“Make America Great Again†is a slogan that President Donald Trump has used to his advantage and one that has helped him win office twice. But I have always been stuck on the “again†part. When exactly was America great? What period is he referring too when he uses this term?
America’s greatness has had its shortcomings. Our experiment in democracy, while a laudable goal, has fallen short over the years, has created considerable suffering for many and has always excluded a segment of our population from enjoying its benefits. Given Trump’s track record of the first seven months in office, America is sure not great right now.
When they hear this phrase, I suspect Trump’s supporters think nostalgically of a time that never really existed. I don’t blame them either. Most of us received a sanitized version of American history during our high school years and, if you grew up in our state, you were taught eighth-grade West Virginia history that was totally disconnected from reality. You were expected to memorize all 55 counties, but the curriculum conveniently ignored the fact that greedy coal companies had needlessly killed thousands of miners in their pursuit of profit.
America’s troubled history is one you don’t always learn. Four broad themes have permeated our past and have largely been glossed over in our history books: Indigenous genocide, racialized slavery, hyper-capitalism and militarist imperialism. Their legacy shapes the social, economic and political structure of our nation today.
Millions of Native Americans once occupied what is now the United States. They didn’t just disappear. The sad truth is the majority were killed and their land was stolen from them. The ones remaining were relegated to reservations established on worthless land that white settlers didn’t want. This action created a legacy of poverty and other social ills that still exist. Today, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, for example, has one of the highest rates of teenage suicide in the country.
In West Virginia history, I was taught that the Battle of Point Pleasant was the “first†Battle of the American Revolution, not Lexington and Concord, because it prevented an alliance between Great Britain and the Native American tribes in the Ohio Valley. The battle, however, was nothing more than a land grab to seize ground from the Shawnee.
Currently, the Trump administration is threatening to curtail funding from the Smithsonian Institution because it focuses too much on “how bad slavery was†and not enough on the “brightness†of America. Slavery was horrible and few of us have a clear picture of this atrocity. We know slaves were bought and sold, but I doubt many of us realize how brutally they were beaten and mistreated. Plantation owners routinely raped their slaves because the status of the child was inherited from the mother. As a result, if a slave became pregnant by him, this led to an additional individual in his ownership. Our collective lack of knowledge does not remove this stain on America.
We don’t need to look to history to see the ills of hyper-capitalism. It is happening before us. Income disparity in the United States has become a defining feature of this nation’s economic landscape, with the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans widening over the past several decades. While the top earners have seen substantial increases in their income and accumulated wealth, many individuals and families in the lower and middle economic tiers have experienced stagnant wages and limited upward mobility. In short, the rich get richer, and the poor and middle class get poorer. In 2015, Republicans gained control of the West Virginia Legislature. Are you better off now than you were 10 years ago?
Today, most Americans view our military favorably, but our mighty armies have been used to carry out imperialistic initiatives in the past. One instance is to look at the actions of President James K. Polk, who deliberately provoked a war with Mexico and, in the process, conquered half of that nation. There isn’t any way around that. The U.S. regions most affected by undocumented immigration — California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — were once part of the Republic of Mexico, until we took them by military force.
Few Americans know much about this war, and rarely consider that much of America’s land — from sea to shining sea — was, in fact, conquered. It is a sad fact that America has not always been the altruistic and benevolent nation it claims to be.
George Santayana, in his 1905 book, “The Life of Reason,†wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.â€
Robert Beanblossom grew up in Mingo County and retired from the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. Now living in western North Carolina, he can be contacted at r.beanblossom
