Ronald Wright's "What is America?"

This is another interesting book by Ronald Wright. Previously, I had read Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress. I fully enjoyed them. They were full of unexpected bits of information and a new perspective on history. This book continues that path and some of the material overlaps with the previous book but that didn't reduce my enjoyment.

First, Wright is extremely sympathetic with the native population. So much of his writing points out the hypocrisy and betrayal in relations between the invaders from Europe and the native population. This is truly a sad tale. Awareness of the self-deception which the conquerers had about their motives and the facts of their history is important. As Wright pointedly reminds his reader in this book, a lot of contemporary American political behaviour shows a continuation of these ugly traits and this succeeds because so many Americans are unaware of their real history.

In talking about the lessons on government and democracy which the early colonists learned from the Six Nations, Wright points out:

Yet one memorial to the Iroquois can be seen wherever the United States does business under its Great Seal. The symbol of the Five Nation's combined strength was an eagle clasping five arrows in its talons. The United States raised the number of arrows to thirteen and put Latin in the bird's mouth: E PLURIBUS UNUM. Along with these Roman words and a Masonic pyramid stamped on each dollar, the filched eagle became a fitting emblem for the settlers' hybrid empire.

Wright shines a light into some of the uglier bits of American history:

One of the shabbier intercolonial fights was Plymouth's overthrow of Wessagusset, a small Anglican colony at peace with local Indians and therefore a rival in both religion and the fur trade. On the pretext of "saving" Wessagusset from a non-existent Indian plot, a Plymouth force murdered some of the colony's native allies in cold blood and made the deed stick to the Anglicans -- who then did come under Indian attack and fled back to England. "The trick," wrote Francis Jennings, was "diverting the blame to the 'savages.'" It was a trick that would be played again many times, most famously in 1773 at the Boston Tea Party, and most bloodily in 1857 at Mountain Meadows, Utah, where more than a hundred California-bound migrants were slaughtered by "Indians" who were mainly Mormons in fancy dress and greasepaint.

This will shock most American readers:

President Jefferson held out a seductivce vision of a mestizo North America: "The day will soon come," he told a gathering of Indians in 1808, "when you will unite yourselves with us, join in our great councils, and form a people with us, and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marrriage; your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great continent."

...

Notwithstanding his talk of an inclusive and just nation, President Jefferson (who, for all his enlightenment, was a slaveholder and often argued both sides of a case with equal eloquence) privately admitted to less lofty motives behind the civilizing scheme. Once Indians had become livestock owners on private plots, he wrote in 1803, they wouldn't need their hunting grounds and could be ensnared in the tender trap of debt:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want ... we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals amojung them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.

When debt alone was insufficient, bribery and corruption often did the job. Failing that, individual ownership would eventuallyl be imposed by federal law in 1887, when the nations driven to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) were, in violation of all the Removal treaties, dismantled into private holdings by the Dawes Alltment Act -- frankly described by Theodore Roosevelt as "a might pulverising engine to break up the tribal mass."

Jefferson's words of two hundred years ago also help explain modern America's deep hostility to all forms of ownership and law that try to withstand the alkahest [universal solvent] of commerce. When the conflict arose inside western civilization -- with labour's challenge to capital -- no nation would show a greater dread of socialism than the United States. Today, some on the American right still denounce mainstream social democracies, including those of Canada and Europe, as "communistic" -- a laughable charge beyond the overheated air of neoconservative think tanks. Collectivity was savagery: like the red man himself, it was the red menace of its day. The Indians, wrote Senator Dawes of his Allotment Act, lacked "selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization."

If you want to view the US from a persective different from what the schoolbooks offer, read this and read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. As Santayana said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."