For over twelve years of their life, from the age of six to eighteen, children in America and around the world attend a local school where they supposedly are equipped with the tools necessary to attend college and get a carrier. But how pure is the knowledge provided by their textbooks? How much do textbooks shape the ideas and philosophies of young moldable minds? Textbook propaganda is a tool that has been used since the invention of the printing press by communist dictators and democratic capitalists to mold the thoughts of a child into the goals of the state.
Other world leaders and powers have used textbook propaganda throughout the years. In communist Russia, due to a low level of literacy, Stalin was not able to use all the same textbook propaganda techniques that other leaders of his day used, but he still filled any educational textbooks that Russians used, as well as informational videos and other such learning devices, with plenty of propaganda. Today Palestinian children are taught to act like Muslim suicide bombers who gloriously give their life for their country in the national resistance movement against Israel, the "occupier" and "colonialist". Palestinian school textbooks attack the very legitimacy of the Israeli state and discuss Jews as barbarian imposters, like donkeys who deserve to be slaughtered.
The European Union, a group of nations including Germany, France and Britain, promote textbooks that depict Europe as one big happy family. These teachings diminish the brutal history between member states and with nominal truth discuss things that not all nations of the EU agree with. There are nations that are not even part of the EU and there are nations like Britain that disagree with many of these EU teachings.
Yet as deceptive as Hitler's propaganda in Nazi Germany may sound, in many ways America pursues similar twisting of historical fact. School curriculum is filled with theories about evolution that are presented as fact. Children take in these deceptions and believe them. The Christian views on life are tossed out the window on the grounds of "Separation of Church and State". Yet, as Christianity is disparaged, Islam is encouraged. Islamic ideas are being promoted in history textbooks and school curriculum to encourage political correctness and goodwill towards Muslim neighbors. Some take a strong anti-Israeli bias, treating the Jews as the invading monsters and Palestine as the poor defender while not recounting the history of Palestinian terror. The inclusion of Islamic ideas and New Age Spiritualism is simply a move by humanists to try and draw in more support for their cause against the Christian worldview. Certainly the pendulum has swung too far against the Christian roots of America. Schools should not be allowed to mandate any religious doctrine of globalism, situational ethics, celebration of sexual diversity, and evolutionary theories as fact.
If schools outlaw religious teaching then they should be required to avoid subjects that have religious implications. Teaching on the origin of life should be left to the parents whose responsibility is raise and educate their child. The schools are a tool of the government designed to help parents with this job, not to do the parent's job for them.
FitzGerald's main achievement is the scutwork. She has pored through the pages of hundreds of musty American history textbooks, something nobody, I believe, has ever done before. She describes their contents, delineates their overall "philosophy," and shows how they changed from generation to generation. About what it all signifies, however, she has only confused and contradictory notions. She never really understands that her subject is the education--and miseducation--of a self-governing people. Still, FitzGerald's material is invaluable; when cast into a political history of which FitzGerald seems blissfully ignorant, it reveals a great deal about the way we are currently ruled.
The history begins just before the turn of the century, when the first school managers powerful enough to impose their conception of history on a large number of children introduced the first American history text to the public schools. Until then what little history American schoolchildren learned they had direct from their schoolmarms by way of a sort of oral tradition. What they learned, however, they learned so well that historian Mark Sullivan blamed nineteenth-century schoolmarms for delaying our entry into the first world war. The only history they taught, Sullivan complained in his six-volume chronicle Our Times, was the American Revolution, and the way they taught it had made it impossible for most Americans to believe that England was fighting for "democracy against autocracy" in the trenches of France. The schoolmarms' American Revolution is readily reconstructed. On one side stood the tattered sons of liberty, whose forebears had come to an unknown continent in search of religious freedom. On the other side stood a tyrannical king and his arrogant Redcoats, foredoomed in their pride to a stunning defeat. What better way than this to inculcate love of liberty and hatred of tyranny in the future citizens of a free republic?
Something had to be done quickly or democracy might one day break out. Educational leaders quickly worked out a solution. Let the secondary schools teach the children of workers what was fit only for workers. AsWoodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, sternly advised the Federation of High School Teachers: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." Since there was no way to stop "the masses" from entering high school, the only way to meet the crisis, in short, was to prevent them from learning anything liberating when they got there. Instead, the educational leaders said, the new secondary schools should offer vocational training in particular and something called industrial education in general. This, the influential Douglas Commission said in 1905. was a "new idea" in education. and in truth it was. Until ordinary Americans began attending secondary school, no secondary school in the civilized world had ever seen fit to teach its students a trade. FitzGerald attributes this vulgar innovation to the supposed fact that lofty university presidents like Wilson and Russell had lost their influence over public education--a perfect example of thoughtless snobbery.
The "new idea" must have been somewhat perplexing to schoolmarms of the old-fashioned sort. The public schools were supposed to train citizens, yet here were the country's leading educators--"we"--insisting they regard their pupils not as future citizens but as future working hinds, whom Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, urged teachers to "sort" by their "evident or probable destinies." If the schoolmarms were troubled, however, a stalwart band of educational reformers stood ready to reassure them that training Americans for their industrial "destiny" was the heart and soul of "democratic" education. By far the most important of the reassurers was John Dewey.
Neither the subtle reasoning, nor the ardent idealism of the famed educator mattered much in the history of American education. What proved important were a few of his salient principles. Suitably adapted, they have supplied educational leaders with the lasting framework for a pedagogical system designed to prevent "the masses" from ever learning in a classroom what a free people ought to know. For that purpose, Dewey's most important contribution was his conviction that democracy has little to do with politics and government. Democracy, according to Dewey, was "primarily a mode of associated living," which for most Americans chiefly meant working together in factories. Having stripped democracy of its political character, Dewey and his colleagues, who prided themselves on their "realism," went on to redefine it as "industrial cooperation." With this new, "realistic" definition, they effected a permanent pedagogical revolution. For one thing, it enabled the Deweyites (and more interested parties) to sever the venerable ties that bound the common schools to the needs and requirements of popular Government. The schools were to be adapted instead, Dewey wrote in 1897, "to the circumstances, needs, and opportunities of industrial civilization." Instead of the American Republic, the American economy would call the tune. The new "realistic" definition of democracy even stripped public education of its theoretical republican objective, which was, as Jefferson had said, to teach future citizens "how to judge for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom." Such knowledge was unlikely to enhance, and might well impair, "industrial cooperation." The new object of "democratic" education, Dewey said, was to teach every child "to perceive the essential interdependence of an industrial society." Thus instructed, the future citizen (i.e., factory worker) would develop what Dewey called "a socialized disposition."
Stripping Deweyite "realism" of its idealistic trappings proved but the work of a moment to the educational leaders, who knew a good thing when they saw one. In 1911, a committee of the National Education Association, the largest and most influential of the teachers' organizations, urged the nation's high schools to drop history altogether, on the Deweyesque grounds that it failed to promote the "social efficiency" of the ill-bred. Social studies, history's fledging rival, would be better able, said the committee quite correctly, to "accommodate youngsters to existing conditions." That was not what Dewey had in mind, but it was latent in his "cooperative" precepts, and the educational leaders were not the only ones to realize it. Revealingly enough, the first public-school system organized on Deweyesque lines was established in 1907 in Gary, Indiana, a one-year-old company town founded by, and largely in thrall to, the U.S. Steel Corporation. J. P. Morgan knew a good thing when he saw one too. So did the United States Congress. Under President Wilson's leadership, it began funding "vocational education" in the public schools, the first serious federal attempt to shape the content of public education.
FitzGerald does not try to explain why American parents, teachers, and local school boards resisted, circa 1911, what Americans since 1965 have accepted without demur. The general explanation, perhaps, is that corrupting a venerable republic is not the work of a day.
The old habits of thought would no doubt have proved a flimsy barrier had the educational leaders enjoyed in 1911 the power to impose their will on America's decentralized public education. Today, a quite small number of educators have virtually unchecked sway over the curriculum of America's public schools, which have become, as one educator put it in 1962, "a monolith under oligarchic control." The "textbook philosophy" (FitzGerald's phrase) the educational oligarchy propounds is the "philosophy" the textbook publishers dispense--one that the large majority of school districts will buy, and pass on to the overwhelming majority of students. In 1911 the educational elite had no such sweeping power. Local control of the common schools, though waning, had not yet become a sham. To a degree, it could still meet the purpose for which it was originally intended: preventing the "managers of states" from teaching a republic's children that "good citizenship" consists in "a rather small degree of knowledge of, and participation in, public affairs." The usurpation of local control in the years after World War I was to be an essential element in the corrupting of a venerable republic.
Traditional modes of thought, the absence of an educational oligarchy, and the middle-class political revolt combined to produce a surprising result. Although the new "industrial" pedagogy made rapid headway, America's schools, despite the united urging of big businessmen, trade unions, and leading politicians, refused to let go of history. Instead they fortified the curriculum with the only American history texts ever used that were not intended to corrupt future citizens. These texts flourished in the years between 1910 and 1930, which FitzGerald terms the "Hundred Flowers" era of American history texts. Written by trained historians, representing diverse points of view, the new texts, born of the Progressive revolt, were intensely political and remarkably free of cant. Their virtues are well worth noting, because eliminating those virtues was to be the immediate task of the educational establishment, which had to put off for another generation the extinction of political history.
The most popular textbook of the period was American History, by David Saville Muzzey, first published in 1911. It was the antithesis of "industrial education" in every respect, since the grand lesson of Muzzey's text was that politics matters greatly, and matters to every citizen. Muzzey's readers learned, first and foremost, that the actions of people made American history and that the high and the mighty, in fact, have power--a liberating truth in itself. Moreover, the powerful bore constant watching, for villainy was not unknown in high places. In Muzzey's history President Polk, for one, was a bastard who instigated an unjust war with Mexico in order to grab some territory. Readers of Muzzey learned that democracy in America, too, bore watching. Indeed, Muzzey's history of America is largely the history of the vicissitudes of democracy. A Yankee Republican of the old school, Muzzey seems to have viewed all modern life as one giant menace to liberty and self-government. The major problem of the age, he warned young readers, was "the corruption of the government by the money power." American democracy needed defending, and it had nothing to do with industrial cooperation.
While texts such as these were circulating, (often in watered-down revisions), the educational leaders seem to have bided their time until they were powerful enough to eliminate from the curriculum history lessons so inconducive to "social efficiency" and so unlikely to "accommodate youngsters to existing conditions." All through the post-Versailles years the nascent educational establishment, backed by state legislators, strengthened its hold on thepublic schools and on the schools that train public-school teachers. During those years the number of local school districts was cut from 120,000 to less than half that number. State educational commissions were established to reduce still further the formal autonomy of the remaining districts. By a dozen different devices--licensing laws, state guidelines, and so on--control of the curriculum passed completely out of the hands of citizens and into the grip of an increasingly tight-knit, ingrown professional oligarchy. All it needed to emasculate the lingering "Hundred Flowers" tradition was a sharp change in the political atmosphere. With the outbreak of World War II, the oligarchy struck at once, and the tradition, FitzGerald says, came "abruptly" to an end. For the next twenty-five years every new textbook used in the schools was written on the assumption that its readers were potential subversives.
The educational establishment, FitzGerald concludes, has deprived Americans of their "birthright," a personal loss she sincerely laments, but the judgment scarcely covers the ground. What the political history of the textbooks reveals is that a powerful few, gaining control of public education, have been depriving the American republic of citizens, and popular government of a people to defend it. And the American history textbook, so innocent-seeming and inconsequential, has been their well-chosen instrument.
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Native Americans Dehumanized by Demonizing Colonial Propaganda
Daniel N. Paul
NOTE: The following description of Systemic Racism, although it relates to events in localized areas of the Americas, is also applicable to all parts of the two Continents.
British officialdom, to keep English Subjects suitably aroused against the Eastern Amerindians, blamed them for a good many of the crimes - they used the term "outrages" in their reports - committed in their colonies. In the case of the Mi'kmaq, without evidence, they blamed them for all the so-called "outrages" that occurred in Acadia.
In fact, there is very little evidence to support a contention that the Mi'kmaq ever indulged in organized atrocities against their enemies. Renegade Mi'kmaq may have indulged in some, but, these were not condoned or sanctioned by Mi'kmaq governments, and were exceptions, not the rule.
The use of demonizing propaganda by governments, for the purpose of arousing public opinion to support their cause, is a well-established practice around the world. It was used for such during the 1990 Persian Gulf War. During that conflict, incidents of brutality, or invented ones, were reported widely by both sides.
The propaganda used to portray opponents as barbarians during the Gulf War was a modern version of the colonial demonizing propaganda that was used so effectively by European colonial authorities to dehumanize the First Nations Peoples of the Americas, which depicted them as bloodthirsty heathen savages.
First Nations Peoples Dehumanized and Victimized
Systemic Racism in Canada and Nova Scotia
Dr. Daniel N. Paul, C.M., O.N.S.
August 31, 2008
"Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race." - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”
“I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill.” Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott - 1920
Scott made his mark in Canadian history as the head of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, a department he had served since joining the federal civil service in 1879.
Even before Confederation, the Canadian government adopted a policy of assimilation (actually, it was the continuation of a policy that British colonial officials had pursued since 1713). The long term goal was to bring the Native peoples from what the white supremacist politicians and bureaucrats described as their ‘savage and unproductive state’ and force (English style) civilization upon them, thus making Canada a homogeneous society in the Anglo-Saxon and Christian tradition.
In 1920, under Scott's direction, it became mandatory for all native children between the ages of seven and fifteen to attend one of Canada's Residential Schools.
The following two quotes are from a presentation that I made as Chair of the Council on Mi’kmaq Education, on November 23, 2007, to the Nova Scotia Government’s Teacher Training Review Panel.
“I’ll start this discourse by thanking the Panel for providing the Council with an opportunity to put forward a proposal for reforming Nova Scotia’s teacher training program to the extent that graduating students will leave a training school with a positive opinion of the Mi’kmaq Nation. To achieve this goal we will advocate that true Mi’kmaq history be a required course for teacher training students. As matters now stand, which doesn’t enhance the effort to effectively counter the systemic stereotype racist image held by most of the majority towards our People, most teachers graduating from teaching training entities in this province know little, or nothing, about First Nations Peoples. And, unfortunately, much of what they do know can be categorized as “White washed history.”
Before proceeding further, I want to diverge from the subject for a moment to state, related to the fact that systemic racism has often caused me to suffer the indignity of being discriminated against because of who I am, that this opportunity to propose positive proactive action to correct a historical wrong through education is something that I’ve been wanting to do for years. If our proposal is accepted, and followed through, it will eventually help realize a long sought after result; non-First Nation peoples accepting our People as equals from a different progressive culture. Therefore, because I see it as essential for the success of the Mi’kmaq People’s future endeavours and prosperity in Nova Scotia, I do hope that during our discourse we can persuade the Panel to embrace what we will propose.”
To-date, nothing of substance has evolved from the presentation.
The Why and How Systemic Racism Evolves
A quote from an October 15, 2006 article by Stephanie M. Schwartz, The Arrogance of Ignorance; Hidden Away, Out of Sight and Out of Mind
“This is an article of facts about the lives of modern-day American Indians, a topic most mainstream American news organizations will not discuss.... It is not a plea for charity. It is not a promotion for non-profit organizations. It is not aimed for pity.... It is, however, an effort to dispel ignorance…. a massive, pervasive, societal ignorance filled with illusions and caricatures which, ultimately, serve only to corrupt the intelligence and decent intent of the average mainstream citizen. Only through knowledge and understanding can solutions be found....”
I recently received an Email from an American Indian leader asking if I could offer an explanation about why racial discrimination in the United States against First Nation Peoples is yet so widespread and pervasive. The following is an edited version of my reply:
“It’s the same on both sides of the border. Somehow, someway, pride in origins needs to be re-instilled in our People, and the non-First Nation population must be educated about the true histories of our Peoples. Then, somehow, someway, a desire to return to the self-sufficiency that was part and parcel of pre-European invasion First Nation existence must be reinstated into the expectations of our Peoples. Depending on another race of people's charity for survival is degrading and fosters feelings of inferiority and insecurity. The end result is that the idleness created for able-bodied People by living on handouts leads to drug, alcohol, family abuse, etc.”
Two Major Problems
First: The white man's condescending paternalism. The following is essential for First Nations Peoples to restore self-esteem. We need to come to know, and promote the truth; our intellectual abilities are equal to those of any race of people on the face of Mother Earth! We have the intellectual capability to do things for ourselves, we don’t need others to do things for us. Because we've been treated as mental incompetents, incapable of managing our own affairs by another race of people for centuries, doesn't mean that we have to accept the fabrication as fact. We have much to be proud of. Our People survived the hell on Mother Earth that the European invasion begot them, and are still here. That alone is something to be immensely proud of.
Second: The lack of knowledge about the true histories of First Nations among ourselves, and the general population is almost universal, with very negative results for First Nations. This is a vacuum that Canadian provinces can easily correct by proactive reform, if the will can be found, of education systems, which will require mandatory teaching of real First Nations history in schools. Such won’t be easy to accomplish. Elected officials will have to muster the fortitude to override the obstruction efforts of influential closet white supremacist individuals, who will fight diligently to preserve the status quo, which presently excludes real First Nations history from being included in the Province’s school curriculums.
One of the most serious problems arising for our Peoples, out of our historical exclusion, is, as mentioned, most First Nations Peoples have very little knowledge about their histories. For instance, most Mi’kmaq haven’t any knowledge whatsoever about the fact that their ancestors, trying to save their country from theft by invaders, fought the British bravely for over one hundred and thirty years. All most know about our culture is dancing and artwork.
The before-mentioned can be attributed in a large part to the hunter writing the history. Read most history books written by white men about the invasion and colonizing of the eastern seaboard of North America by Europeans, and you will find nary a positive comment about the heroic efforts made by the area’s original inhabitants to preserve their cultures and homelands. Most of them do not even acknowledge the existence of the great First Nations that once prospered in the area. When they do, it generally is in the most unflattering terms, barbarous people, savages, heathens, etc. One notable exception was made by Joseph Howe in an anti-Confederation speech he delivered in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1867:
“The Indians who fought your forefathers were open enemies, and had good reason for what they did. They were fighting for their country, which they loved, as we have loved it in these latter years. It was a wilderness. There was perhaps not a square mile of cultivation, or a road or a bridge anywhere. But it was their home, and what God in His bounty had given them they defended like brave and true men. They fought the old pioneers of our civilization for a hundred and thirty years, and during all that time they were true to each other and to their country, wilderness though it was....”
European Colonial History
To provide an overview of the horrendous treatment suffered by First Nation Peoples since the European invasion commenced, I’ll lightly touch upon European colonial history with one condensed paragraph. This is necessary because one would need volumes of books to adequately describe it in detail, which we do not have the time for today.
The European subjugation of the indigenous Peoples of the Americas was a crime against humanity that knows no equal in human history. By the time the invaders had managed to appropriate all the lands in the Americas that our ancestors had owned and occupied for millenniums, of the hundreds of diverse civilizations that had existed prior to Columbus, not one was left intact, and tens of millions were dead. During the process, indigenous people suffered every barbarity imaginable, mass murder, germ warfare, enslavement, rape, enforced starvation, relocation, etc. One of the favourite means used by the English to ethnically cleanse the land of its original inhabitants in North America was proclamations offering bounties for the scalps of First Nation men, women, and children. A barbarous means used by them, on three occasions against the Mi'kmaq, in Nova Scotia. Stemming from it, some United States jurisdictions continued to use these ungodly proclamations until the 1860s to try to eliminate some First Nation populations.
The following, related to the systemic racism created for First Nations by dehumanizing demonizing colonial propaganda, contains examples of some of the abhorrent acts that were visited upon First Nations Peoples. One can be certain, if enlightened action is not taken to stop it, similar abhorrent acts will continue to occur for the foreseeable future
Why Racism and Other Forms of Intolerance Attitudes Persist
In his discourse in, Lessons at the Halfway Point , Michael Levine accurately identifies why intolerance exists: "If you don't personally get to know people from other racial, religious or cultural groups, its very easy to believe ugly things about them and make them frightening in your mind."
If Europeans had gotten to know, and had accepted indigenous Americans and Africans as equals during colonial times, instead of adopting White supremacist racist beliefs that negatively, and erroneously, depicted both Peoples as wild inhuman savages for the better part of five centuries, these peoples of colour would not have suffered the indescribable hells they did across the Americas, and, in far too many cases, still do.
The following shows how the racism problem that First Nation Peoples suffer is pervasive and, why a Nation of civilized people must fight together to overcome it!
First Nation Invisibility
Buffy Saint-Marie, a member of the Cree Nation, acclaimed singer and human rights activist, stated during an October 1970, interview with the Los Angeles Times, that Indian children “are not taught to be proud they’re Indian. Here the melting pot stands with arms open - if you’re willing to get bleached first.”
This statement by Dalhousie University professor Susan Sherwin about the underlying cause of racism is the best description I’ve ever read. It puts into words why it is so hard to get society to recognize, and accept, that the systemic racism that victimizes First Nations Peoples exists: “....the greatest danger of oppression lies where bias is so pervasive as to be invisible...”
Examples of First Nation invisibility in Canada
The following is a quote from a story published in the May 30, 2007 edition of the Globe and Mail. “Tim Horton’s serves up some controversy” No Drunken Indians Allowed.' The sign was put up by a young employee at an Alberta outlet.
The incident provides a great example of how deeply ingrained in Canadian society systemic racist beliefs about First Nations Peoples are. When a young Caucasian teenager hangs a sign stating "No Drunken Indians Allowed," it shows that she has been taught by others that expressing such racist garbage about First Nation Peoples is not wrong. Her action exposes the reality that there is a long festering sickness loose in Canadian society that needs to be dealt with by federal and provincial governments effectively. After all, it was their predecessors, and British colonial administrations, that instilled in the subconscious of this society, by using dehumanizing demonizing propaganda about First Nations Peoples, the systemic racism that plagues our Peoples today.
Our home, un-native land
First Nations initially overlooked in list of things defining Canada By GREGORY BONNELL The Canadian Press Thu. Jul 17, 2008 - 4:32 AM
TORONTO — Aboriginal people have been granted the 102nd spot on a government-sponsored list of 101 things that most define Canada after online respondents pointed out that First Nations people, culture and symbols weren’t included in the original tally.
The oversight and late addition reflects how the historic marginalization of First Nations people has pushed them to the fringes of Canadian consciousness, an aboriginal studies instructor said...
Revisionist History
In the case of First Nations it's their factual History, which is slowly replacing the fairy tale Caucasian version of demonizing European colonial propaganda, that is branded by those who believe in the supremacy of the European to be "revisionist history". The fairy tale version, unfortunately, is still widely accepted and used by many writers as undisputed fact. I can attest to the veracity of this statement from first hand experience. When my book, We Were Not the Savages , was first published, which outed the widespread use of scalp proclamations by the British, and other atrocities committed by them against Eastern North American First Nations Peoples, I was roundly condemned by many Anglo individuals, from across the spectrum of society, as a “revisionist.”
The Dehumanizing Effects of Systemic Racism
Systemic racism is an evil that tarnishes the good name of most of the "civilized" societies of the Americas. In my view, a society which permits it's First Nations Peoples, in modern times, to continue to be degraded by dehumanizing Eurocentric colonial propaganda is more than a little short on the civilized side.
The negativity that First Nations Peoples suffer from systemic racism in modern times is pervasive and a burden that prevents equal participation in the good life that the majority enjoy. Although both claim to be compassionate countries, with justice for all as a core value, Canada and the United States, with a few notable U.S. internal exceptions, Maine and Montana for instance, are not making any viable effort to substitute colonial propaganda with the truth.
To emphasize the point that they are not substituting fiction with fact, the following is a comparison that shows how racially motivated remarks about other racial groups are dealth with by society, compared to those made about First Nations Peoples:
On April 4, 2007, Don Imus, a radio talk show host made a sexiest racist remark about a female sports team, whose players were mostly of African American heritage, “nappy headed hos.” Rightfully, there was condemnation across the board and he was fired.
During the prior two weeks to that event, I saw three shows on North American T.V., where these degrading terms, describing First Nation Peoples were used: “Injuns,” “Savage Redskins,” “Indian givers,” “Acting like a bunch of wild Indians,” not a word of condemnation. Why not? The answer is simple, a subconscious belief among the majority that the statements are true.
During the colonization of the Americas by invading Europeans tens of millions of First Nations People died from out and out genocidal practices - starvation, the deliberate spreading of European diseases, etc., at their hands. The following is a prime example of how religiously the catastrophe is ignored by Canada and the United States.
Virginia Tech Murders. A sample of the headlines that publisized the horrendous deed in the United States and Canada: "The worst shooting rampage in American history…" "Massacre and Mourning, 33 die in worst shooting in U.S. History," "Rampage called worst mass shooting in U.S. history." "What first appeared to be a single shooting death unfolded into the worst gun massacre in the nation's history.”
In response a First Nation person might want to know: What about the Massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado? It's a historical fact that Methodist minister Col. Chivington and his soldiers massacred between 200 and 400 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, most of the victims were women, children, and elderly men. Chivington specifically ordered the killing of children. When asked why, he said, "Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice."
Another example: At Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the U.S. 7th Cavalry, on December 29, 1890, attacked, while they were engaged in a spiritual practice known as the "Ghost Dance,” 350 unarmed Lakota Sioux. Approximately 90 warriors and 200 women and children were killed. Although the attack was officially reported by Field Commander General Nelson A. Miles as an "unjustifiable massacre," twenty three soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the slaughter. The unarmed Lakota men fought back with bare hands. The elderly men and women stood and sang their death songs while falling under the hail of bullets. Soldiers stripped the bodies of the dead Lakota, keeping their ceremonial religious clothing as souvenirs. In spite of this, modern US governments have been steadfast in refusing to revoke the medals.
Joan Redfern, a Lakota Sioux remarks: "To say the Virginia shooting is the worst in all of U.S. history is to pour salt on old wounds. It means erasing and forgetting all of our ancestors who were killed in the past."
Justice Comparison
In 1995, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were accused and convicted of murdering, torturing, and raping two white girls - horrific crimes. After conviction, Bernardo was sentenced to life, and designated a dangerous offender. He is kept in isolation and, in all likelihood, will never get out of prison. Karla, of course, swung a deal and is now out free.
At the same time in Saskatchewan John Martin Crawford, a previously convicted murderer and rapist of a Cree woman in 1983, was tried and convicted for torturing, raping, and murdering three more Cree women. There is evidence that he may have killed and raped more, and he has a history of committing other violent acts. For these horrific acts, Crawford is serving three concurrent life sentences in open prison confinement, with no chance of parole for 20 years, he has not been declared a dangerous offender.
Crown prosecutor Terry Hinz stated during an interview: "There is no reason why the Paul Bernardo case should have received more publicity than the John Martin Crawford case."
These comments made by trial judge Wright during the conviction process answer best why the national media all but ignored this horrendous case:
"What was it about these four victims that made Mr. Crawford feel that he could take their lives after sexually assaulting them, confining them, terrorizing them...?
“And finally, what on earth can explain his actions in mutilating two of them? I refer to his conviction with respect to Ms. Serloin; she was left naked, the final indignity, on her back and exposed and mutilated by biting. Ms. Taysup's arm was cut off at the elbow, for what possible reason?
“It appears to me that Mr. Crawford was attracted to his victims for four reasons: one, they were young; second, they were women; third, they were Native; and fourth, they were prostitutes... The accused treated them with contempt.... He seemed determined to destroy every vestige of their humanity. He left three of them naked and lying on the ground. There is a kind of ferocity in these actions that reminds me of a wild animal, a predator.
“The accused has shown no remorse, absolutely none, no regrets, there's been no effort to explain his actions and, in fact, we know from the tapes that he laughed about the killings." Sensational horrific stuff, isn't it? Thus, there is no rational conclusion that can be drawn from the media's indifference, other than that these women were viewed by them as only "Indians" and, because of they were, of no interest. An example of systemic racism at its worst.
The author of Just Another Indian, journalist Warren Goulding, offers his opinion of why Crawford's crime spree has largely been ignored by the media.
"Race, geography, incompetence, and economics all play a role.," "There are no easy answers to explain Canadians' indifference to this case then, or now, but as a society we must ask ourselves the questions."
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Junior Marshall Case, a Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq boy who was convicted of murder because he was a Mi’kmaq, which needs no elaboration here.
The following is a quote from the November 12 issue of the Halifax Herald
VANCOUVER — Frank Paul spent the last night of his life crawling on his hands and knees at the police station, from where he was dragged to a police wagon and then dumped, drunk and soaking wet, in a back alley where he died.
But Paul’s family heard a starkly different explanation from police when they were finally called about his death on the night of Dec. 6, 1998.
"They said he died in a hit-and-run and that he was found in a ditch," Paul’s cousin, Peggy Clement, said from the New Brunswick community of Elsipogtog, formerly known as Big Cove.”
Paul’s official cause of death was hypothermia.
For Steven Kelleher, the lawyer representing the family, one big question about Paul’s fate begs an answer: "Why?"
"Why was there such a profound and unanimous indifference to this man’s life and death? Lethal indifference."
"Expert" Opinions
The following is a quote from a column by Jonathan Kay, published by the National Post, October 23, 2007, which illustrates vividly that you can write and have published by a respected publishing entity in this country just about anything about First Nations Peoples, no matter how vile it is.
“....A proper native policy would be guided by the three principles listed above.... The most decrepit and remote reserves, ... would simply be torn down -- their inhabitants installed at government expense in population centres of the residents' choice. The hundreds of millions of dollars that go into running these hell-holes would be used to teach job skills, detox the drunks, educate the children and otherwise integrate the families into mainstream Canadian life....
Self-government would be possible, but only in the same limited way that any Canadian city or town is self-governing. The conceit that native reserves can be re-conceived as culturally distinct "nations" would be given up in favour of a model that promotes integration....
Off the reservation: The reserve system is Canada's worst moral failing. Let's do the right thing and get rid of it. “
NOTE: I had published in the May 26, 2000 issue of the Halifax Herald a column entitled, Where is society's outrage over proposed genocide?, the following is a quote from it.
The headline "Book blames reserves for natives’ plight" appeared over a front-page story in the April 17 issue of this newspaper. The story revealed that in his soon-to-be-published book, First Nations, Second Thoughts, author Tom Flanagan (University of Calgary Professor) advocated the extinction by assimilation of Canada's First Nations Peoples as a means to solve the country's so-called "Indian Problem."
Flanagan, who at the time was an influential Alliance party policy advisor, was not expelled from the party for advocating in his book the extinction of our Peoples by assimilation. Nor did he suffer any penalty from society for asserting in it that First Nation Peoples, because their cultures were not identical to European models, were not civilized. In fact, he has been the recipient of many awards, i.e., the Donner Foundation awarded him its writing prize of $25,000. Alliance party brass did not react in horror to his outrageous suggestions. Today, he is still used as a consultant by the federal government, in fact he led the 2005 PC election campaign.
The before-mentioned examples are just a few of a multitude that could be cited to demonstrate that Canadians have a serious problem of systemic racist attitudes about First Nations Peoples to deal with. To see the relegation of the horrendous murders and abuse of our peoples to a footnote in the obscure corners of the news media, just because of their race, is unforgivable. This is even more so when the offending society promotes itself as a bastion of tolerance, justice and equality for all!
It should be noted that individuals such as Kay and Flanagan always blame First Nation Peoples for their sorry state, never the racism of their own ancestors that created the hardship that our People still suffer today. I’ve yet to hear of an instance where one of them has called for an in-depth investigation into the historical performance of the Department of Indian Affairs. Is it because it has been staffed, over the years by white men, who were hell-bent on solving the “Indian Problem” by engineering and promoting policies and programs to destroy First Nations by assimilation, not lobbying for their acceptance and prosperity. I can state, without hesitation, that such a report, if conducted with outing the unvarnished truth as it’s goal, would shock most Canadians profoundly.
I believe that the before cited recent actions and behaviourial conduct by Caucasian society towards our Peoples explains why colonial Governor Edward Cornwallis, although its been amply proven that he indulged in what can be described as genocidal behaviour by trying to exterminate the Mi'kmaq, offering bounties for the scalps of men, women, and children, is still honoured by Nova Scotia and Canada. Can you imagine there being a statue of him in a public park, or having a junior high School, among many other things named after him, if he had tried to exterminate a white race? But, because he only tried to exterminate red people, it’s okay to continue to honour him. By doing so society demeans itself and teaches its children to be racist.
Examples of Systemic Racism - Nova Scotia Style
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." A great piece of wisdom! I don't know who coined it; therefore, proper accreditation cannot be given. However, when writing or talking about the intolerant views of people, I prefer to use ignorance as an excuse for the intolerance displayed. "Stupidity" only comes into play when people indicate by their continued prejudices, that they are too stupid to learn how to recognize and cure their ignorance.
The following are examples of some of the negative incidents, because of systemic racists beliefs among non-First Nation peoples, that I've dealth with in recent times:
An elderly Scottish gentleman, after the first edition of my book, We Were Not the Savages, was published in 1993, told me in a shopping mall. "You creature you, how dare you be critical of those who have done so much for your people. My ancestors educated yours and made their lives complete!" He had not read the book, just some reviews. I suggested he read the book, gave him my card so that he could contact me afterwards, and haven’t heard from him since.
The following is a quote from a speech that was delivered by a white male speaker at a business people's forum I attended in Dartmouth, in the early nineteen nineties: "our ancestors came to the Americas five centuries ago, found, and started populating and developing two vast and vacant continents." He was most apologetic, and embarrassed, when I pointed out to him that when Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, the estimated population of the two continents was around 95 million:
This nugget, "since responsible government was established here by Europeans," was uttered in a speech made by a former speaker of the Nova Scotia legislature, Art Donahue, to a human rights conference at the Metro Center, which I attended in the nineteen nineties. He ignored, because of ignorance of history, the fact that the Mi'kmaq had developed and implemented responsible government in the area tens of centuries before the European invasion commenced.
The following is a racist insult, depicting us as irresponsible bloodthirsty hunters, made by an official of the Nova Scotia Wildlife Federation, which was published widely in newspapers, T.V., Etc., after we had signed a hunting agreement with the province, without being condemned as racist hype by the news media. "the Micmacs will coat the province, from Yarmouth to Sydney, with the blood of our wildlife." To counter this garbage, I spent, on behalf of the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq, approximately $25,000 on positive newspaper ads. Under the agreement, we had an allocation of 2,000 deer for the first year, only 400 were harvested, and, of course, wildlife still exist today in the Province.
Three highway signs that I lobbied successfully to have changed:
This sign, Annapolis Royal, established 1605, Canada's oldest settlement, was placed at an exit from a newly constructed by-pass express highway to the village of Annapolis Royal. It did not recognize this fact; North America had First Nation settlements for millenniums before Europeans set up any.
After hearing about, and seeing it, I contacted the mayor of the Town of Annapolis Royal, the Warden of Annapolis County, and the Department of Transportation, and voiced my outrage. After they were reminded about First Nation existence, the Mayor and Warden were shocked that they had supported the wording of the sign. Within a few days the signs were removed, and I was invited to a joint meeting of the Councils, so that they could formally apologise. The sign now reads: Annapolis Royal, established 1605, Stroll Through the Centuries.
Signs on highway 102, giving notice of Bedford exits, didn't acknowledge that the Mi'kmaq had been using the Bedford location as a stopping place for tens of centuries before Europeans did. It was recommended by author Elsie Tolson to the Town of Bedford. “Bedford, a Stopping Place Since 1503"
Because the Mi’kmaq had been stopping in the area for tens of centuries, I arranged a meeting with Elsie, and pointed out to her the erroneous message the sign portrayed. She was appalled by the fact that she had not taken into consideration the existence of our ancestors. With her cooperation, the sign now reads, Bedford, A Traditional Stopping Place
This 1997 incident of highway naming borders on the unbelievable.
Background: In 1744, the Mi’kmaq and allies had laid siege on several occasions to the fort at Annapolis Royal. Mascarene, the fort’s governor, appealed to the governor of Massachuetts Bay Colony, William Shirley, for military assistance. Shirley responded by declaring war on the Mi’kmaq, which included a bounty to be paid for the scalps of Mi’kmaq men, women, and children. To help enforce his declaration of war, he sent Captain John Gorham and his Rangers to Nova Scotia. They, by brutally killing many Mi’kmaq, soon established a reputation for barbarity that didn’t take a back seat to the actions of other barbarians. His Rangers were also involved in enforcing Cornwallis’s 1749 proclamation for Mi’kmaq scalps, men, women, and children. Because of their murderous reputations, even the British civilian and military populations of the Annapolis garrison did not welcome these barbarians with open arms. In fact - some say with good cause - many loyal British subjects were terrified of them.
In spite of having this knowledge, HRM municipal councillor Bob Harvey recommended to the Department of Highways that it name a connector highway, connecting Bedford and Sackville, Captain John Gorham Boulevard, which it did, the signs went up. I responded in January 1998 by writing a newspaper column detailing to some extent Gorham’s barbarous history, which even prompted the Halifax Herald to write an opinion demanding that the sign be removed.
The Department of Highways could be excused to some extent because its employees were ignorant of our history, but Bob Harvey, a former school teacher can not. He was well aware of Gorham’s brutality. After I educated highway staff a bit, the sign came down, and the highway was renamed. You can visit this Website http://www.alts.net/ns1625/gorhamj.html to read more about the subject.
I’ll end my narrative with the proposal I made to the Teacher Training Panel for begining the process of eliminating the systemic racism that degrades the First Nations Peoples of Canada, and the Americas.
“Please keep in mind that across the board acceptance of our People by all facets of Canadian society as equal players is essential for our future prosperity and well-being. This is so because, as demonstrated, systemic racism has marginalized and excluded First Nations Peoples for centuries, and is the root of the discrimination we still suffer.
After considering various options that could be used to negate the systemic racism that colonial propaganda created to demean our People, some of them tried without success, I’ve concluded that there is no other way but through education that it can be effectively accomplished.
We now put on the table for consideration by government a proposal for creative proactive reform of the Province’s teacher training education system, which is intended to see taught in teacher training facilities an accurate complementary picture of the Mi’kmaq Nation. In the future, if implemented, graduating students will know that our ancestors abided in a prosperous, socially caring, free, democratic, “YOU” society, prior to European invasion. Most important, course material must impart the fact that our ancestors fought the British to try to preserve their culture and country, not for the perverse pleasure of slaughtering innocent people.
With the goal mentioned, eliminating the systemic racism that colonial propaganda created, and impedes the return to self government by our Peoples, we propose that the Province’s teacher training facilities be required to adopt a mandatory course on the history of the Mi’kmaq Nation, with emphasis on post-European invasion events, and all the warts that go with it. A course all students will have to pass in order to acquire a B.E.D.
I promote such a reform wholeheartedly, because I consider inclusion of true Mi’kmaq history in teacher training curriculum a vital element for successfully removing, in the foreseeable future, from the non-First Nation sub-conscience, the negative picture they hold of First Nations. It will have other positive benefits for the Province; among them, it will be used as a pioneering role model of progressive racial education policy for the rest of the country to follow, and a prosperous Mi’kmaq People will increase the prosperity of all Nova Scotians.
The structuring of a Mi’kmaq history course for teacher training facilities should not be hard. Such individuals as Don Julien, Professor John Reid, Professor Geoffrey Plank, myself, to name a few, can be recruited to help. Also, there is historical information, published in several new books that would be of invaluable assistance towards constructing such a course; examples, "An Unsettled Conquest" - "A Great and Nobel Scheme" - "Accounting for Genocide: Canada's Bureaucratic Assault on Aboriginal People" - "We Were Not the Savages" - "1491, by Charles C. Mann".
I’ll close with a quote from a report submitted to Nova Scotia’s British Governor Cary in 1843 by Joseph Howe, who was the first Indian Commissioner appointed under the provisions of 1842 legislation, - "An Act to Provide for the Instruction and Permanent Settlement of the Indians".
“I trust, however, that should your Excellency not be satisfied with the results of these first experiments, the blame may be laid upon the Commissioner, rather than be charged upon the capacity, or urged against the claims of a people, for whose many good qualities a more extended intercourse has only increased my respect, and who have, if not by Treaty, at least by all the ties of humanity, a claim upon the Government of the Country, which nothing but their entire extinction, or their elevation to a more permanent, and happy position in the scale of Society, can ever entirely discharge.”
My friends, you can be very instrumental in helping us to achieve, at long last, what Howe envisioned for our People one hundred and sixty four years ago in 1843: “their elevation to a more permanent, and happy position in the scale of Society.” Please consider doing so.
*******
The Propaganda of History
By W. E. B. Du Bois
How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery.
The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and established democracy.
What are American children taught today about Reconstruction? Helen Boardman has made a study of current textbooks and notes these three dominant theses:
1. All Negroes were ignorant.
“All were ignorant of public business.” (Woodburn and Moran, “Elementary American History and Government,” p. 397.)
“Although the Negroes were now free, they were also ignorant and unfit to govern themselves.” (Everett Barnes, “American History of Grammar Grade,” p. 334.)
“The Negroes got control of these states. They had been slaves all their lives, and were so ignorant they did not even know the letters of the alphabet. Yet they now sat in the state legislatures and made the laws.” (D. H. Montgomery, “The Leading Facts of American History,” p. 332.)
“In the South, the Negroes who had so suddenly gained their freedom did not know what to do with it.” (Hubert Cornish and Thomas Hughes, “History of the United States for Schools,” p. 345.)
“In the legislatures, the Negroes were so ignorant that they could only watch their white leaders—carpetbaggers, and vote aye or no as they were told.” (S. E. Forman, “Advanced American History,” Revised Edition, p. 452.)
“Some legislatures were made up of a few dishonest white men and several Negroes, many too ignorant to know anything about law-making.” (Hubert Cornish and Thomas Hughes, “History of the United States for Schools,” p. 349.)
2. All Negroes were lazy, dishonest and extravagant.
“These men knew not only nothing about the government, but also cared for nothing except what they could gain for themselves.” (Helen F. Giles, “How the United States Became a World Power,” p. 7.)
“Legislatures were often at the mercy of Negroes, childishly ignorant, who sold their votes openly, and whose ‘loyalty’ was gained by allowing them to eat, drink and clothe themselves at the state’s expense.” (William J. Long, “America—A History of Our Country,” p. 392.)
“Some Negroes spent their money foolishly, and were worse off than they had been before.” (Carl Russell Fish, “History of America,” p. 385.)
“This assistance led many freed men to believe that they need no longer work. They also ignorantly believed that the lands of their former masters were to be turned over by Congress to them, and that every Negro was to have as his allotment “forty acres and a mule.” (W. F. Gordy, “History of the United States,” Part II, p. 336.)
“Thinking that slavery meant toil and that freedom meant only idleness, the slave after he was set free was disposed to try out his freedom by refusing to work.” (S. E. Forman, “Advanced American History,” Revised Edition.)
“They began to wander about, stealing and plundering. In one week, in a Georgia town, 150 Negroes were arrested for thieving,” (Helen F. Giles, “How the United States Became a World Power,” p. 6.)
3. Negroes were responsible for bad government during Reconstruction:
“Foolish laws were passed by the black law-makers, the public money was wasted terribly and thousands of dollars were stolen straight. Self-respecting Southerners chafed under the horrible régime.” (Emerson David Fite, “These United States,” p. 37.)
“In the exhausted states already amply ‘punished’ by the desolation of war, the rule of the Negro and his unscrupulous carpetbagger and scalawag patrons, was an orgy of extravagance, fraud and disgusting incompetency.” (David Saville Muzzey, “History of the American People, p. 408.)
“The picture of Reconstruction which the average pupil in these sixteen States receives is limited to the South. The South found it necessary to pass Black Codes for the control of the shiftless and sometimes vicious freedmen. The Freedmen’s Bureau caused the Negroes to look to the North rather than to the South for support and by giving them a false sense of equality did more harm than good.
With the scalawags, the ignorant and non-propertyholding Negroes under the leadership of the carpetbaggers, engaged in a wild orgy of spending in the legislatures. The humiliation and distress of the Southern whites was in part relieved by the Ku Klux Klan, a secret organization which frightened the superstitious blacks.”
Grounded in such elementary and high school teaching, an American youth attending college today would learn from current textbooks of history that the Constitution recognized slavery; that the chance of getting rid of slavery by peaceful methods was ruined by the Abolitionists; that after the period of Andrew Jackson, the two sections of the United States “had become fully conscious of their conflicting interests. Two irreconcilable forms of civilization … in the North, the democratic … in the South, a more stationary and aristocratic civilization.”
He would read that Harriet Beecher Stowe brought on the Civil War; that the assault on Charles Sumner was due to his “coarse invective” against a South Carolina Senator; and that Negroes were the only people to achieve emancipation with no effort on their part. The Reconstruction was a disgraceful attempts to subject white people to ignorant Negro rule; and that, according to a Harvard professor of history (the italics are ours), “Legislative expenses were grotesquely extravagant; the colored members in some states, engaging in a saturnalia of corrupt expenditure” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition, Volume 22, p. 815, by Frederick Jackson Turner.)
In other words, he would in all probability complete his education without any idea of the part which the black race has played in America; of the tremendous moral problem of abolition; of the cause and meaning of the Civil War and the relation which Reconstruction had to democratic government and the labor movement today.
Herein lies more than mere omission and difference of emphasis. The treatment of the period of Reconstruction reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans. The editors of the fourteenth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica asked me for an article on the history of the American Negro. From my manuscript they cut out all my references to Reconstruction. I insisted on including the following statement:
White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools.
This the editor refused to print, although he said that the article otherwise was “in my judgment, and in the judgment of others in the office, an excellent one, and one with which it seems to me we may all be well satisfied.” I was not satisfied and refused to allow the article to appear.
War and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. It is the duty of humanity to heal them. It was therefore soon conceived as neither wise nor patriotic to speak of all the causes of strife and the terrible results to which national differences in the United States had led. And so, first of all, we minimized the slavery controversy which convulsed the nation from Missouri Compromise down to the Civil War. On top of that, we passed by Reconstruction with a phrase of regret or disgust.
But are these reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying Truth? If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.
If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.
It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is “lies agreed upon”; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?
Here in the United States we have a clear example. It was morally wrong and economically retrogressive to build human slavery in the United States in the eighteenth century. We know that now, perfectly well; and there were many Americans North and South who knew this and said it in the eighteenth century. Today, in the face of new slavery established elsewhere in the world under other names and guises, we ought to emphasize this lesson of the past.
Moreover, it is not well to be reticent in describing that past. Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center. The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law.
One reads, for instance,
Charles and Mary Beard’s Rise of American Civilization, with a comfortable feeling that nothing right or wrong is involved. Manufacturing and industry develop in the North; agrarian feudalism develops in the South. They clash, as winds and water strive, and the stronger forces develop the tremendous industrial machine that governs us so magnificently and selfishly today.
Yet in this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of this story, for the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful and sacrifice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in the fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy. Can all this be omitted or half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself scientific?
Or, to come nearer the center and climax of this fascinating history: What was slavery in the United States? Just what did it mean to the owner and the owned? Shall we accept the conventional story of the old slave plantation and its owner’s fine, aristocratic life of cultured leisure? Or shall we note slave biographies, like those of Charles Ball, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass; the careful observations of Olmsted and the indictment of Hinton Helper?
No one can read that first thin autobiography of
Frederick Douglass and have left many illusions about slavery. And if truth is our object, no amount of flowery romance and the personal reminiscences of its protected beneficiaries can keep the world from knowing that slavery was a cruel, dirty, costly and inexcusable anachronism, which nearly ruined the world’s greatest experiment in democracy. No serious and unbiased student can be deceived by the fairly tale of a beautiful Southern slave civilization. If those who really had opportunity to know the South before the war wrote the truth, it was a center of widespread ignorance, undeveloped resources, suppressed humanity and unrestrained passions, with whatever veneer of manners and culture that could live above these depths.
The Civil War
Coming now to the Civil War, how for a moment can anyone who reads the Congressional Globe from 1850 to 1860, the lives of contemporary statesmen and public characters, North and South, the discourses in the newspapers and accounts of meetings and speeches, doubt that Negro slavery was the cause of the Civil War? What do we gain by evading this clear fact, and talking in vague ways about “Union” and “State Rights” and differences in civilization as the cause of that catastrophe?
Of all historic facts there can be none clearer than that for four long and fearful years the South fought to perpetuate human slavery; and that the nation which “rose so bright and fair and died so pure of stain” was one that had a perfect right to be ashamed of its birth and glad of its death. Yet one monument in North Carolina achieves the impossible by recording of Confederate soldiers: “They died fighting for liberty!”
On the other hand, consider the North and the Civil War. Why should we be deliberately false, like Woodward, in Meet
General Grant, and represent the North as magnanimously freeing the slave without any effort of his part?
The American Negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far as I know, that ever became free without any effort of their own. . . .
They had not started the war no ended it. They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals, and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land a mule.
The North went to war without the slightest idea of freeing the slave. The great majority of Northerners from Lincoln down pledged themselves to protect slavery, and they hated and harried Abolitionists. But on the other hand, the thesis which Beale tends to support that the whole North during and after the war was chiefly interested in making money, is only half true; it was abolition and belief in democracy that gained for a time the upper hand after the war and led the North in Reconstruction; business followed abolition in order to maintain the tariff, pay the bonds and defend the banks.
To call this business program “the program of the North” and ignore abolition is unhistorical. In growing ascendancy for a calculable time was a great moral movement which turned the North from its economic defense of slavery and led it to Emancipation. Abolitionists attacked slavery because it was wrong and their moral battle cannot be truthfully minimized or forgotten. Nor does this fact deny that the majority of Northerners before the war were not abolitionists, that they attacked slavery only in order to win the war and enfranchised the Negro to secure this result.
One has but to read the debates in Congress and state papers from Abraham Lincoln down to know that the decisive action which ended the Civil War was the emancipation and arming of the black slave; that, as Lincoln said: “Without the military help of black freedmen, the war against the South could not have been won.” The freedmen, far from being the inert recipients of freedom at the hands of philanthropists, furnished 200,000
soldiers in the Civil War who took part in nearly 200 battles and skirmishes, and in addition perhaps 300,000 other as effective laborers and helpers.
In proportion to population, more Negroes than whites fought in the Civil War. These people, withdrawn from the support of the Confederacy, with threat of withdrawal of millions more, made the opposition of the slaveholder useless, unless they themselves freed and armed their own slaves. This was exactly what they stared to do; they were only restrained by realizing that such action removed the very cause for which they began fighting. Yet one would search current American histories almost in vain to find a clear statement or even faint recognition of these perfectly well-authenticated facts.
Reconstruction
All this is but preliminary to the kernel of the historic problem with which this book deals, and that is Reconstruction. The chorus of agreement concerning the attempt to reconstruct and organize the South after the Civil War and emancipation is overwhelming. There is scarce a child in the street that cannot tell you that the whole effort was a hideous mistake and an unfortunate incident, based on ignorance, revenge, and the perverse determination to attempt the impossible; that the history of the United States from 1866 to 1876 is something of which the nation ought to be ashamed and which did more to retard and set back the American Negro than anything that has happened to him; while at the same time it grievously and wantonly wounded again a part of the nation already hurt to death.
True it is that the Northern historians writing just after, the war had scant sympathy for the South, and wrote ruthlessly of “rebels” and “slave-drivers.” They had at least the excuse of a war psychosis.
As a young labor leader, Will Herberg, writes:
The great traditions of this period and especially of Reconstruction are shamelessly repudiated by the official heirs of Stevens and Sumner. In the last quarter of a century hardly a single book has appeared consistently championing or sympathetically interpreting the great ideas of the crusade against slavery, whereas scores and hundreds have dropped from the presses in ignoble ‘extenuation’ of the North, in open apology for the Confederacy, in measureless abuse of the Radical figures of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction period as the logical culmination of decades of previous development, has borne the brunt of the reaction.
First of all, we have
James Ford Rhodes’ history of the United States. Rhodes was trained not as an historian but as an Ohio business man.
He had no broad formal education. When he had accumulated a fortune, he surrounded himself with a retinue of clerks and proceeded to manufacture a history of the United States by mass production. His method was simple. He gathered a vast number of authorities; he selected from these authorities those whose testimony supported his thesis, and he discarded the others. The majority report of the great Ku Klux investigation, for instance, he laid aside in favor of the minority report, simply because the latter supported his sincere belief. In the report and testimony of the Reconstruction Committee of Fifteen, he did practically the same thing.
Above all, he begins his inquiry convinced, without admitting any necessity of investigation, that Negroes are an inferior race:
No large policy in our country has ever been so conspicuous a failure as that of forcing universal Negro suffrage upon the South. The Negroes who simply acted out their nature, were not to blame. How indeed could they acquire political honesty? What idea could barbarism thrust into slavery obtain of the rights of property? …
“From the Republican policy came no real good to the Negroes. Most of them developed no political capacity, and the few who raised themselves above the mass, did not reach a higher order of intelligence.
Rhodes was primarily the historian of property; of economic history, and the labor movement, he knew nothing; of democratic government, he was contemptuous. He was trained to make profits. He used his profits to write history. He speaks again and again of the rulership of “intelligence and property” and he makes a plea that intelligent use of the ballot for the benefit of property is the only read foundation of democracy.
Scholars of Columbia and Hopkins
The real frontal attack on Reconstruction, as interpreted by the leaders of national thought in 1870 and for some time thereafter, came from the universities and particularly from Columbia and Johns Hopkins.
The movement began with Columbia University and with the advent of John W. Burgess of Tennessee and William A. Dunning of New Jersey as professors of political science and history.
Burgess was an ex-Confederate soldier who started to a little Southern college with a box of books, a box of tallow candles and a Negro boy; and his attitude toward the Negro race in after years was subtly colored by this early conception of Negroes as essentially property like books and candles. Dunning was a kindly and impressive professor who was deeply influenced by a growing group of young Southern students and began with them to re-write the history of the nation from 1860 to 1880, in more or less conscious opposition to the classic interpretation of New England.
Burgess was frank and determined in his anti-Negro thought. He expounded his theory of Nordic supremacy which colored all his political theories:
The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason; has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind. To put such a race of men in possession of a "state" government in a system of federal government is to trust them with the development of political and legal civilization upon the most important subjects of human life, and to do this in communities with a large white population is simply to establish barbarism in power over civilization.
Burgess is a Tory and open apostle of reaction. He tells us that the nation now believes “that it is the white man’s mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind.”
For this reason America is following “the European idea of the duty of civilized races to impose their political sovereignty upon civilized, or half civilized, or not fully civilized, races anywhere and everywhere in the world.”
He complacently believes that “There is something natural in the subordination of an inferior race to a superior race, even to the point of the enslavement of the inferior race, but there is nothing natural in the opposite.” He therefore denominates Reconstruction as the rule “of the uncivilized Negroes over the whites of the South.” This has been the teaching of one of our greatest universities for nearly fifty years.
Dunning was less dogmatic as a writer, and his own statements are often judicious. But even Dunning can declare that “all the forces [in the South] that made for civilization were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen”; and that “the antithesis and antipathy of race and color were crucial and ineradicable.” The work of most of the students whom he taught and encouraged has been one-sided and partisan to the last degree.
John Hopkins University has issued a series of studies similar to Columbia’s; Southern teachers have been welcomed to many Northern universities, where often Negro students have been systematically discouraged, and thus a nation-wide university attitude has arisen by which propaganda against the Negro has been carried on unquestioned.
The Columbia school of historians and social investigators have issued between 1895 and the present time sixteen studies of Reconstruction in the Southern States, all based on the same thesis and all done according to the same method: first, endless sympathy wit the white South; second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro; third, a judicial attitude towards the North, which concludes that the North under great misapprehension did a grievous wrong, but eventually saw its mistake and retreated.
These studies vary, of course, in their methods. Dunning’s own work is usually silent so far as the Negro is concerned. Burgess is more than fair in law but reactionary in matters of race and property, regarding the treatment of a Negro as a man as nothing less than a crime, and admitting that “the mainstay of property is the courts.”
In the books on Reconstruction written by graduates of these universities and others, the studies of Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Louisiana are thoroughly bad, giving no complete picture of what happened during Reconstruction, written for the most part by men and women without broad historical or social background, and all designed not to seek the truth but to prove a thesis. Hamilton reaches the climax of this school when he characterizes the black codes, which even Burgess condemned, as “not only … on the whole reasonable, temperate and kindly, but, in the main, necessary.”
Thompson’s “Georgia” is another case in point. It seeks to be fair, but silly stories about Negroes indicating utter lack of even common sense are included, and every noble sentiment from white people. When two Negro workers, William and Jim, put a straightforward advertisement in a local paper, the author says that it was “evidently written by a white friend.” There is not the slightest historical evidence to prove this, and there were plenty of educated Negroes in Augusta at the time who might have written this. Lonn’s “Louisiana” puts Sheridan’s words in Sherman’s mouth to prove a petty point.
There are certain of these studies which, though influenced by the same general attitude, nevertheless have more of scientific poise and cultural background. Garner’s “Reconstruction in Mississippi” conceives the Negro as an integral part of the scene and treats him as a human being. With this should be bracketed the recent study of “Reconstruction in South Carolina” by Simkins and Woody. This is not as fair as Garner’s, but in the midst of conventional judgment and conclusion, and reproductions of all available caricatures of Negroes, it does not hesitate to give a fair account of the Negroes and of some of their work. It gives the impression of combining in one book two antagonistic points of view, but in the clash much truth emerges.
Ficklen’s “Louisiana” and the works of Fleming are anti-Negro in spirit, but, nevertheless, they have a certain fairness and sense of historic honesty.
Fleming’s “Documentary History of Reconstruction” is done by a man who has a thesis to support, and his selection of documents supports the thesis. His study of Alabama is pure propaganda.
Next come a number of books which are openly and blatantly propaganda, like Herbert’s “Solid South,” and the books of Pike and Reynolds on South Carolina, the works by Pollard and Carpenter, and especially those by Ulrich Phillips. One of the latest and most popular of this series is “The Tragic Era” by Claude Bowers, which is an excellent and readable piece of current newspaper reporting, absolutely devoid of historical judgment or sociological knowledge. It is a classic example of historical propaganda of the cheaper sort.
We have books like Milton’s “Age of Hate” and Winston’s “Andrew Johnson” which attempt to re-write the character of Andrew Johnson. They certainly add to our knowledge of the man and our sympathy for his weakness. But they cannot, for students, change the calm testimony of unshaken historical facts. Fuess’ “Carl Schurz” paints the picture of the fine liberal, and yet goes out of its way to show that he was quite wrong in what he said he saw in the South.
The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself, has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected. Only three or four states have preserved the debates in the Reconstruction conventions; there are few biographies of black leaders. The Negro is refused a hearing because he was poor and ignorant. It is therefore assumed that all Negroes in Reconstruction were ignorant and silly and that therefore a history of Reconstruction in any state can quite ignore him.
The result is that most
unfair caricatures of Negroes have been carefully preserved; but serious speeches,
successful administration and upright character are almost universally ignored and forgotten. Wherever a black head rises to historic view, it is promptly slain by an adjective—“shrewd,” “notorious,” “cunning”—or pilloried by a sneer; or put out of view by some quite unproven charge of bad moral character. In other words, every effort has been made to treat the Negro’s part in Reconstruction with silence and contempt.
When recently a student tried to write on education in Florida, he found that the official records of the excellent administration of the colored Superintendent of Educations, Gibbs, who virtually established the Florida public school, had been destroyed. Alabama has tried to obliterate all prints records of Reconstruction.
Especially noticeable is the fact that little attempt has been made to trace carefully the rise and economic development of the poor whites and their relation to the planters and to Negro labor after the war. There were five million or more non-slaveholding whites in the South in 1860 and less than two million in the families of all slaveholders. Yet one might almost gather from contemporary history that the five million left no history and has no descendants. The extraordinary history of the rise and triumph of the poor whites has been largely neglected, even by Southern white students.
The whole development of Reconstruction was primarily an economic development, but no economic history or proper material for it has been written. It has been regarded as a purely political matter, and of politics most naturally divorced from industry.
All this reflected in the textbooks of the day and in the encyclopedias, until we have got to the place where we cannot use our experiences during and after the Civil War for the uplift and enlightenment of mankind. We have spoiled and misconceived the position of the historian. If we are going, in the future, not simply with regard to this question, but with regard to all social problems, to be able to use human experience for the guidance of mankind, we have got clearly to distinguish between fact and desire.
In the first place, somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, so far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world. Then with that much clear and open to every reader, the philosopher and prophet has a chance to interpret these facts; but the historian has right, posing as scientist, to conceal of distort facts; and until we distinguish between these two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten times over.
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner, or that Thomas Jefferson had mulatto children, or that Alexander Hamilton had Negro blood, and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
No one reading the history of the United States during 1850–1860 can have the slightest doubt left in his mind that Negro slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and yet during and since we learn that a great nation murdered thousands and destroyed millions on account of abstract doctrines concerning the nature of the Federal Union. Since the attitude of the nation concerning state rights has been revolutionized by the development of the central government since the war, the whole argument becomes an astonishing reduction ad absurdum, leaving us apparently with no cause for the Civil War except the recent reiteration of statements which make the great public men on one side narrow, hypocritical fanatics and liars, while the leaders on the other side were extraordinary and unexampled for their beauty, unselfishness and fairness.
Not a single great leader of the nation during the Civil War and Reconstruction has escaped attack and libel. The magnificent figures of Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens have been besmirched almost beyond recognition. We have been cajoling and flattering the South and slurring the North, because the South is determined to re-write the history of slavery and the North is not interested in history but in wealth.
This, then, is the book basis upon which today we judge Reconstruction. In order to paint the South as a martyr to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and to ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development, we have in fifty years, by libel, innuendo and silence, so completely misstated and obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its work and government that today it is almost unknown. This may be fine romance, but it is not science. It may be inspiring, but it is certainly not the truth. And beyond this it is dangerous. It is not only ideals; it has, more than that, led the world to embrace and worship the color bar as social salvation and it is helping to range mankind in ranks of mutual hatred and contempt, at the summons of a cheap and false myth.
Nearly all recent books on Reconstruction agree with each other in discarding the government reports and substituting selected diaries, letters, and gossip. Yet it happens that the government records are an historic source of wide and unrivaled authenticity. There is the report of the select Committee of Fifteen, which delved painstakingly into the situation all over the South and called all kinds and conditions of men to testify; there are the report of Carl Schurz and the twelve volumes of reports made on the Ku Klux conspiracy; and above all, the Congressional Globe.
None who has not read page by page the Congressional Globe, especially the sessions of the 39th Congress, can possibly have any idea of what the problems of Reconstruction facing the United States were in 1865–1866. Then there were the reports of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the executive and other documentary reports of government officials, especially in the war and treasury departments, which give the historian the only groundwork upon which he can build a real and truthful picture.
There are certain historians who have not tried deliberately to falsify the picture: Southern whites like Frances Butler Leigh and Susan Smedes; Northern historians, like McPherson, Oberholtzer, and Nicolay and Hay. There are foreign travelers like Sir George Campbell, George Clemenceau and Robert Somers. There are personal reminiscences of Augustus Beard, George Julian, George F. Hoar, Carl Schurz and John Sherman. There are the invaluable work of Edward McPherson and the more recent studies by Paul Haworth, A. A. Taylor, and Charles Wesley. Beale simply does not take Negroes into account in the critical year of 1866.
Certain monographs deserve all praise, like those of Hendricks and Pierce. The work of Flack is prejudiced but built on study. The defense of the carpetbag régime by Tourgée and Allen, Powell Clayton, Holden and Warmoth are worthy antidotes to the certain writers.
The lives of Stevens and Sumner are revealing even when slightly apologetic because of the Negro; while Andrew Johnson is beginning to suffer from writers who are trying to prove how seldom he got drunk, and think that important.
It will be noted that for my authority in this work I have depended very largely upon secondary material; upon state histories of Reconstruction, written in the main by those who were convinced before they began to write that the Negro was incapable of government, or of becoming a constituent part of a civilized state. The fairest of these histories have not tried to conceal facts; in other cases, the black man has been largely ignored; while in still others, he has been traduced and ridiculed. If I had had time and money and opportunity to go back to the original sources in all cases, there can be no doubt that the weight of this work would have been vastly strengthened, and as I firmly believe, the case of the Negro more convincingly set forth.
Various volumes of papers in the great libraries like the Johnson papers in the Library of Congress, the Sumner manuscripts at Harvard, the Schurz correspondence, the Wells papers, the Chase papers, the Fessenden and Greeley collections, the McCulloch, McPherson, Sherman, Stevens and Trumbull papers, all must have much of great interest to the historians of the American Negro. I have not had time nor opportunity to examine these, and most of those who have examined them had little interest in black folk.
Negroes have done some excellent work on their own history and defense. It suffers of course from natural partisanship and a desire to prove a case in the face of a chorus of unfair attacks. Its best work also suffers from the fact that Negroes with difficulty reach an audience. But this is also true of such white writers as Skaggs and Bancroft who could not get first-class publishers because they were saying something that the nation did not like.
The Negro historians began with autobiographies and reminiscences. The older historians were George W. Williams and Joseph T. Wilson; the new school of historians is led by Carter G. Woodson; and I have been greatly helped by the unpublished theses of four of the youngest Negro students. It is most unfortunate that while many young white Southerners can get funds to attack and ridicule the Negro and his friends, it is almost impossible for first-class Negro students to get a chance for research or to get finished work in print.
I write then in a field devastated by passion and belief. Naturally, as a Negro, I cannot do this writing without believing in the essential humanity of Negroes, in their ability to be educated, to do the work of the modern world, to take their place as equal citizens with others. I cannot for a moment subscribe to that bizarre doctrine of race that makes most men inferior to the few.
But, too, as a student of science, I want to be fair, objective and judicial; to let no searing of the memory by intolerable insult and cruelty make me fail to sympathize with human frailties and contradiction, in the eternal paradox of good and evil. But armed and warned by all this, and fortified by long study of the facts, I stand at the end of this writing, literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field.
What is the object of writing the history of Reconstruction? Is it to wipe out the disgrace of a people which fought to make slaves of Negroes? Is it to show that the North had higher motives than freeing black men? Is it to prove that Negroes were black angels? No, it is simply to establish the Truth, on which Right in the future may be built. We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race, and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.
Three-fourths of the testimony against the Negro in Reconstruction is on the unsupported evidence of men who hated and despised Negroes and regarded it as loyalty to blood, patriotism to country, and filial tribute to the fathers to lie, steal or kill in order to discredit these black folk.
This may be a natural result when a people have been humbled and impoverished and degraded in their own life; but what is inconceivable is that another generation and another group should regard this testimony as scientific truth, when it is contradicted by logic and by fact.
This chapter, therefore, which in logic should be a survey of books and sources, becomes of sheer necessity an arraignment of American historians and an indictment of their ideals.
With a determination unparalleled in science, the mass of American writers have started out so to distort the facts of the greatest critical period of American history as to prove right wrong and wrong right. I am not familiar enough with the vast field of human history to pronounce on the relative guilt of these and historians of other times and fields; but I do say that if the history of the past has been written in the same fashion, it is useless as science and misleading as ethics.
It simply shows that with sufficient general agreement and determination among the dominant classes, the truth of history may be utterly distorted and contradicted and changed to any convenient fairy tale that the masters of men wish.
I cannot believe that any unbiased mind, with an ideal of truth and of scientific judgment, can read the plain, authentic facts of our history, during 1860–1880, and come to conclusions essentially different from mine; and yet I stand virtually alone in this interpretation.
So much so that the very cogency of my facts would make me hesitate, did I not seem to see plain reasons. Subtract from Burgess his belief that only white people can rule, and he is in essential agreement with me. Remember that Rhodes was an uneducated money-maker who hired clerks to find the facts which he needed to support his thesis, and one is convinced that the same labor and expense could easily produce quite opposite results.
One fact and one alone explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive Negroes as men; in their minds the word “Negro” connotes “inferiority” and “stupidity” lightened only by unreasoning gayety and humor. Suppose the slaves of 1860 had been white folk. Stevens would have been a great statesman, Sumner a great democrat, and Schurz a keen prophet, in a mighty revolution of rising humanity. Ignorance and poverty would easily have been explained by history, and the demand for land and the franchise would have been justified as the birthright of natural freemen.
But Burgess was a slaveholder, Dunning a Copperhead and Rhodes an exploiter of wage labor. Not one of them apparently ever met an educated Negro of force and ability. Around such impressive thinkers gathered the young post-war students from the South. They had been born and reared in the bitterest period of Southern race hatred, fear and contempt. Their instinctive reactions were confirmed and encouraged in the best of American universities. Their scholarship, when it regarded black men, became deaf, dumb, and blind. The clearest evidence of Negro ability, work, honesty, patience, learning and efficiency became distorted into cunning, brute toil, shrewd evasion, cowardice and imitation—a stupid effort to transcend nature’s law.
For those seven mystic years between Johnson’s “swing ’round the circle” and the panic of 1873, a majority of thinking Americans in the North believed in the equal manhood of black folk. They acted accordingly with a clear-cut decisiveness and thorough logic, utterly incomprehensible to a day like ours which does not share this human faith; and to Southern whites this period can only be explained by deliberate vengeance and hate.
The panic of 1873 brought sudden disillusion in business enterprise, economic organization, religious belief and political standards. A flood of appeal from the white South reinforced this reaction—appeal with no longer the arrogant bluster of slave oligarchy, but the simple moving annals of the plight of a conquered people. The resulting emotional and intellectual rebound of the nation made it nearly inconceivable in 1876 that then years earlier most men had believed in human equality.
Assuming, therefore, as axiomatic the endless inferiority of the Negro race, these newer historians, mostly Southerners, some Northerners who deeply sympathized with the South, misinterpreted, distorted, even deliberately ignored any fact that challenged or contradicted this assumption. If the Negro was admittedly sub-human, what need to waste time delving into his Reconstruction history?
Consequently historians of Reconstruction with a few exceptions ignore the Negro as completely as possible, leaving the reader wondering why an element apparently so insignificant filled the whole Southern picture at the time. The only real excuse for this attitude is loyalty to a lost cause, reverence for brave fathers and suffering mothers and sisters, and fidelity to the ideals of a clan and class. But in propaganda against the Negro since emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion.
* * * * *
The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution.
Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted.
And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.
One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all.
So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell; and after its whirlwind a teacher sits in academic halls, learned in the tradition of its elms and its elders. He looks into the upturned face of youth and in him youth sees the gowned shape of wisdom and hears the voice of God.
Cynically he sneers at “chinks” and “niggers.” He says that the nation “has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican party, or Republican Administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man.”11
Immediately in Africa, a black back runs red with the blood of the lash; in India, a brown girl is raped; in China, a coolie starves; in Alabama, seven darkies are more than lynched; while in London, the white limbs of a prostitute are hung with jewels and silk. Flames of jealous murder sweep the earth, while brains of little children smear the hills.
This is education in the Nineteen Hundred and Thirty-fifth year of the Christ; this is modern and exact social science; this is the university course in “History 12” set down by the Senatus academicus; ad quos hae literae pervenerint: Salutem in Domino, sempeternam!
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