a strong smell of the long con here. We're supposed to feel guilty, yes, for things we had no responsibility for which happened long before we were born. But we can't stop there, we have to do more to acknowledge our guilt and be redeemed: we have to give money. Reparations.
Jay's announcement reads at times more like an opening salvo -- it is somewhat laced with little (and not so little) Marxist revisionist post-modern neutron bombs. My superficial reading of his sight indicates that he appears thoughtful and sensitive, but very entrenched in Marxist labor/use theory and liberation theology.
To put it bluntly, if the American Indian cultures themselves had evolved any sort of functional civic culture, the Europeans could never have gained a foothold.
It is as if Jay tried to throw a monkey wrench into the discussion by raising a fantasy issue which we have to deal with, but it is very difficult to do that because the issue itself is nothing but a fantom, a metaphysical attitude that has nothing to do with contemporary problems. Jay isn't proposing the solution to any existing problem but asking for agreement on a sort of theological proposition which has no real meaning for people who don't already accept the premise.
Talk? Fine with me and usually interesting. Compulsion on the other hand does not apply to me as long as I can still breathe and reload. I reiterate for the limited, I do NOT seek to overthrow anything or anybody, neither do I seek trouble with any man. But neither does my knee bend, not to ideology or man.
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The reading of narratives is a recursive process in which readers, regularly encountering new developments and insights, continuously revise their understanding of the unfolding story they read. Nothing can so revise a narrative like its ending, which can upend everything we think we understood from the start. A national narrative, extending many generations, can seem a story that never ends, or a story with many endings, constantly revising itself into a new sense of an ending. Those who come long after may have some better sense of a definitive end to a whole nation’s story.
If we ended the American story in 2008, with Barack Obama on election eve — the crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park staring up at the newly elected president on the stage, tears of sweet deliverance from centuries of release sweeping over it, we would tell a story of America triumphant — a people hopefully and democratically victorious over the hateful debilities of human nature. Along a shorter-term, we might see the humanistic social welfare vision of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society rescued from the reactionary, four-decade effort to undo those accomplishments and make America grim again.
If, however, we end the story with Trump fully ascendant, on January 20, 2025, how different, then, the tale. Then we see that four-decade campaign of reaction — and no long arc of justice, in any dream of a moral universe – on the verge of total victory. All the worst of America and its people, seeded into the garden from the start, combatted from then on, having choked out at last the health from the planter’s hand and run riot.
Is there still another ending, and how long, with how much of good lost to write it?
Or, to adapt Stevie Smith,
Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning
AJA
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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
I need to give this a much fuller read because it deserves that. Will be back later today to catch up properly--been distracted by possible fire evacuation as we are a mile from the Brentwood fire. So I've not forgotten you and the depth of your essays.
Since Denmark is a founding member of NATO, will Article 5 kick in? (The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.) I refer to the forceful annexation of Greenland. Regarding attacking a fellow NATO member, it looks like we need a new article. I also wonder if a state's governor can order its National Guard to protect its citizens from deportation by the US Army. Where is sanity in this Bizarro world?