CRIMES OF THE UNITED STATES?

Like most Canadians, I am fascinated and bemused by the colossus that looms just across Lake Ontario from me. The United States of America, the most powerful and dynamic nation in the history of Planet Earth, is about sixty kilometres southeast of where I sit in The World's Most Multicultural City.

The vast majority of Americans think of the United States as a great, good nation, under God, and full of generous impulses and kindness.

There is much, much truth in this.

Several decades ago a Canadian radio and television personality, Gordon Sinclair (1900-1987), raised his voice with memorable elegance to praise the United States. In a stirring polemic he lauded the American tendency to send aid to shattered countries and to defend civilization wherever and whenever needed.

Sinclair was, of course, for the most part entirely correct. For the most part, the United States is and has been for a long time a hyperambitious, astonishingly progressive First World nation, aiding its neighbours generously in earthquakes, famines and wars.

However . . . Perhaps I am a "nattering nabob of negativism," but I intend today to talk about how the United States has been, and is (in a few isolated places even today) an astonishingly backwards Third World country. That is, I intend to talk about its history as a less than totally desirable culture and neighbour.

To Canadians this seems astonishing: how can such a greatly, greatly advanced nation be so progressive, and yet so primitive? But perhaps, if we look at the history of the United States, we shall not be too surprised.

For the United States -- the inventor and spreader of so much good for the world -- has also a long, long history involving racism, slavery, aggression, and more than occasional imperialism.

The Myth of the United States

Like nearly all countries, the United States has celebrated the happier side of its past in a series of myths. These tell the dynamic story of America's growth and noble ideals. The United States tells and retells and "improves" these myths in its popular art and history. As the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991) used to say, myths tend to gather together to make a mythology. The myths of American history have done this. Many Americans used to receive this mythology uncritically. Many still forget or downplay historical events that do not fit it, or are omitted by and not celebrated in it.

Those seeking the actual truth about the history of the United States must, with difficulty, sift through the still-forming mythology of the United States to determine whether events depicted in it occurred as they are said to have done.

For instance:

America is officially (as its national anthem says) "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But "The Star-Spangled Banner" was written in 1814, during America's long period of slavery. Most black people, particularly in the South, were hardly free. Indeed, like Native Americans, they were hardly considered to be people. The United States has the embarrassment of a long history of human slavery and continuing racism.

At first sight, America's slavery history is shocking. In North America, for example, the making of new slaves was abolished in Upper Canada in 1792. But the areas where slavery was legal in the United States were only gradually limited in the first half of the 19th century. Then slavery was decisively ended, in territories occupied by the Union Army by president Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Still, slavery in the United States was only actually abolished with the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Consitution in 1868.

So, in the area of human slavery the United States was not as progressive as a North American British colony.

In democratic enfranchisement, however, we must concede that the United States was more progressive. It was much more progressive than Europe. Early on the United States gave the vote to all (white) males of 21 years of age. The vote was officially extended to blacks in 1868, and to women in the almost uninhabited territory of Wyoming in 1869. However, in practice, after the Reconstruction period, there were few places in the South where blacks were permitted to vote until the 1960s.

Another way the United States was not progressive was the way it handled Native Americans. Several American presidents were even renowned as "Indian fighters" (a telling phrase), e. g., William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), and Zachary Taylor (1784-1850).

President Harrison had fought successfully under General Anthony Wayne (1745-1796) against an Indian coalition at the Battle of Falling Timbers in 1794. Then he was victor of the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 against the brother of Shawnee chief Tecumseh (1768-1813). According to Microsoft Encarta 97 Encylopedia, Harrison was the architect of the removal of "millions of acres of land" from Indians.

President Andrew Jackson, eventually the owner of 100 slaves, was victor in the Creek Indian War in 1813 (he expelled the Creeks to Oklahoma). He was again victor in the war against the Seminoles in 1818. According to Canadian literary journalist Robert Fulford (1930-     ),

"Jackson made his name as a ruthless killer of Indians (and sometimes Spaniards), the champion of the settler class. He or his ideas ruled America from 1829 to the Civil War, with the result that the Indians were shoved out of all lands east of the Mississippi and made uncomfortable in the territory to the West. It was under Jefferson, in 1803, that the U.S. doubled its size at a stroke by buying the Mississippi Valley from Napoleon Bonaparte for $15-million, but it was under Jackson and his followers that this land was quickly established as the rightful home of European-American immigrants -- and no one else."

President Zachary Taylor fought the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in the War of 1812, commanded 400 men in the Black Hawk War of 1832 (in which Abraham Lincoln also participated), and subdued the Seminoles in 1837. He was, incidentally, one of the largest slaveowners in the South.

This was all connected with the (white) imperialism and racism that was endemic to the first 175 years or so of the Republic. As is well known, many of the founders of the Republic were slaveowners, including George Washington (1732-1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Benjamin Franklin, and Randolph. But many founders, too, made fortunes in ways that require to be examined. How, for instance, did Washington obtain the large areas of land he somehow acquired in the Ohio country? Had any treaties been signed with the Indians from which he benefited? Who allowed Washington, a surveyor, to have this land? How much did he pay, and to whom? And most important, what happened to the Native Americans who had been on this land and, in present-day terms, would have had aboriginal or at least squatter's rights?

On these points, American mythology is silent. Go listen instead to Parson Weems on Washington and the cherry tree.

Early white American aristocrats had ambitions to see their country expand into Indian territory. The Indians had been forced out of (or annihilated in) much of the strip east of the Appalachians where whites had created the new Republic. One of the reasons for creating the American Republic was to end such British imperial creations as the Quebec Act of 1774, which limited American whites to colonies already created, and preserved a territory for Indians to the West, from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. White Americans objected to being thus limited. They wanted to spread west and, if necessary, drive out or eliminate the Indians.

It was, of course, argued at the time that the "savages" (read: Native American hunter-gatherers) were incapable of using the land efficiently, that they were heathens who needed to be Christianized, and made into farmers and factory workers. In fact, of course, few white persons cared about Indian betterment. Most white people just wanted to get land of their own and make money. Maybe the Indians would benefit from being converted to the modern world, but if they didn't, who cared?

Push 'em aside. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

[To Be Continued and Revised]

Sources

"William Henry Harrison", "Andrew Jackson", "Abraham Lincoln", "Zachary Taylor"; Microsoft Encarta 97 Encyclopedia.

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