Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

by Kevin M. Kruse

The reason Congress held territories back from statehood wasn’t that no one lived in them but because the wrong people did. White squatters, free Blacks, French people, Spaniards, Mexicans, and, above all, Native peoples represented threats to federal control.

The final contiguous territories didn’t become states until 1912. Yet even then the country wasn’t a legally homogeneous zone, carpeted wall-to-wall with self-governing states. Washington, DC, remains a highly visible exception—a plurality-Black district whose nearly 700,000 residents may vote for president but lack congressional representation (“End Taxation without Representation,” DC’s license plates read) and have been repeatedly denied statehood. Less visible are the 574 federally recognized tribal nations within US borders today, quasi-states lacking full sovereignty. And within US states—existing as partial legal carve-outs—are more than 300 federal Indian reservations, covering a collective acreage the size of Idaho.

In all, the United States today has five inhabited territories that contain more than 3.6 million people. Those people cannot vote for president, have no voting representatives in Congress, lack full constitutional protection, and suffer the predictable effects. All five territories are poorer, per capita, than the poorest US state.

Mexico is second only to China as our leading trading partner in terms of the dollar value of goods flowing between countries. In July 2020 the total amount of trade between Mexico and the United States was $47.5 billion, which accounted for 15.2 percent of the total value of trade between the United States and all countries. Trade with China in the same month totaled $49.7 billion.

In a socialist society (Friedman alleges), dissenting views are crushed, but in a capitalist society anyone with money can freely promote his views. Wealthy individuals can support whatever ideas suit them—including outlier ones—and influence society. But rather than see this as a problem requiring redress, Friedman sees this as a virtue. In a capitalist society, “it is only necessary to convince a few wealthy people to get funds to launch any idea, however strange.” In this manner, “a free market capitalist society fosters freedom.”31 It’s an old socialist joke that capitalist societies run on the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. What Friedman not only added but defended was that the man with the gold could pay clever people—like himself—to offer the best defense of those rules that they could muster, a resource not available to the poor and middle class.

“A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege.”32 In Friedman’s vision, anyone could be a benefactor to men of ideas, but in practice only the wealthy were positioned to do so. In this and many other ways that Friedman would rarely acknowledge, the rich are a good deal freer than the poor: philanthropy is not a level playing field, and free speech is not free.

Roosevelt campaigned on, and governed by, a phrase we would recognize today: “social justice.” The Depression showed, to use Roosevelt’s preferred word, the “interdependence” of all Americans and indeed all people.

The longer history of protest demonstrates that the years that it took for Black people to be able to sit where they liked on Montgomery buses or to order a grilled-cheese sandwich at Greensboro’s Woolworth lunch counter represented only a culmination of countless other protests that had preceded them. Those protests most often failed and were disorderly. People condemned them as lawless, and police brutally suppressed them.

The national amnesia concerning early protests leaves most Americans with the impression that African Americans complied for decades with Jim Crow’s outrages and theft of rights, even as it hides the continual remaking of the racist regime that whites built and rebuilt to enforce them during the decades that Jim Crow lasted. Moreover, the omission of protest history also makes it seem that when the evil of segregation became apparent to white people in 1955, the federal government quickly solved it with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The idea that the protests of the classical phase of the civil rights movement remade the United States into a color-blind country is one reason that by 2021, a majority of white Americans experienced no cognitive dissonance in believing that Rosa Parks’s action to desegregate bus seating was right and just but could not countenance the slogan “Black Lives Matter” as a tool against structurally racist police violence. Or, instead of remembering African Americans’ Depression-era boycotts in the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, led by Black women practicing gendered consumer politics, they deplored boycotts as “cancel culture.”

Ronald Reagan famously quipped that “Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”26 Yet even without accounting for near-cash assistance, the national poverty rate declined from 20 percent to 12 percent under LBJ’s watch. By contrast, it stood at 13 percent when Reagan was elected president, and it remained at 13 percent when he left office.

Reagan won in an Electoral College landslide (489‒49), although his margin in the popular vote was narrower—50.7 percent to Carter’s 41 percent and independent John Anderson’s 6.6 percent. Reagan had secured just over half the vote in the election, and polls showed that a large part of that vote was as much about opposition to Carter as it was an endorsement of Reagan or his agenda. Over half of voters said they cast their ballot based on “negative views of the candidates.” Four out of five of Reagan’s supporters reported they made their decision in response to Carter’s record as president. “The great conservative realignment of 1980 was chimerical,” noted Gil Troy. “Only 28 percent of the electorate identified as ‘conservative,’ only 13 percent as strong Republicans, only one Reagan voter in ten identified Reagan’s conservative ideology as a key motivator.”