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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Greg Grandin
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June 1, 2021 - September 2, 2022
“We are rapidly utilizing the whole of our continental territory,” Kasson said. “We must turn our eyes abroad, or they will soon look inward upon discontent.”26
One sentence alone, which subsequent historians cite the way monks chant a creed, captures Turner’s revolution: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”
Another historian wrote that the origins of the independent spirit of the American West was “found to be in the forests of Germany,” and that American frontiersmen were but replicas of Saxon, Teutonic, and Aryan “independent freemen.”
Turner’s main argument, which he advanced in his 1893 essay as well as in subsequent writings, is straightforward: America’s vast, open West created the conditions for an unprecedented expansion of the ideal of political equality, an ideal based on a sense that the frontier would go on forever: “The wilderness seemed so unending.”9 Left alone with their visions of unlimited resources, pioneers would transform nature and deepen democratic values: independence, personal initiative, and, above all, individualism. But also fairness, honesty, and trust, a kind of frontier mutualism. In a harsh
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as callous as this one composed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1889, which cited the march of civilization to condone the elimination of Native Americans: “The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side: this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.”
But what we think of the West, since its inception, has been the domain of large-scale power, of highly capitalized speculators, businesses, railroads, agriculture, and mining. “Settlement tended to follow, rather than precede, connections to national and international markets,” Richard White, a historian of the West, argues. These markets were created through federal action, by, among other things, federal gunboats.21 Western movement required a strong state.
Turner included a telling comment: “The West of our day relies on national gov[ernment] because gov[ernment] came before the settler, and gave him land, arranged his transportation, gov[ernment], etc. etc.”
It’s a sleight of hand, this sequence, for, as Turner wrote in his notes, “government came before.” But it was, and remains, a powerful move, one that premises the virtue of freedom as existing independently of the state and restricts the role of the state to only guarding virtue. That premise makes possible the ongoing refusal of the United States to accept the legitimacy of social or economic rights. Individual, inherent rights, found in nature—to have, to bear, to move, to assemble, to believe, to possess—were legitimate, as was a state that protected them. Social rights—to receive health
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But just a few years later, Wister published another novel that imagined the frontier not so much closed as commandeered, seized by the barons and bankers. “There’s nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil and discontent. We’re no longer a small people living and dying for a great idea; we’re a big people living and dying for money.”
There was another option: to define the frontier not as a line to stop at but one to cross over. To link—as two other frontier theorists, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, often did—progressive reform at home to war abroad.
Any war was better than a “rotting peace that eats out the core and heart of the manhood of this country,” he said. All wars, the senator continued, taught devotion, abnegation, courage, and forced nations to “rise above the petty, the unworthy, the selfish.”
Even as he moved the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington, purged African Americans from federal jobs, and legitimated the Ku Klux Klan
“is going out conquering and to conquer until, it may be, in the Providence of God, a new light is lifted up in America which shall throw the rays of liberty and justice far abroad upon every sea, and even upon the lands which now wallow in darkness and refuse to see the light.”28 The next year, at the same ceremony, Wilson said that war (which Wilson had entered two months earlier) offered a chance “to vindicate the things which we have professed” and “show the world” that America “was born to serve mankind.”
The same is true on the United States’ border with Mexico, where an obsession with fortification against what’s outside is symptomatic of trouble that exists inside.
The liberals in Mexico—in command of the government after having beaten the French—rejected most of these cases and refused to recognize debt incurred and concessions granted by Maximilian. But Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, pressed Mexico. Powerful voices demanded payment, calling on Washington to take Mexico “in hand” and establish a “protectorate” over the country, or seize the country entirely and lead it “to a higher plane of civilization.”
the end, though, it wasn’t annexation or war but the leverage provided by debt, along with the promise of more loans and investments to build railroads, that brought Mexico to heel. With no other options, Mexico’s leaders practically handed over the national economy to foreign investors. Led by some of the most storied names in U.S. corporate history—including J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller and Standard Oil, Edward Harriman, the Astors, the Guggenheims, Joseph Headley Dulles (John Foster Dulles’s great-grandfather), William Randolph Hearst, Phelps Dodge, Union Pacific, and Cargill—U.S. capital
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facilitating the transfer of property from Mexicans and Native Americans who didn’t have title to land or who held land collectively. The dispossessed appealed to U.S. courts. But in nearly all cases judges ruled against them. In upholding the takings, courts cited as precedent decades-old rulings issued in support of Jackson’s removal policy, including judgments that upheld the doctrine of discovery: “Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.”14
In an expulsion that rivaled the brutality of Jackson’s removal policy, tens of thousands of Yaqui were driven from their homes in Sonora and deported south, to the Yucatan and Oaxaca. There, they were put to work on sugar, tobacco, and henequen plantations (though Mexico had long abolished chattel slavery, the post–Civil War spread of export-led capitalism intensified various mechanisms of forced labor, including those based on peonage and vagrancy laws). Tens of thousands more died in the assault. Women and children were forced into servitude. Confiscated Yaqui property in Sonora went to
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Running through many different phases as it raged for many years, the Mexican Revolution was, as the historian John Mason Hart describes, the “first great third world uprising against American economic, cultural, and political expansion.”
Similar to earlier calls in support of Indian removal, one Texas paper described “a serious surplus population that needs eliminating.” The authors of “Refusing to Forget” write that high-level politicians “proposed putting all those of Mexican descent into ‘concentration camps’—and killing any who refused.
1918, according to “Refusing to Forget,” the Rangers radically reduced the number of Mexican American voters across south Texas, humiliating and disarming Mexican American politicians and terrorizing their families: “A new, more brutal white supremacy had come to the border.”
The Oklahoman expressed a kind of opposition to taxes that is common today among law-and-order racists, saying that the Klan provided a means for “taxed to the limit” citizens to protect themselves without adding to public expenditure.27
Harding’s call was explosive: “untimely and ill-considered,” the Birmingham police rebuked the twentieth-century president, while a Mississippi senator said that if the “president’s theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion, then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.”
Border patrol agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. The patrol wasn’t a large agency at first, and its reach along a two-thousand-mile line was limited. But its reported brutality would grow as the number of its agents, over the years, increased. Migrants had no rights, which gave the patrol absolute impunity.
“It all started with the border. And that’s still where it is today,” run the first two lines of the Drive-By Truckers’ 2016 song “Ramón Casiano.” The song ends: “And Ramón still ain’t dead enough.”
At the very worst there was always the possibility of climbing into a covered wagon and moving west where the untilled prairies afforded a haven for men to whom the East did not provide a place.… Traditionally, when a depression came a new section of land was opened in the West; and even our temporary misfortune served our manifest destiny.
In a striking 1935 essay titled “No More Frontiers,” undersecretary of agriculture Rexford Tugwell said that centuries of easy U.S. expansion across the continent had resulted in “riotous farming.”10 “It was all very romantic,” Tugwell said, this “national epic” of pulling up stakes and moving on. But it had habituated U.S. farmers to unsustainable techniques, which produced widespread soil erosion. In the nineteenth century, the Homestead Act distributed good land to the powerful, including lumber barons who stripped the trees off the land and assigned the rocky margins to the poor. The act
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Assuming infinity, Americans didn’t farm so much as strip-mine the soil, ignoring limits until they hit, in the Great Depression, the final limit. Technology that was introduced, such as the tractor and thresher, only served to spread wasteful practices across even larger areas—“to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest,” as Turner himself wrote, deforesting the southlands and destroying the Great Plains at ever greater rates while rendering the labor of tenant farmers unneeded.
The New Deal’s response to this ecological crisis was spectacular and, in those years prior to World War II, offered the most far-reaching vision of the collective public good since the Freedmen’s Bureau: the government resettled families, put people to work, planted trees, restored the loam, reseeded soil, expanded national parks, returned land to Native Americans for pasture, and tamped down the dust.
To FDR’s everlasting discredit, he would order the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and, in order to keep southern Democrats happy, he cut African Americans out of many New Deal reforms. But
By the time of Roosevelt’s election, the various factions that made up the Mexican Revolution—which was fought to overcome this history of oppression—had consolidated into a stable government that, in 1917, put into place the world’s first social-democratic constitution, guaranteeing citizens the right to receive education, health care, and decent wages and to organize unions. Mexico’s president Lázaro Cárdenas, upon his election in 1934, accelerated a program of economic reforms, including land reform. By the time he left office in 1940, Cárdenas had distributed close to forty-five million
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Earlier, starting with the Wilson administration, the Department of State and business interests had united to condemn the Mexican Constitution as a perversion of the ideal of individual rights, especially property rights.20 Now, though, members of FDR’s cabinet were making pilgrimages to Mexico, holding up its land reform as something that might be tried in the United States, and reading its constitution, wondering if they could get similar social rights inserted into the U.S. Constitution.
In the other stream, Bracero workers were legal, but largely unprotected by labor law. Most lived in squalid conditions, overworked and denied many of the rights of basic citizenship, not to mention the more forceful worker protections put into place by the New Deal. “We used to own our slaves,” said one Florida sugar planter in an exposé into the mistreatment of farmworkers, including those in the Bracero Program; “now we just rent them.”
At home in the United States, though, “human rights”—whether understood as civil rights ending segregation or social rights furthering economic democracy—were meeting strong opposition. Roosevelt, in his 1944 address, proposed the adoption of a second “Bill of Rights”—an “economic declaration of rights” that included all the rights Mexico had been guaranteeing its citizens since 1917: the right to health care, education, a living wage, decent housing, and social security.
The effort to revise the Constitution in a way that limited the president’s ability to cite international law to achieve domestic reform came to be called the Bricker Amendment campaign,
Since the Senate hadn’t yet ratified that U.N. declaration (the United States only voted in favor of it in the United Nations), conservatives charged that the treaty with Japan was a “sneak attack” on the Constitution, as the Chicago Tribune put it, a “roundabout approach” to get the United States signed on to social rights, desegregation, and other anti-racist principles. “In other words,” the Tribune continued, “once the U.N. ‘rights’ get a foot in the American door, the Constitution and Bill of Rights can be rewritten to suit the Truman politicians.”
“Something is wrong with capitalism as it now stands in the United States,” King warned. “Rugged individualism,” he said, was a faulty foundation for national identity, since over the years it had distracted from the fact that government does in fact redistribute wealth—upward. “This country has socialism for the rich,” King said, and “individualism for the poor”; what was dispensed lavishly as “subsidies” to one kind of people was begrudged to another as “welfare.”
Developing a critique that focused on capitalism’s psychic hold over people, King used the idea of the frontier to put forward a counter value structure, an alternative vision of American history and morality. African Americans, he said, confronted a reality “as harsh and demanding as that of the pioneer on the untamed frontier.”6 That harshness forged character and weeded out frivolity; it sharpened “knowledge and discipline … courage and self-sacrifice.”
By this point, King was looking for ways to join the struggle to end racism with the fight for a more economically just society. And he knew that Vietnam threatened both.
It was time, he said, to “break the betrayal of my own silences.” King didn’t just condemn the United States’ war in Southeast Asia. He condemned all of it: the country’s long history of expansion, its “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism,” and a political culture where “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people.”
And just as Adams watched the Jacksonians use perpetual war on the frontier to reverse his policy of (as he wrote in his diary) “progressive and unceasing internal improvement,” King watched Vietnam derail the struggle for justice: “It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program.
Racists killing brown people abroad became more racist; opponents of racism, reacting to the killing, became more militant. As urban riots continued through 1967, King repeatedly pointed out that money spent on war could have been used to alleviate poverty at home, that political energy that could have been put to building a more just nation was squandered in yet another “divine, messianic crusade.” The most destructive passions, worsened by war, might be channeled outward by war, as black and white soldiers united in brutal solidarity to kill foreigners.
