Things are moving fast.\u00a0 However this new regime has come into power, through Russian intervention, dark money, gerrymandering, voter suppression or sheer chicanery, it has revealed the underbelly of America. I had thought we lived in an advancing society, where the ills that have plagued this nation since its inception were gradually being addressed by law or convention or a real change in values.\u00a0 But the veils have been torn back.<\/p>\n
I started a research quest about our national history.\u00a0 What I\u2019ve learned has clarified for me why we shouldn\u2019t be surprised by the tenor of politics today.\u00a0 Maybe this is what our country really is, and those of us who thought otherwise have been both mistaken and naive.<\/p>\n
What follows is a bare bones tracking of some of the heinous beliefs that are leading our country today.\u00a0 As you read, think about recent legislation, who the perpetrators are, and the direction that our country seems to be moving.<\/p>\n
John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, gave a sermon in 1630 naming the settlement of the New World to be \u201cthe shining city on a hill.\u201d\u00a0 His words called for a virtuous community that would set an example to Old World. In reality, this community excluded anyone who practiced a religion other than Puritanical Christianity or had a different color skin.<\/p>\n
In fact, Roger Williams, a Massachusetts minister, wrote a pamphlet stating that freedom of religion was a natural right which required church and state to be separated. This way of thinking, in addition to his demand that the Native Americans be paid for the land that had been taken from them, got him convicted of sedition and heresy.\u00a0 (He escaped and founded the settlement of Providence, Rhode Island, whose original charter insured both religious freedom and separation of church and state.)<\/p>\n
The shining city concept mutated into the notion of American Exceptionalism <\/em>with the Declaration of Independence. The well-heeled white landowners who wished to be free of a financial obligation to Great Britain believed that America\u2019s new institution was a very special creation. But it didn\u2019t stop there:\u00a0 America must now remake the world in its image. Thomas Paine wrote:<\/p>\n “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at\u00a0 hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.”<\/em><\/p>\n But that freedom was limited to one segment of the population. When the Constitution was created in 1787, our founding fathers, many of whom were slave owners, created and condoned the \u201cthree fifths compromise.\u201d Each African-American held in slavery was to be counted as three\/fifths of a person. This shocking concept gave the southern states more seats in Congress than if slaves, who weren\u2019t allowed to vote, had been left out. It also affected the electoral college by favoring states states whose white male voting population was small, mainly those that practiced slavery. The result was that for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of the presidency, slave owners from Virginia helmed the country, and slaveholder interests dominated the government until 1861.<\/p>\n Thomas Jefferson, one of those Virginian slave owning presidents, doubled the size of the country with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. He also funded the Lewis & Clark expeditions, and and, shortly afterward, the whole continent became fair game. American Exceptionalism<\/em> metastasized into America\u2019s Manifest Destiny<\/em>, a belief that God gave the United States the duty to \u201credeem the heathen and remake the west in the image of the original colonies.\u201d In 1811 John Quincy Adams wrote:<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cThe whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of\u00a0 religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The War of 1812 was, in part, about this principle.\u00a0 The U.S. had long wanted to annex Canada for several reasons:\u00a0 to completely expel the British from North American, to stop raids by indigenous peoples into the Northwest Territories, and to gain additional land.\u00a0 The war ended in 1814 with the Treaty of Ghent. The British had hoped to set up an Indian state in the territories below the Great Lakes, but the American diplomats rejected this idea:<\/p>\n \u201cThe United States, while intending never to acquire lands from the Indians otherwise\u00a0 than peaceably\u2026are fully determined\u2026to reclaim from the state of nature, and to bring into cultivation, every portion of the territory contained within their acknowledged boundaries.\u201d \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n This statement shocked the British negotiators, one of whom remarked, \u201cTill I came here, I had no idea of the fixed determination which there is in the heart of every American to extirpate the Indians and appropriate their territory.\u201d<\/p>\n Skip forward a few decades, and Manifest Destiny<\/em> becomes one of the root causes of the Civil War.\u00a0 White settlers in Mexico had fought to claim the territory known as Texas. They beat Santa Ana in 1836 and created the Republic of Texas. The Republic was annexed by the United States in 1845. The new state claimed that its southern boundary was the Rio Grande; the Mexican government said that it was the Neuces River further to the north.<\/p>\n So what else to do but to invade Mexico. The war lasted from 1845 to 1848, ending when the U.S. forces captured Mexico City.\u00a0 The negotiations for peace included a payment of fifteen million dollars to Mexico and the acquisition of even more territory. In fact, the United States considered annexing the whole of Mexico to insure peace in the region.\u00a0 But this was controversial \u2014 it would mean extending U.S. citizenship to millions of Mexicans. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina spoke these words:<\/p>\n \u201cWe have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race\u2014the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race\u2026.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n With all these new lands poised for possible statehood, the big question arose:\u00a0 which new states will be allowed to practice slavery?\u00a0 The Southern states were eager to impose their belief system on the rest of the country, insuring slave holding states the majority in Washington. So the big political question became one of \u201cstates\u2019 rights\u201d, not one of the moral depravity of holding a human being as a slave. Of course, what followed was the formation of the Confederacy and the Civil War, not a war against slavery, but a war to keep the states united.<\/p>\n I could continue forward for decades.\u00a0 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Japanese internment camps during WWII.\u00a0 The refusal of twelve states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.\u00a0 The gutting of the Voting Rights Act.\u00a0 Citizens United.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true, there have been some remarkable people and enlightened moments in our history.\u00a0 Lincoln\u2019s Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s trust-busting battles and his establishment of the National Park System.\u00a0 All the women who fought for the right to vote.\u00a0 FDR\u2019s insistence on the safety nets of Social Security and Medicare.\u00a0 The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.\u00a0 Roe v. Wade.<\/p>\n Sadly, though, the political views established at the very outset of our great experiment are still in play.\u00a0 The Civil War continues to be fought today, and the ghosts of the white slave owners have returned.\u00a0 Our first black president was vilified and thwarted at every turn, not because of any political disagreement, but because he was black.\u00a0 Our Native American population is again being deprived of their ancestral lands. The Supreme Court is in danger of returning to the kinds of decisions it made when it ruled in the Dred Scott case. The education system is shifting from an attempt at egalitarian opportunity for all to one rigged for the rich; the economic system is returning to the age of the robber barons.<\/p>\n Ironically, it may be that the concept of states\u2019 rights that will save some of us.\u00a0 Governor Jerry Brown of California has teamed with the western states to fight climate change.\u00a0 Oregon\u2019s Governor Kate Brown has named Oregon a sanctuary state.\u00a0 The state of Washington denied a lease for a coal export terminal.\u00a0 Thirty-seven states (and the District of Columbia) have legalized same sex marriage.\u00a0 Eight states have legalized marijuana.\u00a0 State governments are going after the gerrymandering that has legitimized an unfair voting system.\u00a0 State courts in Washington and Hawaii are fighting against the illegal and unconstitutional \u201ctravel ban.\u201d<\/p>\n Is this going to lead to another Civil War?\u00a0 Will the economic strength of the \u201cblue states\u201d prevail just as it did in 1865?\u00a0 What frightens me most, though, is living in a nation whose values seem to be so perverse.\u00a0 Through hard work and dogged pressure we may be able to change who the politicians in charge are. But will we able to change the deeply held beliefs that dominate the worst political discourse these days?\u00a0 How do we go about doing that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Things are moving fast.\u00a0 However this new regime has come into power, through Russian intervention, dark money, gerrymandering, voter suppression or sheer chicanery, it has revealed the underbelly of America. I had thought we lived in an advancing society, where the ills that have plagued this nation since its inception were gradually being addressed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=397"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nancyhoufek.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}