There are those who achieve greatness in spite of their flaws. I can
recognize the genius of Thomas Jefferson, while understanding that he
could justify owning people.
I would have preferred that my history books had given me that sort of
information, rather than hiding it.
Then there are those who are so flawed that it's impossible to find
anything good to say.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/25/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Reading it gave me pause because on one level, what Trump says about
disrespecting our history is true. If you look carefully at all of the
historical figures honored by statues, many of them past presidents, you see
that many of them have disgusting racist, sexist attitudes and in order to
show respect for all members of our society, we need to take all of them
down from their places of honor. If people truly re-examine our history,
all of their false patriotism has to be dismantled. Rename Columbus Day and
then rethink the meaning of the original Thanksgiving celebration as it was
described to us. Washington's Birthday? He as a slave holder. Lincoln's
Birthday? He didn't care about freeing slaves. His first priority was
keeping the union together. But we've never had a truly United States.
We've mostly had a Dis United States.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2020 6:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Let's Talk About the Real Teddy Roosevelt
Judging Teddy Roosevelt and condemning him will do little toward our present
racial unrest. Learning that this attitude was accepted and even admired,
begins to assist us in understanding why we are who we are today.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/24/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Let's Talk About the Real Teddy Roosevelt By Jon Schwarz, The
Intercept
24 June 20
New York City's American Museum of Natural History announced Sunday
that it will remove its famous statue of President Teddy Roosevelt
from its sidewalk entrance.
The museum's president emphasized that the decision was made based on
the statue's "hierarchical composition" - Roosevelt is on horseback,
flanked by an African man and a Native American man on foot - rather
than the simple fact that it portrayed Roosevelt. The museum,
co-founded by Roosevelt's father, will keep Roosevelt's name on its
Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, and Theodore
Roosevelt Park.
This suggests that Americans still have not faced the extraordinarily
dark side of Roosevelt's history.
Roosevelt was born in 1858 to a wealthy New York City family. When his
father died while Roosevelt was attending Harvard, he inherited the
equivalent of about $3 million today. While in his twenties, Roosevelt
invested a significant percentage of this money in the cattle business
out west. This led him to spend large amounts of time in Montana and
the Dakotas in the years just before they became states in 1889.
During this period, Roosevelt developed an attitude toward Native
Americans that can fairly be described as genocidal. In an 1886 speech
in New York, he
declared:
I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead
Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like
to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious
cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Take three
hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for
fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what
the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel.
That same year Roosevelt published a book in which he wrote that "the
so-called Chivington or Sandy [sic] Creek Massacre, in spite of
certain most objectionable details, was on the whole as righteous and
beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier."
The Sand Creek massacre had occurred 22 years previously in the
Colorado Territory, wiping out a village of over 100 Cheyenne and
Arapaho people. It was in every way comparable to the My Lai massacre
during the Vietnam War.
Nelson A. Miles, an officer who eventually became the Army's top
general, wrote in his memoirs that it was "perhaps the foulest and
most unjustifiable crime in the annals of America."
The assault was led by Col. John Chivington, who famously said, "I
have come to kill Indians. . Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits
make lice."
Soldiers later reported that after killing men, women, and children,
they mutilated their bodies for trophies. One lieutenant stated in a
congressional investigation that "I heard that the privates of White
Antelope had been cut off to make a tobacco bag out of."
In a subsequent book, "The Winning of the West," Roosevelt explained
that U.S. actions toward American Indians were part of the larger,
noble endeavor of European colonialism:
All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient
contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use
of scattered savage tribes. . Most fortunately, the hard, energetic,
practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in
barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who
are, these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in
imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is
done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands. .
The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages. .
American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander
and Maori,-in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds
are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty
people.
It is no exaggeration to call this Hitlerian. And while it's extremely
unpopular to say so, Nazism was not just rhetorically similar to
European colonialism, it was an outgrowth of it and its logical
culmination.
In a 1928 speech, Adolf Hitler was already speaking approvingly of how
Americans had "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred
thousands, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a
cage." In 1941, Hitler told confidants of his plans to "Europeanize"
Russia. It wasn't just Germans who would do this, he said, but
Scandinavians and Americans, "all those who have a feeling for
Europe." The most important thing was to "look upon the natives as
Redskins."
What this means for the innumerable celebrations of Roosevelt across
the U.S. is up to us. But if we proceed honestly, we will face a
reckoning with something even more monumental than the history of
America.
