KELO-TV blips a longer AP story about University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler’s new book Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas. The implication of the full article is that American democracy led to the decimation of America’s Native population:
A new book by a noted historian attempts to show how expanding American democracy hurt Native Americans in the early days of the nation and how tribes viewed the young United States as an entity seeking to erase them from existence.
University of Oregon history professor Jeffrey Ostler’s just-released “Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas” argues that the emergence of American democracy depended on the taking of Native lands [Russell Contreras, “Book Tries to Show How US Democracy Hurt Native Americans,” AP, 2019.08.25].
I bristle at the suggestion that democracy is a harmful ideology. Our westward assault on American Natives wasn’t cool, but it was the antithesis of democracy, the idea that all people are created equal and deserve an equal stake in commanding their destiny. But in this May interview with historian/blogger John Fea, Ostler says Thomas Jefferson saw westward expansion as vital to promoting American democracy:
I think most thoughtful Americans are increasingly willing to learn more about what the sociologist Michael Mann termed the “dark side” of American democracy. There is certainly a growing awareness of the role of slavery in the founding and building of the United States from the 1780s to 1860. But there is probably less awareness of how the emergence of democracy depended on the taking of Native lands. According to Thomas Jefferson, a seemingly limitless supply of land in North American would allow the United States to avoid replicating European social conditions in which a small aristocratic class monopolized land, leaving the majority dependent. In America, however, abundant land would allow small farmers political independence. Surviving Genocide shows why and how the United States took the lands of sovereign Native nations and documents the costs of democracy for Native people [Jeffrey Ostler, interviewed by John Fea, “The Author’s Corner with Jeffrey Ostler,” The Way of Improvement, 2019.05.30].
Hmmm… if the argument is that democracy cannot exist without constant expansion and opportunity to escape the consolidation of ownership of land, then democracy itself must be a fleeting phenomenon, since land is finite. Jefferson may have been right: since we closed the frontier, we’ve only seen farms get bigger and fewer, with a shrinking class of corporate monopolists controlling more land and production and tricking the remaining farmers to elect a billionaire autocrat to take Jefferson’s place.
But does Ostler suggest that Jefferson should have abandoned democracy and settled for a non-expansionist aristocracy occupying only the eastern shores of America? Democracy is not the culprit here. Jefferson pursued the ideal of democracy, but he pursued it through immoral means that ignored the human rights of Native populations. Jefferson thought democracy applied only to his kind; a truly democratic approach to building our nation would have invited our Native neighbors to join and contribute to our great democratic experiment. Perhaps the landlust of our Euro-invader forbears was too great a force for democratic ideals to check, but that would only mean it was our failure to live up to our democratic ideals, not the ideals themselves, that led to the near-extermination of America’s First Nations.
This reminds me of the American leaders of the early 1930s including Prescott Bush, Geo W’s grandfather, promoting fascism as the way of our country’s future. Read the story of WWI General Smedley Butler.
These experts want a control system versus our principles of a messy democracy.
My God, I can see it now – the latest right-wing argument will be: “Don’t blame violence! Blame democracy! If it weren’t for all these crazy people thinking they can just do anything they want and vote for the wrong people, and promote all kinds of the wrong values – we need an authoritarian at once! With 100% power! What could possibly go wrong?”
Democracy, if we give what was in existence in America that name, and violent expansionism existed together. We started out as more of a democratic aristocracy, and I do think the appropriation of Indian lands helped the aristocracy maintain control by spreading out the poorer population. That was, of course, popular with the poorer population since then they could become, if not aristocrats, and least landowners. Everyone, except slaves and the Indian tribes, benefited. Democracy flourished because slavery and taking Indian lands was popular.
I guess this guy never heard of the notion of Manifest Destiny – that the world was MADE FOR white Europeans to have and to use. Screw anybody else. This notion is alive and well today. Last week in ND, on a construction site, I heard the employee of another company remark about the sunrise as something that “God made for us.” To the humanocentrist – even God subjugates him/herself to OUR (human) needs. Of course, this relationship must by necessity accept the Christian creation story at its base.
Might I add unadulterated greed to the items listed?
Greed for the land needed for the railroads and land needed for the farmers and ranchers.
Whites needed the land and took it by any means necessary.
The 100th Meridian was the clash that still resounds in our historical context. Kevin Woster writes about his friend Sam Hurst in a great blog post regarding what the 100th Meridian is actually about.
““I think that the 100th meridian is the eastern edge of the American West. This is where American settlers crashed into Native culture. This is where the traditions of American farming crashed into the invisible rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains,” Sam says. “I have always loved the opening scene in ‘Giants in the Earth.’ The immigrant family is lost in the grassland. The patriarch is fascinated, thinks it gorgeous. The matriarch is terrified by the solitude and endless horizon. They cannot tell that one mile they are in the greatest farm country in the world, and the next mile they are in the arid lands.”” http://www.sdpb.org/blogs/kevinwoster/life-on-the-100th-meridian-a-place-where-cultures-clashed-and-farm-met-ranch/
John Wesley Powell drew the imaginary line “100th Meridian, in the 19th century. His description of it is as true then as it is today. Settlers had no business stealing the land from the Native populations and putting it to plow. The west lands of the 100th should have remained as they were, by treaty and by common sense, grasslands.
I think Ostler errs in trying to blame the democratic system of government for the attempted genocide of the native inhabitants.
It was racism and the economic system of capitalism based on endless consumerism benefitting only white people that demanded expansion and ownership to the West Coast.
Therein lies the USA’s ongoing soul struggle.
American Indians as well as Mexican nationals in the West were decimated by the implementation of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny wasn’t democracy nor were many of Jefferson’s actions. It was colonialist, imperialist, expansionism. Deadly and evil.
To return to the previous post about South Dakota brain drain, the majority of the state’s people are wholly unwilling to admit the dark side to SD’s past. They’re stubborn and unable to see another’s pain and their own responsibility in causing it. The line I often associate with the discounting of Indian’s cultural annihalation by white settlers is, “Hey! I never stole any Indian’s land. Why should I care?”
Another one – There are some who say, “All land was stolen from someone and all Indians stole land from other Indians. All people, especially Africans, had slaves.” These two ideas are white, male, supremacy in action. It’s trying to justify despicable white male behavior and deny personal culpability for our shared guilt.
* Led by a boorish President, many males in SD will never apologize and never accept guilt. It’s a statewide fault that easiest to avoid by just moving away.
I do not know Native’s thoughts on owning the land, but it is for certain sure whitey had no respect for Indian property rights…whatever they were.
I believe Indians felt natural resources were there for everyone’s use, but white men disabused them of that quaint notion bigly.
Well, I suppose it’s a good sign that we at least agree that we invaders treated our Native neighbors miserably and that now we’re just trying to figure which of our values, or which combination of our values, inclined us toward conquest and genocide.
Democracy, capitalism, Christianity… can we test each value and measure it’s potential for good and for evil?
I’d like to think democracy offers more chance to check conquest and genocide.
Greed and religion (which to many people – NOT ALL!!! – is often just another way to grab up all the cookies, only this time in the hereafter) are always dangerous unless carefully regulated and controlled. History shows us endless examples of genocide, enslavement, imperialism, etc.
As for politics, I still go for Winston Churchill’s “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” speech, Nov. 11, 1947.