In Tuesday’s post about the 12 best things in American history, I promised a followup post about the worst things.
When I started working on it, I realized it would be silly to rate the worsts from 1-12 or from 12-1. In addition, I am having trouble separating bad things we did from bad things that happened to us.
To me there are clearly a Big Three, maybe even a Big Four. I’ll start by counting those down (from 4 to 1). Then I’ll list others in no particular order.
4. Prejudice (racism, ethnic and religious) — We’re not real great toward people different from us. Of course we’re the worst when it comes to the way we have treated African-Americans since 1865, and we’re still not really past it. I really don’t feel like I need to elaborate on racism, but ethnic prejudices have been a huge problem too. Particularly toward people who aren’t Caucasian.
As for religious prejudice, it seems very strange that people who apparently came to these shores in the early 17th century seeking religious freedom were so intolerant toward others. From the Salem Witch Trials to Anti-Semitism to violence toward American Muslims in the years after 9/11, religious freedom seems to be honored more in the breach than in reality.
3. Internment of Issei and Nisei in 1942 — One could argue that this is actually part of the previous one, but this was the one instance when people had their property stolen from them and were imprisoned for the duration of World War II. When people argued that there was not one case of Japanese-Americans committing sabotage or engaging in espionage, they were told that was extremely suspicious. We actually paid reparations to survivors more than 40 years later.
Without question, the biggest blot on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s record as president.
2. Chattel slavery from 1619-1865 — Hey, betcha thought this would be No. 1.
Actually, it would be legit to call this 1A. I mean, despite what we hear these days from 21st century racists, there was absolutely nothing good about kidnapping Africans and shipping them to the United States to provide free labor for Southern plantations. The whole slavery thing bled over into the post-Civil War era, whether through forced labor, lynchings or separation of families.
Slavery has been called America’s Original Sin, so you would think something would have to be particularly horrible to be worse.
Which leads us to …
- Native American genocide, from 1492 on — If there is a ridiculous misstatement of fact, it’s that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Even if other Europeans hadn’t crossed the ocean 500 years before, saying anyone “discovered” America is like saying Marco Polo discovered China.
The Americas were not uninhabited when Europeans first arrived. In fact, estimates of indigenous population in the Americas in 1492 range from a million or so to more than 100 million. The genocide started fairly innocuously. It’s a fair bet that infecting Native Americans with diseases to which they had no immunity wasn’t intentional, but as soon as white Europeans started coming in greater and greater numbers, the fact that prime land was already occupied became an inconvenience.
Inconvenience led to dislocation and the Trail of Tears, which led to the only good Indian being a dead Indian, which led to reservations and casinos.
Talk about Original Sin.
***
Bad things that happened from outside — Pearl Harbor and 911, two of the worst days in our history. We tend to see both as vicious attacks on us, but from the other side, both were responses to provocation. We weren’t the bad guys in either one of these, but we shouldn’t always assume we’re the good guys.
Bad things we did — Marine Gen. Smedley Butler, one of our greatest military heroes, once said he knew whenever he was sent to another country, he was acting as an enforcer for American business. The fact is, there were really only two wars after the revolution that we had to fight. One was the War of 1812 and the other was WWII. In both cases we were attacked.
Then there was the Bomb. Not so much the one we dropped on Hiroshima. That probably saved us from having to invade Honshu and doubling U.S. casualties in the Pacific War. It probably also saved Japanese lives in the long run. The one that wasn’t necessary was Nagasaki, and there was talk the reason for it was to show Josef Stalin we had more than one. Not a particular noble reason.
American Dream/American Hologram — The American Dream has become such a perversion of itself over the years that it’s almost impossible to see any fairness in it. With roughly 70 percent of Americans doing no better than just getting by, with so many people filled with so much anger toward others, with religious freedom deteriorating into freedom to be an evangelical Christian, where is there to go?
In the 1950s, the top 1 percent basically controlled 7 percent of our national wealth. Just a few years ago, that 7 percent had grown to 18 percent. It’s not a question of baking a bigger pie when the richest among keep grabbing bigger pieces of that pie. When we all but eliminated the higher rates in a progressive income tax, all we did was guarantee ever increasing income inequality.
George Carlin may have ridiculed the American Dream, but the late Joe Bageant may have nailed it even more effectively when he described our country as the American Hologram. We live in a time and place where there’s a pretty veneer, or a hologram, over the reality of our lives. Things working class people used to take for granted — home ownership, vacations, pensions — have become rarer and rarer.
If millions of working class people ever realize there may actually be someone other than themselves to blame for their problems, the megarich are going to have to hire their own armies to hold onto their wealth.
Just don’t let politicians con you into believing the best is yet to come.
I think Bob Dylan said it best.
A hard rain’s gonna fall.