What makes America great?

Back in February, I blogged about writing to Jill Lepore asking her if she had written such an essay somewhere on what makes America great.  Lepore replied: "I think my answer to that question is in my next book, which is called "This America: The Case for the Nation."

I read her op-ed in the NY Times.  I liked what she was arguing for:

My fave #PublicIntellectual, Jill #Lepore:
"Nationalism is an abdication of #liberalism. It is also the opposite of #patriotism. To confuse #nationalism with #patriotism is to mistake contempt for love and #fear for valor."https://t.co/jHGe4q8TEN#tRump

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) May 26, 2019

I suppose I could have made the book a part of my summer reading.  But, this is the first summer when I have taken off from any serious work.  After years of M suggesting that I get out of my head, I implemented it.  It feels like I have put down a huge weight that I had been carrying on all these years.  I have no idea how people like Lepore keep going!

But then even when I don't read books, I do read plenty of book reviews.  This essay reviews Lepore's "This America: The Case for the Nation."  Well, it is a twofer that also reviews "This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto," whose author is an Indian-American--Suketu Mehta.

I haven't read Mehta's book either; but, I have read his op-ed and have heard him articulate his argument.

On #tRump's politics of fear of #immigrantshttps://t.co/UVLSPAW5JR#TheBrownsAreComing

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) June 2, 2019

So, the review essay is not about books that will be unfamiliar terrain.

Nationalism is currently thriving, she believes, because the discourse of American liberalism is deficient. First, that discourse undervalues the radicality and relevance of the country’s founding ideals; second, the preoccupation with the rights of subgroups is essential, certainly, but politically inadequate; third, and here I put the matter much more crudely than Lepore would, liberals must in some sense do battle for possession of the Stars and Stripes. However gauche or complicit it may seem, they must understand and unapologetically frame their values—which currently have a niche, somewhat subversive emphasis—as our core national values:

This America is a community of belonging and commitment, held together by the strength of our ideas and by the force of our disagreements. A nation founded on universal ideas will never stop fighting over the meaning of its past and the direction of the future…. The nation, as ever, is the fight.

I am struck by the reviewer's blunt statement that "liberals must in some sense do battle for possession of the Stars and Stripes."

"The nation, as ever, is the fight."

Right on, Professor Lepore!

"I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.”

That was not me, but it is from Mehta.

This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now…. We’re not letting the bastards take it back.
It’s our America now.

We certainly are not letting the bastards take it back.  No way, Jose!

But, for us liberals and immigrants, the challenge is huge when it comes to fighting for the nation. Fighting for our nation.

If Lepore is right and the nation is indeed the fight, liberals must understand what a fight involves. That is, you can’t fight performatively when the other side is fighting to win: that kind of fight simply won’t go on for very long. You have no option but to fight to win, too. You want to win because you are right and they are wrong; because you have a moral right to power and they don’t; because you are real Americans and they’re not.

Fight on!

Can you hear me now?

I received emails in response to almost every op-ed that I wrote.  A few were hateful, yes.  But, for the most part, people were decent even when disagreeing with me.  I always replied to them, except the "haters and losers," to use the current president's words.  To me, there was no second thoughts about replying; the whole point in writing op-eds was to engage with the public on important issues, and I loved that engagement.

As a reader of commentaries, I have also written a few emails to authors.  I don't recall ever emailing when I disagreed with the author because I fear that critical engagement is not what most writers like, even though I love that.  I have emailed almost always rejoinders in agreement.  Many of them have replied, mostly with nothing more than thanks.

Even recently. After reading this essay in the context of the Sabarimalai controversy, I wrote to that author.  That was a month ago.  A few days after that, I wrote to another author who had engaged with the public on correcting the narrative about Aurangzeb.  And a couple of days after that, I emailed another author in response to her commentary about the status of women and caste in India.

I never received a reply from any of them.  

And, oh, in case you thought that it is the awfully arrogant men who don't reply, well, all the three are women.  And, oh, if you thought it is because they are Indians, or Americans, well, one is an Indian, a second is an American, and the third is an Americanized Indian.  There!

A contrast to these is my favorite contemporary public intellectual--Jill Lepore.

I wrote to Jill Lepore a couple of days ago:

Dear Professor Lepore:
After years of reading your essays in The New Yorker, for the first time I read one of your books--These Truths.  I enjoyed reading and learning from it.  Thanks.
While reading, I was also blogging about it, adding my own thoughts as well.  The following was a comment a few days ago at the final post in the series:

I have been following your writing with great interest. I have a question: What makes America great? My daughter - a very bright 12 year old - is being taught history by a gifted teacher who told them a history of the United States very much in line with the Lepore thesis that you have explored in this blog. So I asked her: if America is all this, then what makes it great?Perhaps you can answer this question?

I suggested in my response that I will be most delighted to read what his daughter wrote in response to the question, "what makes America great?"  I am yet to hear from him.
It then occurred to me that this is a question that I should direct to you.  Or, maybe you have already written such an essay that I can read up somewhere?
Thanks again for your awesome writings in everyday simple language that makes reading them a pleasure.

Jill Lepore writes back:

So glad you enjoyed the book. I think my answer to that question is in my next book, which is called "This America: The Case for the Nation."

I suppose Jill Lepore sets the bar high.  Good for her!

Lying is as American as apple pie!

The relentless campaign about Barack Obama being a Muslim and a Kenyan.
The swift-boating of John Kerry.
The whisper campaign that John McCain fathered a daughter with a black woman.

From Jill Lepore's book, I come to understand that rare was a really truthful moment in American politics and elections.  Sure, Lepore could be a narrating the story with her progressive bias.  But, it is not as if she is working with "alternative facts."

Consider, for instance, the election of 1934, in which Upton Sinclair, "an eccentric and dizzyingly prolific writer still best known for The Jungle ... decided to run for governor of California."  As a prolific writer, Sinclair had established quite a paper trail.  And that's where his problems began.

Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who later became a couple, "like most California Republicans, were horrified at the prospect of a Sinclair governorship."  So, they huddled themselves in a room, and selected sentences from Sinclair's writing. 

Newspapers were partisans (faux news is not all that new!), and the "Los Angeles Times began running on its front page a box with an Upton Sinclair quotation in it"--the quotes, of course, taken completely out of context.  Sinclair lost.

Lepore writes, "as Sinclair argued, voters were now being led by a Lie Factory."

Whitaker and Baxter continued to fine-tune this new art of negative campaigning, especially lying, which seems to be a part of being a Republican!  They wrote the book on this, as they say.

Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. ... Never explain anything. The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support.  Say the same thing over and over again. ... Simplify, simplify, simplify.  A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think."

Like trump's MAGA; Drain the swamp; Build the wall; Lock her up; Repeal Obamacare; No collusion; Fake news; ...

In all the lying and cheating in order to get elected, the powerful whites could not be bothered about the plight of blacks. Not even about lynchings!  For all the things that we credit FDR for, his "New Deal programs were generally segregated, and Roosevelt failed to act to oppose lynching."  And when FDR refused to support an anti-lynching bill in 1933 , because he needed the Southern Democrats votes in Congress, "the anti-lynching bill died."

Across the Atlantic, in the continent from where the European settlers came and wiped out the natives and then imported humans from Africa in order to dehumanize them as slaves, a powerful populist also effectively used lying and negative campaigning--particularly about minorities.

On Tuesday, the president will use the stage in Congress in order to further engage in lies, damn lies, and fear-mongering, in the grand old white American way :(

The idol of all Morondom

In the old country, back in my growing up days, there were quite a few elders who behaved as if their words were definitive truths derived from the gods.  In sarcasm, a few would comment on the side, or behind the backs,  வசிஷ்டர் சொன்னா வேத வாக்கு (There are so many layers to explain. I will leave you with only one, which is a Wiki link to the sage Vasishta.)

The deeper question is about the truths.  These Truths, which Lepore explores in the history of the United States.  The Declaration of Independence declares that "we hold these truths to be self evident."  Turns out that every bit of that phrasing is up for discussion.  "We": who is the we?  "These truths": Which truths?  "Self evident": Are they self evident?

The current president does a mockery of truths in every possible way.  The racist voters and enablers of his seem to operate under an impression that "if Trump says it’s true, it must be. After all, he became President."  trump has become the adjudicator of truth to the 63 million, though it seems like a few of those 63 million may have had a Damascene conversion of sorts!

The story of the United States has been a struggle about "these truths."  And this played out in many contexts, including in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. (Also, check out this old post of mine, from almost five years ago.)

Jill Lepore writes that for Walter Lippman, the trial and the battle between the two lawyers--William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow--wasn't merely about evolution itself:

[It] was about how people decide what's true--does truth derive from faith or from reason?--and more deeply, what happens in a democracy when people can't agree about they decide what's true.  Does the majority rule?

"if Trump says it’s true, it must be. "  When he says, for instance, that there is no climate change, given that the electoral majority agreed with him, then it must be true that there is no climate change.

Lepore continues to write about Lippman's insights:

What were the implications for democracy? If a majority of voters decided that Charles Darwin was wrong and that evolution shouldn't be taught in schools, what was everyone else suppose to do?

Lepore quotes Clarence Darrow who could not agree with Bryan's assault on science; Darrow considered Bryan "the idol of all Morondom."

Well, Darrow could not have imagined trump, whose handpicked Secretary of State called him a fucking moron; in contrast to trump, William Jennings Bryan comes across as Vasishta!

But ... what about Native Americans?

In Jill Lepore's narrative, I am now into the 20th century, more than 400 years after Columbus "discovering" India.

After some of the detailed descriptions early on about the asymmetrical interactions between European settlers and Native Americans, and then later about the Trail of Tears, Lepore's narrative does not say much about the original inhabitants.

Now, Lepore herself writes about readers who would question her on why she had skipped something or the other.  As she writes, no single-volume history of the United States can cover it all.  I think that including it all will be like trying to draw a true-to-scale map of the world.  (Was this in Alice in Wonderland?)  But, still ...

I figured I would not be the first person to think of this.  As a truly curious person would do in this internet age, I googled for it.

Sure enough, this essay from The Los Angeles Review of Books pops up, in which the author writes:

Indigenous absences are not a minor fault with These Truths. They lie at its core and they bear weighty consequences for the story that emerges. In a book that confidently bills itself as “an account of the origins, course, and consequences of the American experiment over more than four centuries,” the marginalization of indigenous people is a fundamental problem.

Any historical account will be contested, yes.  But, still ...

Methodology may have been a problem from the start. Lepore has a reliance on written literacy and record-keeping as powerful determinants of history and memory. The “history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail,” she asserts, adding, “most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts.” She makes this claim partly through a contention about the “literall advantage” supposedly maintained by Euro-American colonizers over peoples of indigenous and African descent, who oftentimes used non-written forms of expression and communication.

I don't understand why academics use "methodology" when they mean the research method.  Anyway, that is beside the main point, which is that when Lepore's method is to let the people speak for themselves, and for which she relies on the written word, well, what happens to the stories, the truths, that were not written down but were passed down through the spoken word or through images?

Lepore is a sharp intellect, and a phenomenal communicator.  I am sure there were reasons about which she is confident.  But, still ...

[Scholars] of early America and Native America have produced marvelously fine-grained reassessments of literacies, communication, and meaning production. You can now browse entire library shelves that illuminate the dynamic, enduring processes through which distinctive Native communities have transmitted information: knotted quipu strings, woven baskets, petroglyphs, standing stones, oral traditions, songs, dances, gestures, cornfields, clothing, sand and bone maps, and so much more.

Understanding the non-written is not an easy task.  And, like in the case of the Indus civilization, not being able to decode their inscriptions is another challenge altogether.

Such complexities ought to make us even more interested in understanding the past--what we may have been taught and told might not be anywhere close to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  What a shame that instead of a collective investment in such pursuit of truth, we are even closing down history departments, as if the truth is the one that Henry Ford declared: History Is Bunk.

Southern trees bear strange fruit

I like Jill Lepore's narration for many reasons, one of which she herself writes about:

My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves.  I've pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist ... the teller of truth.

In this, Lepore provides the raw and emotion-laden sentences of slaveholders and abolitionists, of conservatives and progressives, of Lincoln and Davis, ... All these then provide me the evidence to be the critic and call fouls, which I have done in every post that is about Lepore's book.

A reminder again that we are testing out the question that Lepore laid out:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

We know already how much America does not fare well regarding these truths within its ever expanding boundaries.  How about outside its political boundaries?

In the late 1880s, America had an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to "these truths" when the Spanish-American war began in 1898.  "Cubans had been attempting to throw off Spanish rule since 1868, and Filipinos had been doing the same since 1896."

A glorious opportunity to help Cubans and Filipinos with their natural rights and help them regain their sovereignty, right?  "Under the terms of the peace, Cuba became independent."

Do not celebrate, yet, for there is more: "Spain ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States, in exchange for $20 million."

Filipinos fought for their independence and were now stuck with the US as their ruler!

A U.S. occupation and American colonial rule were not what the people of Philippines had in mind when they threw off Spanish rule.  The Philippines declared its independence, and Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo formed a provisional constitutional government.

American revolutionaries declared their independence from a far away England, and a hundred years later, the Philippines was declaring its independence from a far away US.  A 100 years makes a huge difference about independence.  And, of course, Filipinos not being white folk also mattered!

Aguinaldo worried about "how bitter is slavery."  Yes, "slavery" was the word he used!

The war began.

From its start in 1899, the Philippine-American War was an unusually brutal war, with atrocities on both sides, including the slaughter of Filipino civilians.  U.S. forces deployed on Filipinos a method of torture known as "water cure," forcing a prisoner to drink a vast quantity of water; most of the victims died. ... Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.

trump now not caring about Puerto Rico is, therefore, not really new. He is merely practicing good old American politics of white supremacy; at least he tossed the people there a few rolls of paper towels!

Lepore writes that this war "dramatically worsened conditions for people of color in the United States."  The jingoistic war chants "filled with racist venom, only further incited American racial hatreds."

"If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched," the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903.

It was now separate-but-equal--and with lynching!

At this stage, do we really need to check for the answer to this?

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Native Americans. Africans. Mexicans. And now? Chinese!

Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889! 

Let's ask ourselves, again:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Five-fifths ... but separate

Lincoln's assassination was the literal and metaphorical shot that was clear signal that while slavery was illegal in the US, white supremacy cannot be eradicated through law.

Congress passed four Reconstruction acts, which "divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, each ruled by a military general." 

One doesn't need a great imagination to understand that white supremacists in the South were not happy with this. 

And, the southern states were required to draft new constitutions, and "Congress made readmission to the Union contingent on the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment."

So far, so good.

But then came the elections of 1876.  Electoral politics took the United States on another path altogether. 

The Party of Lincoln lost, but "disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina."  I suppose even back then Florida was the eye of the presidential election hurricane!

Another compromise, a bargain, resulted.  In order to retain the Oval Office, the Party of Lincoln "abandoned a century long fight for civil rights."

The military withdrew.  The southern white supremacists regained power.  The KKK's terror campaigns stepped up.  Jim Crow laws came into effect. "Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars."  Separate streetcars. Separate bibles in courthouses. Separate windows at post offices.  Separate dining areas. 

The law extended even to children: "In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime."

As Jill Lepore notes, "slavery had ended, segregation had only begun."

Is this when America was great for the current president and his racist voters to make it great again?

"We have lost our Moses"

In the summer of 2016, "before an overwhelmingly white crowd in Dimondale, Mich., where 2.8 percent of the population is African American," then-candidate trump stumped for black votes, by asking them, "What the hell do you have to lose?"

Apparently that question did not get him African-American votes!  But, his negative campaign against Bill Clinton's crime bills, in order to remind blacks about Hillary, paid off well: "In 2016, black turnout was down eight points from 2012."  He and his political adviser and conduit to the Russians and Wikileaks, roger stone, played the dirtiest politics on their belief that “Hate is a stronger motivator than love ... Human nature has never changed.”

All these are a long, long, long way from Lincoln who believed in "the better angels of our nature."

Not all the people in the South wanted to secede.  Even in Virginia, where there was plenty of opposition to secede in the western part of the state.  Jill Lepore writes that in June, after Lincoln's inauguration earlier in March, "they held their own convention and effectively seceded from the state, to become West Virginia."

Ironically, West Virginia today is confederate flag land with people talking about their heritage and is a solid trump country!

Even the soldiers--North and South---fighting in the Civil War, knew well that the conflict was over one and only one issue: Slavery.  In 1862,  "a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade's newspaper wrote:  "Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation if the blacks is wither a fool or a liar."

Contrast that with the racists in today's "Party of Lincoln" who falsely claim that the war was about state's rights and not about slavery and emancipation!

Lepore reminds us: "It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy."

Think about this the next time you see a confederate flag!

Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation, shepherded the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibited slavery in the United States, and ran for re-election.  All "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

On Good Friday of 1865--April 14th--Lincoln was shot.  He died the following morning.

The Union is Dissolved

When I came to America and started learning as much Americana as I could in a short time, I was intrigued by Lincoln's debate with Stephen Douglas.  Well they were dramatic re-enactments.

The debates were a huge deal.  Jill Lepore writes that "debate was understood as the foundation of civil society."  Yes, the tragic irony that the civil society that the American experiment was trying to create included slavery and genocide and ethnic cleansing!

Lepore writes:

In 1787, the delegates to the constitutional convention had agreed "to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgment without hurting the feelings of each other."

More than two centuries later, we have a candidate who was elected to office because of his ability to insult and demean people, so much so that there is a list--and this is merely via Twitter--that is often updated!

On August 21, 1858, it was rumble in the jungle. Well, kind of. Lincoln v. Douglas, as candidates for the Illinois senate seat.  The Dred Scott decision was still fresh on everybody's mind, and "Douglas reminded his audience of Lincoln's opposition" to the decision.  The debate was about their interpretations of "the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."

Douglas was clear: "This government was made by our fathers on the white basis ... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever."

Ouch!

Now I am able to appreciate a lot more the Lincoln quote that I have read and heard about forever: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people"--not for the benefit of whites alone.  Oh my, what a statement!

Like the current president who won a squeaker with overwhelming support of racists, Douglas also narrowly won.  Lincoln lost.

But, Lincoln had become the leader.  And was the candidate for the presidency in 1860--a four-way race that also included Douglas.

Lincoln won every northern state ... but Lincoln had won hardly any votes in the South.

The crisis was now full blown.

This is the confederacy that trump's "very fine people" love, cherish, and defend!

Politics is a moral issue

A third into the book, I remind myself of the question that Jill Lepore set up for herself and for readers like me:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The evidence thus far does not make the American experiment look good.

In fact, it seems like the experiment gets worse by the page!

The more the North attacked slavery, the more the South defended "their way of life."  More and more compromises were made, in the name of saving the Union.  Morals be damned!

The final proslavery element of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial.

Turn in the runaway slaves?  "These truths"?

Enter Abraham Lincoln.

The 45-year old Lincoln came "out of his law practice and back into politics."  And, "he found a political home in a new political party, the Republican Party, founded in May 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin."

Jill Lepore writes that Lincoln despaired about "what he described as the nation's "progress in degeneracy," a political regression":

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are equal."  We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes."

Lincoln couldn' make serious inroads.  Yet.

In 1857, President Buchanan was sworn in, and dismissed the importance of the slavery issue.

Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.

How awful that the president of the United States did not think that slavery was of pressing and practical importance, leave alone the moral aspects of treating fellow humans as property!

It then comes down to the truths.  If the Constitution and the American experiment rests on three political ideas--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people--then, "does the Constitution sanction slavery or not?"

The US Supreme Court settled it, atrociously, in the Dred Scott case, in which the 7-2 majority ruled that ""no negro of the African race " could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States."

Frederick Douglass thundered, as he always did:

Slavery lies in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.

Or, to use the words of the current president, there were fine people on both sides!

A Civil War was inevitable.

Natives? Check. Blacks? Check. Mexicans? Also check!

The European settlers continued to displace people.  That's what alien settlers always do.  That is happening even now in contemporary times, like how the indigenous Miskitos are under assault in Nicaragua.

In the young USA, the leaders decided that they ought to displace Mexicans too.

Mexico was as large as the US in land area, and had a larger population:

"As early as 1825, John Quincy Adams had instructed the American minister to Mexico to try to negotiate a new boundary," writes Jill Lepore.  Yep, the new country was not even 50 years old.  trump's attacks on Mexico are merely the latest in this long history.

Why were the European settlers so interested?  The Mexican territories of "Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton."

Perhaps you have an immediate question: Working on the cotton fields meant slave labor; so, if somehow acquired by the US, would Texas allow slavery?

The anti-slavery north protested.  Mexico considered Texas its province, though a rebellious one.  The US wanted to annex it, and more.  The US laid a trap for Mexico in order to begin a war.  It was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into that trap.  Almost exactly to this date--on January 25th--back in 1845, "the House passed a resolution in favor of annexation."  And about slavery in Texas?  The resolution included a compromise: "The eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion."

From the 3/5ths compromise, the US has been at such dealmaking in favor of slavery; yet, we have a president in office who loudly wondered why they had never struck a deal in the past in order to avoid the Civil War!  What an ignoramus that 63 million elected only because he appealed to their racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and more!

President James Polk had grand dreams to extend the American empire; "Texas was only the beginning," Lepore writes.  He hoped to get Mexico into an armed confrontation, and it happened.  He asked Congress to declare war.

What would happen if the US won the war and gained territory?  Would Mexicans there now become Americans?  Quite a few leaders were against it.  "Ours is the government of the white man."  Would the new territory then be slave states as well?

As the war with Mexico came to and end in the second half of 1847, Polk "considered trying to acquire all of Mexico" from 26 degrees N all the way to the Pacific.  But, it was finally settled at 36 degrees north.  With a formal end to the war in February 1848, "the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States."

Jill Lepore writes: "As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank."

Build that wall

The Europeans kept coming in by the shiploads.  And the original inhabitants of the land were systematically ousted from their homes and lands.

Jill Lepore writes:

Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers.  Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends.  "This is a free country," a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. ... A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, "The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted."

Maybe the Swede and the Norwegian did not know about the conditions of blacks and the original inhabitants.  Or, maybe they didn't care, and what mattered to them was how the whites were "free" and could enjoy the "principle of equality."

How huge was this white immigration?

European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent [of the U.S. population] in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. ... By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic.

The Catholicism of the new white folk bothered the older white folk who were Protestants.  "By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish.  Signs at shops began to read, "No Irish Need Apply."

To think that America needs to keep immigrants out is a remarkable denial of the country's history.  The current President, who was elected by 63 million racists, openly declares that he would welcome immigrants from Norway but not from "shitholes."

We are yet to reach the critical time of the Civil War.   But, even at this stage of Jill Lepore's history of the US, think again about Frederick Douglass' speech from 1852, in which he thunders:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

When we sing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave," I am not sure who we refer to. 

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Remember this factoid?

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide and then the ethnic cleansing did not end just because it was now the 19th century!

Enter trump in his previous incarnation: andrew jackson, who "extended the powers of the presidency," writes Jill Lepore.

"The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies in a heap of ruins at his feet," declared a senator from Rhode Island.  "When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it."

Jackson set his sights on Indian removal.  He wanted to forcibly move Native Americans from east of the Mississippi to the West.

The Cherokees had forever been fighting to remain on their lands.

We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory.

And then a most unfortunate thing happened: "Gold was discovered on Cherokee land."

The US Supreme Court and its Chief Justice, John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokees.  andrew jackson "decided to ignore the Supreme Court."  The Trail of Tears was the result.

We often refer to slavery as America's original sin.  As sinful as that was, the destruction of the lives and histories of the original inhabitants of this land is an even older story.  As much as the aftereffects of slavery and white supremacy have never gone away, the shameful and atrocious treatment of Native Americans continues.  Especially now with version 2.0 of andrew jackson: trump.

President Donald Trump started off the week by mocking one of the worst Native American massacres in US history in order to score some political points. By Friday, a group of young white teenagers were following his footsteps by taunting Native American elders at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC — on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, no less.
In videos shared widely on YouTube and Twitter, a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” stands inches away from a native elder who is beating a drum. Different angles of the incident show a group of a few dozen young people, mostly boys, in the background, jumping up and down and jeering in unison at the group of elders present for the day’s march. In some shots, the teens appear to be shouting “build that wall, build that wall.”

The native elder, Nathan Phillips, is also a Vietnam vet--the war that President Bone Spurs dodged well.

“I heard them saying ‘build that wall, build that wall,’ ” Phillips said while wiping away tears. “This is indigenous land. You’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did for a millennia. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders, took care of our children, always provided for them, taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see that energy … put that energy to making this country really, really great.”

Yet another Indian elder shedding tears is not going to influence the thinking of 63 million racists!

The revolution in the "shithole"

This is the first long weekend of a new year; Monday is Martin Luther King Day.  Therefore, I will continue to focus on the slavery history of the United States in Jill Lepore's book.

I have written--many times--even in this blog, that I have no idea how African-Americans live without always being angry at the white folk who proudly claim their slave-owning history.  Or, when they openly talk about white supremacy.

Lepore gives me plenty to get angry about--despite that I am not an African-American, and was raised with Brahmin privilege in the old country.  I have no firsthand experience of being the underclass ever, and I am pissed off!

Consider this, for instance: The American Revolution of 1776 echoed across the waters with the French Revolution in 1789.  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Right?

It was the same France that had colonized Haiti, which was then known as Saint-Domnigue. It was "the largest colony in the Caribbean, and the richest."  Whites on the island were outnumbered by slaves, whose population was eleven times the population of whites.

A "democratic" revolution in the nearby United States, and another in the colonial power.  So, of course, Haiti's brown people rose up in 1791.

The leaders of the American revolution did not support the revolution in Haiti.  Instead, they attacked it.  Not just with words: "Between 1791 and 1793, the United States sold arms and ammunition and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to French planters on the island."  Yep, the young republic set a precedent way back then by sending money and materials to a war, not to help the downtrodden but to support the white and the wealthy!

American newspapers did not cheer the Haitian Revolution, but instead reported it "as a kind of madness, a killing frenzy."

America reinforced itself not as a land of liberty, but as a land of slavery.  How awful!

When George Washington called it quits and headed back home, some of their slaves fled.  Washington "sent a slave catcher" after one of them, who offered to return only if she would be granted freedom.  "Washington refused, on the ground that it would set a "dangerous precedent.""  When Washington died, blacks outnumbered whites in that room, Lepore writes.

Nearly 230 years after that revolution, the sitting President of the United States casually and callously referred to Haiti as a "shithole".

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

Easy truths ...

Of course we have differences of opinions on various aspects of the human condition, within our countries and across the world.  I might disagree with you, dear reader, but I will not lose respect for you simply because we disagree.

However, there are issues where there is simply no fuzziness.  Some issues have only one correct answer each, and everything else is wrong.  And on those issues, if you choose, and advocate for those wrong answers, I lose respect for you. trump is one of those in these contemporary times.  

Three hundred years ago, it would have been slavery.

Even with all the understanding that I have, I simply cannot imagine how one group of humans decided that another group of humans was not not really human.  And, therefore, there was nothing wrong in making them slaves. Raping them. Torturing them. Branding them. How sick does one have to be in order to think this way!

The more Jill Lepore gets into slavery--I am yet to reach 1776 in the book--the faster that I am losing respect for the revered white men.  George Washington, who inherited his first human property as a ten year old, was no exception.  While I have, of course, known about the founders' slave-holding, it feels strikingly new when I read sentences like this:

George Washington's slaves had been running away at least since 1760. At least forty-seven of them fled at one time or another.

Let's recap. Washington, the ardent military man who is already engaged in self-governance for the colonies, is fully aware that his slaves are also willing to risk their lives for freedom by running away from his estate ... and the guy does nothing!

In December 1765, George Mason wrote--an essay--to Washington "in which he argued that slavery was "the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed"--the Roman republic."

Towns here and there voted in favor of abolishing slavery.  But, these were in the minority.

As the armed conflict between the colonies and the British worsened, Lord Dunmore "offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion."  The bastards were no noble saints; it was merely their bloody divide and conquer strategy at play here too.

In doing so, Dunmore tipped the scales:

Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina's delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dumore's declaration did "more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies--than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of."

The symbolic Boston Tea Party didn't launch the revolution. Rather "it was this act; Dunmore's offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence."

To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

A final piece from Lepore wraps it all up:

If all men belonging to civil society are free and equal, how can slavery be possible? It must be, Virginia's convention answered, that Africans do not belong to civil society, having never left a state of nature.

Terrible!

You call it war. I call it massacre.

Even as I continue to read Jill Lepore's sweeping, single-volume, history of the United States, it is difficult to shut myself off from the shit that pours out of trump's mouth and tweets.  It is his mouth that is really a shithole!

The horrible human being in the Oval Office evoked the Wounded Knee massacre in a recent tweet, in order to mock Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In this post, I noted from Jill Lepore that between 1500 and 1800, as many as fifty million Native Americans died.  The hunting down of Indians continued on.  Many European settlers believed that “indigenous practices were by definition savage, superstitious and coercive.”  So, what did they do?

In part because of this belief, the U.S. government decided not to recognize Native Americans as citizens of sovereign governments in the 19th century, but as colonial subjects. In 1883, the Department of Interior enacted the first “Indian Religious Crimes Code” making the practice of Native American religions illegal. These codes remained in place until 1934.

Keep in mind that many European settlers were also the same people who fled religious persecution back in their old countries!

In response, Wenger writes, some Native American groups tried to convince government agents that their gatherings were places of “prayer and worship” similar to Christian churches. Others claimed that their gathering were “social,” not religious.
But this kind of masking of religious practices did not stop the U.S. government from using violence to suppress these Native American ceremonies.
In 1890, the U.S. military shot and killed hundreds of unarmed men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in an effort to suppress a Native American religious ceremony called the “ghost dance.”

This is the Wounded Knee that trump uses to mock Warren!  Millions of Jesus-loving born-again Christians voted for this horrible human being?

Lepore writes about the religious revival in the colonies, which gives us an idea of the track record of most of the religious in this country.  But, there were exceptions.  Very, very few.  But, the  kind of exceptions that give us hope.  One of them was Benjamin Lay.  A widely traveled man, and well read, he was one of the first to speak up and loudly against slavery.

In 1718, Lay sailed to Barbados, where he saw people branded and tortured and beaten, starved and broken; he decided that everything about this arrangement was an offense against God, who "did not make others to be Slaves to us."

In contrast, his contemporary, George Washington "inherited his first human property at the age of ten."

After a few years in England, Lay and his wife left for Pennsylania--the Quaker State.

He traveled from town to town and from colony to colony, only ever on foot--he would not spur a horse--to denounce slavery before governors and ministers and merchants. ... His arguments fell on deaf ears.

What a commitment to the cause!

But, even he ran out of steam.  Benjamin Lay became a hermit.

Outside of Philadelphia, he carved a cave out of a hill. Inside, he stowed his library; two hundred books of theology. biography, poetry, and history. He'd decided to protest slavery by refusing to eat or drink or wear or use anything that had been made with forced labor.

Such principled activists are how we will make America great again!

He continued to press Benjamin Franklin about the slaves that he owned.  "Lay pressed him and pressed him: By what right?"

In 1758, "the Philadelphia Quaker meeting formally denounced slave trading; Quakers who bought and sold men were to be disowned.  When Lay heard the news, he said, "I can now die in peace," closed his eyes, and expired.

A hundred years later, the country fought a Civil War over slavery.  But, it took another 100 years to end separate but equal.  And 60 years after that, we have a President who talks about fine people on both sides!

But, at least there were a few people like Benjamin Lay.  May their tribe increase!

The Chinese and the Mayans didn't care. Europeans did. We now have trump!

One of the factoids that I share with students is how India and China were the richest countries on the planet for the longest time.  Not only rich, but advanced in scientific and literary fields also.  Math, astronomy, metallurgy, whatever it was, well, they had it all.

Yet, they didn't seem to have had a great deal of interest in exploring the rest of the world in order to colonize them.

Trevor Noah joked about this in one of his bits, where he asks the audience to imagine Jamaicans, living in the paradise that the Caribbean is, going to cold Europe to colonize the people and the land.

The world changed in 1492.  Jill Lepore writes that "it is a little surprising that it was western Europeans in 1492, and not some other group of people, some other year, who crossed an ocean to discover a lost world."

Lepore gives us an idea of some of the other groups of people:

The Maya, whose territory stretched from what is now Mexico to Costa Rica, knew enough astronomy to navigate across the ocean as early as AD 300.

(A quick comment/question: Why is Lepore using the "AD" instead of "CE"?)

Lepore adds:

The Chinese had invented the compass in the eleventh century, and had excellent boats. Before his death in 1433, Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim, had explored the coast of much of Asia and eastern Africa, leading two hundred ships and twenty-seven thousand sailors. But China was the richest country in the world, and by the late fifteenth century no longer allowed travel beyond the Indian Ocean, on the theory that the rest of the world was unworthy and uninteresting.

Similarly, the Middle East and North African Muslims couldn't care about the rest of the world because they already dominated trade--Mediterranean and continental.

Trevor Noah's Jamaicans serve as wonderful metaphors.  The world outside of Europe was happy and content.

Europeans, on the other hand, were not.

It was somewhat out of desperation, then, that the poorest and weakest Christian monarchs on the very western edge of Europe, fighting with Muslims, jealous of the Islamic world's monopoly on trade, and keen to spread their religion, began looking for routes to Africa and Asia that wouldn't require sailing across the Mediterranean.

Columbus discovered America!

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide, the rape of cultures, and more that they don't always teach in school!

I suppose white supremacy was also born!

By the end of the 19th century, China and India had been reduced to lands of beggars by white colonialists and imperialists, and the material and cultural riches of Central and South America had been wiped out by Europeans.  Two decades into the 20th century, the Middle East was carved into prizes for Europeans.  And Africa was raped and plundered--even by the tiny Belgians.

These truths are setting up the book well.  Looks like it might be a depressing read.  After all, all these truths have given us trump and his 63 million.  I hope Jill Lepore will give me plenty to be cheerful about too.

From Tamil country to Kalapuya land

When we were kids, the world was explained to us in simple terms. And we believed in those explanations.

As we get older, even by middle school, we begin to ask questions that require a bit more detail.  The more we learn, it turns out that often we end up knowing less.

Way back in school, I forget what grade it might have been, we were taught that Columbus discovered America.  I suppose it was not only me who was naive enough to have bought into that, so were my classmates--even Vijay! 

Right then, we didn't ask the teacher, or ourselves, a simple question that much later in life I asked my niece's son when he told me about Columbus having discovered the country where I now live.  I asked him: "So, before Columbus discovered America, there were no people there? He was the first person to go to America?"

In the decades since elementary school, I have come to know more about America.  The first time I came to know that Washington and Jefferson and many others, too, were slave owners, I was crushed.  All that glorious language of "we the people" and "democracy" and more suddenly became meaningless. 

In this tad more informed existence, when I think about the genocidal killing of the people who were in the lands before Europeans arrived, I get intensely angry.  Slavery. Jim Crow. Chinese exclusion. Japanese internment.  America's past is immensely tragedy-filled, with tragedies caused by humans, and a sharp contrast to "Columbus discovered America" and everybody lived happily ever after of my elementary school days.

But, even the answers that I have now about America's past are incomplete.  All I know is that I know very little of it.

Jill Lepore will educate me.

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The nearly 800 pages that Lepore follows up with will keep me busy for a long time.   I need to do this. We all need to read and think about our past.  For people like me who have moved far away from where we were born and raised, there are multiple pasts, like learning about Tamil, that we need to understand.

The past is an inheritance, a gift, and a burden. It can't be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.

And to get to know is what I have planned to do.

These truths from the old country to the adopted country

After the series of posts related to David Shulman's Tamil: A Biography (click here for the posts) I need a break.

When I return, I will launch into learning about the adopted country.  The text--if it interests you, dear reader--is by one of my favorite contemporary public intellectuals: Jill Lepore.

Vanakkam ...

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