Pilgrims & Trekkers

Stealing from the Iroquois

2008-10-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

Re: The place of indigenous peoples in New World history

The U.S. has forgotten the tight connection between its “founding fathers” and the Iroquois—the native foundation on which its nationality was erected. The Boston “tea party” of 1773 was not the one-shot, Halloween-style dress-up in Mohawk costume, that it is understood to be today. As the 1770s began, rebellious settlers drew more and more on their New World experience for identity and inspiration. In fact, an Iroquois vogue, in idea and style, swept the Anglo colonies before their break with Europe. Never mind that the relationship with the natives was tortured—that the patriots failed to understand the natives’ spiritual world and held the indigenous lifestyle in contempt. When they needed an identity symbol to pit themselves as “Americans” against a European establishment, they were quick to adopt the scrappy figure of the very people they themselves had been bullying since the day of arrival.

An engraving published a dozen years before the outbreak of fighting depicts the Anglo colonist as an American native, struggling under the weight of taxes that were imposed by Britain to pay for the settlers’ defense from the French and the natives being impersonated here. In 1766, after the Stamp Act was repealed, patriot Paul Revere designed an obelisk for the rebels and their cause that radiates borrowed native symbolism. Erected in Boston and internally lighted by hundreds of lanterns, it depicted the course of affairs in three oiled-paper panels, like a modern newspaper cartoon:

A native (the colonist) first lies helpless under a pine tree (the Iroquois national symbol) as two British villains approach, one carrying a chain, the other appearing as a devilish flying creature that carries the Stamp Act in its claw. In the second panel, a Liberty goddess (a creature of the Enlightenment) blows a trumpet and the villains are in retreat, driven by a cloudburst. In the third, an eagle feeds its young atop a “Liberty tree. ” Later, this clone of the Iroquois “Eagle That Sees Far” (perched symbolically atop the Iroquois “Tree of Peace” and holding five arrows for the five nations of the League) would become the rebels’ eagle grasping 13 arrows: the first national symbol.

The U.S. instruments of government owe the Iroquois a debt too. Benjamin Franklin, from his perch at the edge of the frontier, was not only an instigator of the Iroquois vogue but the main importer of Iroquois principles. He is remembered a little for his Albany Plan for union, acknowledged as vaguely Iroquois-influenced but ultimately, in the wisdom of the founders, rejected in favor the (real) Constitution. There is no popular sense at all today of the full Indian-talking Franklin, who wore the Covenant Chain of treaties with the Iroquois as an amulet around his neck, or of the climate in which he could do so.

In full, this Philadelphian was maybe the last best hope for the kind of “brotherly love” relationship between peoples that William Penn had stitched together here at the start, immediately unraveled by the next generation. Had the brotherhood model succeeded (where natives are concerned), Franklin’s role would compose an inspiring chapter in the resulting folk myth, rememberable today under some such heading as “Ben Franklin and the Indians.”

It would start with Franklin carrying his Iroquois-inspired platform to the big Albany, N.Y., congress in 1754, winning delegates’ approval there for a uniform trade and treaty policy and regulation of the traders. In the plan, under his urging, the colonies would keep “independence of each other, and separate interests, tho' among a people united by common manners, language and, I may say, religion. . . ." In other words, they would follow the Iroquois arrangement—what today is known as “federalism,” a style of limited government unknown in Europe to that time, invented by native Americans to accommodate the characteristically native insistence on autonomy.

Borrowed from the Iroquois also:
~Decision by consensus: One colony could veto any action.
~A “Grand Council” that was unicameral, like its Iroquois model and unlike the two-house British Parliament.
~A Grand Council that, like the native “Great Council,” elected a “speaker,” the Iroquois term—retained today in the “speaker” of the U.S. “House of Representatives.”

Possibly Iroquois-influenced, too, was the uneven distribution of representatives to the Colonial Grand Council and their number, 48 (Iroquois, 50).

Too visionary, the Albany Plan flopped because legislators at home thought it limiting and the British king thought it liberating. After 20 more years, several wars all-round and assorted efforts by Britain to shorten the leash, colonists were ready to try for union again. And Franklin, presenting their case overseas, was still walking and talking Iroquois-style, using his Covenant Chain necklace as a visual aid to explain colonists’ intentions. His characteristic admonition, “Keep bright the chain,” was memorialized on an engraved silver cream beaker given him in London by friends.

Back from England in 1775, Franklin reheated the Albany Plan in his draft for “a firm league of friendship,” and its Iroquois ideas were largely incorporated in the colonies’ first “Articles of Confederation.” Among those that survived to grace the U.S. instruments still in use today was a provision for amendments, like the Iroquois League’s provision for new measures that could be “added to the rafters” of the symbolic longhouse meeting place. Federal to a fault, like the Iroquois’ own instrument, the first Articles of the colonial tribes lacked a practical authority to tax—a feature that might delight today’s U.S. conservatives had it been enacted.

{Adapted from Looking for the Bahana, © 2008}

The never-ending journey

2008-10-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

Re: The U.S.' real place in New World history

Woman has served the traveling European male from the start of his overseas adventures, if not as the prize in herself, then as a guide to the booty. What’s known as “exploration” had begun, for Greeks and Vikings alike, with raids for exotic women and must-have loot. At storytime later around the fire, rape and pillage took on a rosy glow: The Hesperides were said to have shown Hercules to their father’s Golden Apples in the West; Medea supposedly helped Jason abscond with her father’s gold, then went with him. And what was a good story when Mediterranean meant “middle of the world” had lost none of its appeal 2,000 years later, when our European hero jumped the Atlantic. Already, in Mexico, Malinche had replicated Medea’s career, from the betrayal of her people for Hernan Cortés to her final personal isolation. For all its claim to originality of vision, the U.S., too, had taken the traditional route, with Pocahontas serving as an Anglo Medea for the Separatists’ on their arrival in Massachusetts.

As the Anglo settlers spread westward from the Appalachian Mountains, the old plotline went with them, dusted off around the campfire in renditions of “Oh Shenandoah.” Here, in the role of Jason’s Midas and Hercules’ Atlas, the king on the far shore is the rebelling patriots’ sole Iroquois friend, the Oneida leader Oskanondonha, who fed George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge and was then dispossessed. As Shenandoah (his anglicized name) in the song, he loses his daughter to a generic white trader—the singer, whose progress carried her from the Missouri River frontier to the ocean trade, with verses added, until a ditty about dispossession became a muddled anthem of separation and yearning, mostly about the dispossessor.

As that, continuing an American parallel with white South Africa, “Oh Shenandoah” is much like the Afrikaner anthem “Sarie Marais,” which expresses the longing of a Boer soldier for his girlfriend “down there in the corn by the green thorn tree” in the Afrikaner’s Ohio over the Vaal River. Enlarging and complicating this connection, the tune and lyrics of “Sarie Marais” are thought to have been adapted from a ditty sung during the U.S. Civil War by Union soldiers, “Ellie Rhee (Carry Me Back to Tennessee),” about the sorrows of a runaway black slave. (“Oh why did I from day to day / Keep wishing to be free; / And from my massa run away, / And leave my Ellie Rhee.”) First a song of separation, then of identity, today it is both for the tens of thousands of white South Africans who fled black majority rule to Britain or more successful settler enterprises such as Australia, Canada and the U.S. (Behind them, Sarie’s beloved “old Transvaal” has been carved up into three provinces with native African names.)

Recently, a native woman from the same “Indian maiden” typecast as Pocahontas has been given the lead position in a renewed impulse by image-makers to present the European invasion of North America as a response to invitation. The U.S. Treasury Department—the nation’s licensed icon-maker—in 2000 issued a one-dollar coin commemorating Sacagawea (Sacajawea), a Shoshoni teenager whom Lewis and Clark recruited in 1805 to help them reach the West Coast. It failed, like the earlier Susan B. Anthony dollar.

Yet as a symbol, Sacagawea has continued to flourish, with more images to her erected in the U.S., it is thought, than to any other women except the Virgin Mary. Other image-makers—schools, writers, women’s advocates, merchandisers—have recognized in this symbol a useful add-on to the national story, a mind-melt of Pocahontas at the outset of it with Sweet Betsy from Pike on its final leg. (The Mint: “With her infant son bound to her back, she single-handedly rescued Captain Clark's journals from the Missouri whitewater . . .”).

What this symbolic Sacagawea does is to provide a Native American component for the Lewis-and-Clark space shoot, which has become in the current telling a fully multiracial project on the modern model—a sort of ark of U.S. society, one that includes also a non-speaker of English (her “husband,” the French guide Toussaint Charbonneau) and the token black—Clark’s slave York—who, it is now being emphasized, was treated as an equal on the trip and really had a great time.

But back up and Sacagawea becomes indistinguishable from other swarthy faces in the Anglo picture album. Like the natives ahead of the train in “American Progress,” a popular late-1800s painting, she points the Anglo juggernaut westward, finding fresh horses (locomotion) for Lewis and Clark so their probe does not stall in the Rockies. From farther away, like Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and the symbolic native on Massachusetts’ original flag, she seems to say, “Come over and help us.” From still farther back—and south—she has a career track so much like the Mexican Malinche’s that it could have been borrowed, but the similarities are factual:

Malinche gave Cortés entrée to Aztec gold through her inside knowledge of Aztec culture and her ability to translate from the Aztec language into a Maya dialect understood by a Spaniard who had been taken captive. Likewise, Sacagawea gave two U.S. military men, who are presented today as a scientic team, access to North America’s “natural resources” through her sanctioning presence and her ability to translate from Shoshoni into Hidatsa for Charbonneau, who translated into French for another Frenchman, who told it in English to the hapless Lewis and Clark, who were mono-lingual like most Anglo-Americans today.

At least, that is her achievement if, as the Sacagawea myth insists, U.S. progress really hung on getting those Shoshoni horses. Actually, says debunking educator Wanda Pillow, the real Sacagawea was much less valuable to the expedition than her myth would suggest—mentioned fewer than 70 times in two years of journals, usually in connection with housekeeping chores in her real capacity as Charbonneau’s slave, graced with the odd gallant compliment for the expedition’s only female member and only mother, 15 years old. Less valuable to Lewis and Clark, certainly, than Malinche to Cortés, she remained unimportant to their story until about 1900.

Then, just in time for Lewis and Clark’s centennial celebration, she was discovered. Clark’s real kindness of adopting Sacagawea’s two half-breed children on her death in 1812, plus the myth-making opportunity she presented, enabled her to be popularized as a native maid who, like Pocahontas, had wisely welcomed the Anglo nation builders in. (There were even rumors, 100 years late, of a romance with Clark.) This white man’s Sacagawea provided a grace note at the completion of the “Manifest Destiny” Thomas Jefferson had envisioned in sending his Corps of Discovery off.

Taking nothing from Sacagawea and her sisters, that destiny today appears still unsatisfied. The white man’s restless journeying continues, timeless because it is myth-driven. The “final frontier” of his history-making trek is still the original one: “space” itself, now defined as the sky. The word trek, borrowed by television producers from Afrikaans, originally implied escape as much as adventure, starting out suffused with the white Afrikaners’ tribal sense of apart-ness and their history of jumping boundaries set by others. Sarie Marais’ grandparents would have reached the Transvaal during the Afrikaners’ “Great Trek” to outdistance the empire-building British—very like the “Pilgrims” in flight to America and the U.S.’ on-moving “pioneers.”

This kind of “trek,” seen from one angle, puts the settler groups on both continents in a refugee class with the natives who, in turn, were obliged to flee from them. But the modern myth of “space exploration,” as scripted by the U.S. nation, follows the more heroic classic European model, in a direct line from the Argonauts and Hercules through the myth of Lewis and Clark into the present. The “Apollo Program” that opened the modern phase took its name from a Greek sun god at the dawn of European travel, when Spain, jumping-off place for Colón, was the western horizon (“Hesperia”). The Corps of Discovery morphed into an Astronaut Corps, the continuing mission: to “conquer” space for the U.S. specifically, although the moon landing was presented as a step for “mankind.” Just as if the actual history of it had not begun strictly as a white man’s enterprise, “space exploration” is presented today—and understood in pop culture—as a broadly human, even humanizing, effort.

The original Star Trek television series carefully included an African-American (woman), an Asian-American, a Russian and a half-“Vulcan” character who arguably, as the only crew member with genes native to “space,” is the expedition’s “Indian.” Placed second in command, the noble Spock provides diplomatic and psychological entrée to a strange new world (like the historians’ New World) where everybody, like the Scots-Irish captain, is an alien equally, though some are more alien than others. In a nod, doubtless unconscious, to Puritan Massachusett and its settler view of natives as devils, Spock’s pointed ears and eyebrows were airbrushed out in early promotions out of fear these vaguely Satan-like features would alienate potential viewers. Subsequent Star Trek incarnations have granted something like humanity to a range of reptilian and insect-like beings who give evidence of having something like “civilization.” (Watch out, aliens!)

And where the TV series has gone, goes the nation. The official myth-making effort today reflects current social mapping. Crew assignments for the “space program” give due deference to “minorities” who are more numerous and therefore more challenging currently than the defeated natives (whose position in the U.S. remains up in the air). If NASA is to be believed, after planting the U.S. flag on the moon in 1969, its greatest coup has been to break social barriers by launching the first woman and the first black, the advancement of science being secondary. From the NASA website (2003):

“In the early 1980s as the Space Shuttle began operations, NASA was able to break a number of scientific and technical barriers. The greatest barriers broken were the gender and racial barriers of its Astronaut Corps. The flights of the first American woman, Sally Ride, and the first African American, Guion Bluford, into space were an inspiration to millions.”

Natives having lost lead position, only in 2002 was native America also brought aboard this glory train. A fractionally-Chickasaw Oklahoman named John Herrington became the most widely traveled of a fractionalized race when he “walked in space” (afterward returning to a public relations tour). Appropriately, he was a specialist in takeoff and landing.

{Adapted from Looking for the Bahana, © 2008}

Mystery of the two U.S.A.s

2008-10-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

Re: Parallels between the U.S.' & South Africa's histories

Until 1994, the histories of South Africa and the United States, both settler nations, ran roughly parallel. Leaving World War II a respected ally of Western allies, the then-Union of South Africa presented itself to the modern world as an America for the world’s southern half. Like the U.S., the Union’s full name abbreviated to “U.S.A.” And this U.S.A. shared key features with the other, or so schoolchildren were being taught in the 1950s:

~Both were modern industrial nations created by white people on overseas terrain.
~Both had a representative form of government on the European model and a culture built on Christian values and traditions.
~In religion, America’s “Pilgrims” and South Africa’s voortrekkers both were Calvinist Protestants with a connection to Holland, and in both locations they had made a covenant with God near the start of their experience.
~In both places, pioneers set out in ox wagons to find a promised land—the Great Trek corresponding to America’s Westward Expansion.
~Both peoples showed their mettle in facing a larger native population who fought them before being subdued and Christianized.
~Both then had the English in the role of bully, and both had fought two wars of independence against them—the Afrikaners (Boers), for better or worse, losing only the rematch.

Not needing to be taught in school were these further similarities:
~Both settler peoples viewed these indigenous as culturally and intellectually—and genetically—inferior, and both tried to destroy or isolate native culture.
~Both had a contemptuous lexicon for the locals—kaffir (“infidel”) in Africa roughly equivalent to nigger in the U.S., where newly enfranchised blacks had replaced the defeated natives as bogeyman.
~In both, the treacheries of the native peoples and key battles with them were basic folk history. For Custer’s Last Stand, South Africa had the Treachery of Dingaan—for the Massacre at Wounded Knee the Battle of Blood River.
~Both romanticized indigenous fighters once they were defeated or dead: Shaka and Sitting Bull, the Zulu impi (regiment) and the Plains horseman, the Zulu warrior and the Sioux.
~For both, the national story, otherwise, was the story of a settler folk and a settler culture.
~Both had a national folk shrine: In America, Mt. Rushmore (“Shrine of Democracy”), carved from sacred Sioux land. In South Africa, the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria, commemorating the triumph of the self-styled “Afrikaner” over black African peoples.

These histories have diverged since 1994, when South Africa’s native peoples—a vast majority—won full rights and came to power. In the U.S., after a challenge mounted in the 1970s by militants and intellectuals, indigenous peoples have turned increasingly to the nation’s courts for relief, with some success in gaining access to traditional land and respect for traditional ways. They remain stuck, though, in a settler mythology that obscures and misrepresents their real place in an American history that continues much as it began.

'Let freedom ring': Story of the U.S. Liberty Bell

2008-10-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

Re: Whether any nation has a cosmic purpose &, if so, what it might be

Placards carried by demonstrating members of the Procrastinators’ Society of America outside the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, London, 1976: “We got a lemon” and “What about the warranty?”

Parallel to the U.S. nation’s history-long effort to claim the patent and world distribution rights on liberty, one of the nation’s most enduring symbols for that ideal, the “Liberty Bell,” has been tolling a recitation that, like the bell itself, remains thuddingly inaudible—is, in fact, deafening in its silence. Why? Maybe because, as tokens and omens go, the flawed bell produces overtones that are hard to hear. The record is almost comical:

In 1751, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of founder William Penn’s charter, the bell is ordered from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in east London, Britain’s oldest manufacturing company (still in business today and able to supply a droll subtext for ensuing events).

In 1753, the bell is duly hung in the Pennsylvania statehouse, known as “Independence Hall.” Its inscription—from the Old Testament—reads:

“PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS
THEREOF. LEV. XXV, v. x.,” etc.

On its first ringing, the bell cracks. Three years later, Pennsylvania’s native inhabitants, the Lenape, attack in a vain attempt to regain the land stolen from them in the so-called Walking Purchase Treaty of 1737.

Two Philadelphians (“two ‘ingenious’ workmen,” sniffs the Whitechapel website) volunteer to fix it. Breaking up the metal, they decide it’s too brittle and add copper to the alloy. (“They did not appreciate that bell metal is brittle, and relies on this to a great extent for its freedom of tone.”) The recasting cracks too. They go back to the original formula and recast it a second time, further improved with their autographs. Still unhappy with the result, Pennsylvania hangs the bell in the statehouse steeple and dickers with Whitechapel for a third model, but the Revolutionary War intervenes.

Emerging after the war from under the floor of the Old Zion Reformed Church in today’s Allentown, the bell is returned to Liberty Hall. It cracks again, starting probably with a hairline crack during its use on the death of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1835. Rung again on George Washington’s birthday, 1846, (by “eager boys,” harrumphs Whitechapel), it opens a crack running to its crown, rendering it unusable as an actual bell. This is the Liberty Bell as we know it today.

(“. . . The fact remains,” Whitechapel patiently explains, “that the principal crack is in line with the swing of the clapper and it is an established fact that many bells have been cracked by the improper operation of the clapper in this way. Good bell metal is extremely brittle. . . . If a bell is struck and not allowed to ring freely, because either the clapper or some part of the frame or fittings are in contact with the bell, then a crack can very easily develop.”) Whitechapel’s other noted bell, London’s Big Ben, is cracked also.

Nevertheless, in the 1880s, this Liberty Bell that will not ring starts a new career representing “America,” through the bully years of Manifest Destiny and beyond, at fairs and expositions across the country. For Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, Whitechapel is asked to cast 15 full-size replicas of the Liberty Bell, 2,400 one-fifth size replicas, 200 one-ninth size replicas—and a six-ton Bicentennial Bell (uncracked to date) that bears this revised inscription:

“FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FROM THE PEOPLE OF
BRITAIN
4 JULY 1976
LET FREEDOM RING”

In 2001, the hapless, ringless Liberty Bell is struck several times with a hammer by a Nebraskan shouting, “God lives!” Repaired again, it is moved in 2003 to new quarters at the Liberty Bell Center, across the street from Independence Hall—and, as later develops, next door to former president Washington’s African slave quarters. There, minus at least 25 pounds of metal knocked off by souvenir-hunting tourists, it remains at this writing.

{From Looking for the Bahana, © 2008}

'The continent allotted by Providence'

2008-10-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

Re: Whether any nation has a cosmic purpose &, if so, what it may be

By the 1830s, the booming success of European-style civilization in North America had become an inspiration to white people everywhere, on religious, cultural and even scientific grounds. A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, endeared himself to U.S. Americans forever by seeming to endorse their swelling estimation of themselves after a tour in 1831. He had come, he said bemusedly, to see the future—“the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress.” His book, the work of a 25-year-old aristocrat, can be wildly inconsistent in argument, but it never wavers on three points: that the U.S. is carrying the ball for European social organization and that the U.S. success not only demonstrates the superiority of white people but predicts the extinction of nonwhite societies.

Far from making him a prophet, his racial views were entirely conventional, his predictions of doomsday for dark races exactly what Europeans were banking on. White people, says Tocqueville—grouping the U.S. with Europe’s colonizing efforts in Africa—are “superior in intelligence, in power and in enjoyment” around the world, while native Americans and Africans “occupy an inferior rank in the country they inhabit.” Civilization itself, he argues, is a European invention, and other races have little taste for it and even less ability. America’s natives, he confides, think they are too dignified to work. “It may therefore be said, in a general way, that savages go forth in arms to seek knowledge, but do not receive it when it comes to them.” The “success” of the Cherokee, he says in self-contradiction, proves only that they are “capable of civilization,” not “that they will succeed in it.”

The American natives’ misfortune: to be introduced in a “semi-barbarian” state to “a civilized people, who are also ( it must be owned ) the most grasping nation on the globe. . .” so that they are educated and oppressed at the same time. The U.S. and its member states, in fact, are “alike deficient in good faith” in dealing with them, though the U.S. deals with “less cupidity and violence.” But these behaviors, apparently, are not actual character faults: Several sentences later, the U.S. is winning a gold medal in the New World ethics elimination:

“The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they succeed even in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.”

Leaving aside the morality of exterminating another race and depriving it of rights by any means as a national “purpose,” the claim is still a howling distortion of the historical record, but only from today’s vantage point (and only if noticed). What enabled Tocqueville to get away with absolving the U.S. of responsibility was his confidence—a widely shared idea and growing at the time—that the native die-off had simply followed the course of nature. In much the same way as arriving “Pilgrims” had taken the disease-emptied Atlantic Coast for granted as a “Providence” of their deity, Tocqueville could look on the wars of dispossession—the destruction of native society by alcohol and of the native belief system by Christianity—as the working out of natural processes by which a superior European civilization replaced an inferior native barbarity.

This assumption, which Thomas Jefferson shared—as far as possible from Jefferson’s rash words in the Declaration of Independence but taken to be self-evident too—was what U.S. Americans, whether they credited God or mysterious forces, would call “Manifest Destiny.” So popular already was the concept at home, when magazine editor John L. O’Sullivan, a Jacksonian, found a name for it in an 1845 editorial, that the term quickly took on a life of its own (obscuring its originator—his name dug up only in 1927 by a curious historian). O’Sullivan’s common-stock harangue: England and France had tried to prevent the U.S. from annexing Texas, thereby . . .

“. . . hampering our power, limiting our greatness, and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Ridiculing criticisms that annexation would be “unrighteous,” he called on “common sense” to “acquiesce with decent grace” to the “inevitable fulfillment of the general law which is rolling our population westward. . . .” The swallowing of Texas, let’s face it, was a done deal.

“The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on [California’s] borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses.”

And all this, marveled O’Sullivan, without the actual involvement of the U.S. government or its people—“in the natural flow of events.”

In Britain, the biologist and early sociologist Herbert Spencer, a rival of Charles Darwin’s, was simultaneously putting to paper a scientific doctrine to dignify this kind of event flow: He called it “survival of the fittest.” Though Darwin copped credit for the evolutionary hypothesis by identifying natural selection as its mechanism, Spencer, who originated the term, went on to separate fame as the exponent of “Social Darwinism.” With his references to “the Aryan race” and his expectation that “the mixture of the allied varieties” would produce “a more powerful type of man than has hitherto existed,” he anticipates Adolf Hitler and the Nazis of Germany, who failed the survival test, after all (or have to date). But Spencer was talking about the U.S. “I think,” he said, . . .

“whatever difficulties they may have to surmount, and whatever tribulations they may have to pass through, the Americans may reasonably look forward to a time when they will have produced a civilization grander than any the world has known."

Spencer, like Tocqueville, was especially popular in the U.S. with “America”-boosters such as William G. Sumner, Simon N. Patten and Josiah Strong. The Reverend Strong, a Congregationalist minister from Ohio, supercharged Spencer’s ideas with the American additives of patriotism and a smug Christianity. “It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write,” wrote Strong, that “a pure, spiritual Christianity” and “civil liberty” were humanity’s greatest needs.

“It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon, as the great representative of these two ideas, the depositary of these two greatest blessings, sustains peculiar relations to the world’s future, is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper.”

Applauding the population growth of “this mighty Anglo-Saxon race,” he notes especially that the Anglo population in America, in the 200 years since “the reign of Charles II,” has increased by 250 times. This population swelling is the same prodigy that appears in an Iroquois prophecy of a white serpent that, once taken in and nourished, crowds out its host. In the Iroquois account, the relationship ends in brotherhood after calamity. But in the vision of Strong, it ends in Anglo-Saxon domination of the entire world. The U.S. experience is God’s way of providing the “training” necessary for Anglos to win “the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled” (his emphasis)

Long before “the thousand millions” of other races get there, Strong predicts in unconscious irony, Anglos will sweep down to engulf Mexico, Central and South America and the islands. Similarly, the whites of South Africa will occupy the whole Dark Continent. Even now, the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand are “disappearing” before “the all-conquering Anglo-Saxons.” Why, already, English-speakers occupy a third of the globe’s surface. (The same fraction was still a point of pride to English-speaking white South Africans in the 1950s as native independence movements shook the ground.) Exclaims Strong: “It seems as if these inferior tribes were only precursors of a superior race, voices in the wilderness crying: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord!’"

What gives the Anglo his edge, says the Rev. Strong, is “his money-making power” and his “instinct or genius for colonizing.” The U.S. already is outpacing Britain “in the race after wealth”; while the Anglo generally “excels all others in pushing his way into new countries,” Americans are those in whom “this inherited tendency” is strongest,” a tendency “further developed” by the “westward sweep of successive generations across the continent.”

If the U.S. plays its cards right “during the next ten or fifteen years,” he hints (promoting a posture of U.S. belligerence toward European rivals), “Christians” here have it fully in their power “to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years.” It could have been television evangelist Pat Robertson talking about U.S. support for Israel.

The scrappy Scots-Irish

2008-10-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

Re: History as the product of peoples

In 1829, the man celebrated today as the U.S. nation’s first “populist” president and the father of modern man-in-the-street democracy swept to power. What propelled him—in today’s telling—was the licking he gave “the bloody British” at the Battle of New Orleans, memorialized in Johnny Horton’s 1959 smash rockabilly hit:

"Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise
If we didn't fire our muskets
'til we looked 'em in the eye
We held our fire 'til we see'd their faces well.
Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave 'em, well—”

At least as important, at the time, were his military victories over natives on the nation’s southern frontiers. The Upper Creeks and Florida Seminoles, Andrew Jackson’s career-boosters, were the product of 100 years of Anglo contact in which the South’s excess population—many of them onetime indentured servants, runaway slaves and other under-classes—formed the leading edge. The dominant ethnic strain of this white rabble: Scots-Irish. “Creek” was a settler name for the assortment of peoples, mostly Muskhogean-speaking, whom they had pushed to western Georgia and Alabama from as far away as the Carolina coast; the Seminoles were wholly the southern settlers’ perverse creation, a mixed society of native refugees and black runaways who had found togetherness in the Florida swamps.

Overlooked, until recently, in this continuing tendency to idealize land grab as “democracy” and to cast Britain and other European nations as the obstacle to U.S. nation building is the reality that Andrew Jackson also was the nation’s first success story for the poor-white Scots-Irish of the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee. Ol’ Hickory’s military exploits—he was the first real commander-in-chief after Washington—enabled his own ethnic stock to populate a new U.S. West (in due time, the “New West”) with their kind and culture. His financial and political success (poor boy becomes rich and powerful) showed what they could achieve through grit, combativeness and little or no education: a country. Modern Scots-Irish bard James Webb, senator from Virginia, argues persuasively that the characteristic “American” go-get-’em spirit and fierce patriotism originally were ethnic traits picked up from this tribe.

Today 30-million strong—answering proudly to the once derisive “Redneck” handle—they have emerged from invisibility to being maybe the real power behind conservative political successes from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Country music (a fusion from folk, gospel and blues), its spirit and most of its headliners, from the Carter Family to Jerry Lee Lewis to Toby Keith, are Redneck issue. Dead-set against gun control, the Scots-Irish have been generously endowed with war presidents and scrappers (historian Webb himself is a former U.S. Navy secretary), besides Jackson generating Benjamin Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Reagan, Bill Clinton, the two presidents Bush, Sen. John McCain—George F. Patton, Sgt. Alvin York, Audie Murphy, Stonewall Jackson, almost the whole Confederate side in the U.S. Civil War, Jack Dempsey and John Wayne (who had the swagger down pat). And they are the power and the glory (Pat Robertson and Jerry Lee’s cousin Jimmy Swaggart) of the Christian Right as well.

Jackson’s career, then, may not have been a triumph so much for “participatory democracy” as for clan traditions, and Jackson himself not so much the modern nation-builder as a founding tribal chieftain along the lines of William Wallace the Scot. Arguing in that direction is the song Horton brought to mainstream popularity—more than a century after Ol’ Hickory’s death—with its tribal spirit fully intact. Horton got the song from a Scots-Irish schoolteacher named James Corbett Morris, who lived on the family farm in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains and wrote “The Battle of New Orleans” as part of a history lesson for his students. (He also wrote “Tennessee Stud” for Eddy Arnold.) The Morris song and the Jackson presidential campaign song of 1828 sound like separate cuts off the same concept album. Both celebrate Ol’ Hickory in a contest of Us versus Them, and the original identifies the “we” who “opened up with squirrel guns” as “the hunters of Kentucky.” From there to country songwriter Keith’s “angry American” is an equally short distance:

“Justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed
With the U.S. of A.
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American way.”
—“Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American),” 2002