Book Review: The Legacy of Conquest

The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987).

As her title indicates, Limerick is uninterested in telling a tidy narrative with a beginning and an end. Her theme is the continuity of the American West. As such, she challenges Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis and argues that the West must be rethought of as a place rather than a process. If Western history is merely the story of white settlers conquering the wilderness, then perhaps Turner’s thesis, as arbitrary as it is, can suffice. But if the history of the West is the story of a place, it opens up the narrative and allows us to see previously overlooked continuities. Limerick contends that the ideas and economic forces that animated the nineteenth-century West are far less exotic and foreign to the present day than we may like to believe. The battles fought then – over property rights, land use, ethnic conflict, immigration and more – parallel those of today.

Limerick also aims to recapture the reality of conquest. Despite the brutal truth of it, she notes that the conquest of the West has been turned into an adventure story and a venue for mass entertainment in a way that other aspects of American history have not. “Children happily played ‘cowboys and Indians,’” she writes, “but stopped short of ‘masters and slaves.’” Throughout, Limerick is determined to upend popular perceptions of what the West was (and is) like. She portrays the West not as a place of boundless fulfillment of the American Dream, but as the place where American myths came to die. Here, the rugged white individuals conquering the wilderness are nowhere to be found. In their place are normal people relying on a healthy dose of Federal government support and more than their share of a sense of victimization. It was the place, too, where the American faith in the inevitable reward for hard work was strained to the breaking point. On the farms of the plains and in the mining boom towns, toil and success, those supposed sisters, were all too often decoupled.

Of course, white Americans were not alone in the West. In Limerick’s telling, rather than encountering an empty wilderness, white settlers battle with Indians, Hispanics, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and nature itself. By bringing in the story of disparate groups, Limerick complicates traditional Western narratives, challenging a Eurocentric perspective. We can think of Western history, she says, as a subway system, with each station representing a different group of people. There is no center, but each station is connected to the others, and the view looks different depending on the station one is at. Despite this useful analogy, Limerick fails to fully overcome a basic conceptual problem in the structure of her book. Her study is organized almost entirely around the ideas, goals, and activities of white people. The book comes in two sections: “The Conquerors,” and “The Conquerors Meet Their Match.” Thus in its most basic formatting decision, it affirms a sort of simplistic duality in which, again, white people are at the center and have more agency. Given the realities of the subjugation that did occur, it could be argued this is unavoidable, but it seems to be at odds with what Limerick is attempting to accomplish.

Limerick is an astonishingly fluid writer. Always entertaining, frequently humorous, The Legacy of Conquest is filled with perceptive insights and combative judgments. Yet Limerick’s wide-ranging and free-flowing style can sometimes get the better of her, as her conclusions and use of humor can come off as flippant. For example, she admirably portrays the West as a polyglot place inhabited by numerous and varied groups of people. Yet in discussing white settlers’ reaction to this complexity, she writes, “Western diversity forced racists to think – an unaccustomed activity.” This is humorous, no doubt, but it perpetuates a self-serving myth that elsewhere she seems ready to take down – namely, that racists were just stupid brutes without any rational economic or social motivations, and we modern Americans have moved on from such primitive times. Despite these occasional stumbles, The Legacy of Conquest remains a provocative read a quarter century after its publication.

What We Can Learn From History

A professor said today that we can't learn anything from history -- anything at all. This led to at least one doctoral student several tens of thousands of dollars into this process to question what exactly she was doing all this for.

"Because it's fun!" he said. There is some truth to this.

A lot of people think history has "lessons" to teach us, or act as if historians should be able to double as prophets. So you have fairly ridiculous spectacles like President Obama inviting a bunch of popular historians to the White House as if this will give him the lessons of history that are relevant to the rest of his presidency. Unfortunately for him, there has never been an Obama presidency before, and this is actually the first time 2013 has rolled around. I know, surprising huh? But it means that history does not have much to teach him.

More generally, on the popular level history is constantly being appropriated with extreme simplicity and forced to fit into modern boxes to bolster an argument or political point. In this sense it is true, we cannot learn anything from history. There are too many variables, too much contingency, for us to draw specific lessons that reveal the path forward. If we think lessons are there to be found we deny contingency and suddenly the lessons we could learn don't matter anyway because we've become determinists and what will be will be.

All that aside, I strongly disagree with my professor. I think there is much to be gained from a knowledge of history. To say that we cannot learn from history at all is something similar to saying that we as individuals are not shaped by our past experiences. History does not give us specific lessons, but I believe it can instill more subtle qualities -- humility, nuance, wisdom, perspective. More than that, history grounds us and gives us an identity. Without it we would be cast adrift, which is precisely why it remains so contentious and is fought over in the political domain. To say we do not learn from history is a bit like saying that my parents did not provide any guidance because they failed to give me written instructions for every conceivable life event.

Anyway, a random rant at the end of a long day. I love history.

From Indifference To Responsibility

On Monday I quoted a chunk from Martin Luther King's last Sunday sermon but I'm sure it was far too large for most people to have read it, and I didn't comment on it. So here are some important excerpts that absolutely destroy any notion that King bought into the individualized frames of colorblindness. When King talked about the dream of being judged by character rather than color, he was laying out an inspiring goal, not a policy prescription for how to get there.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

 

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt...

 

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism...

There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

 

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years...

 

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

 

In contrast, the narratives of colorblindness go something like this:

 

"I'm not racist."

"There is equal opportunity in America."

"I treat everyone the same. What more can be asked of me?"

"I wasn't alive during slavery; I had nothing to do with it, so no claim can be made on me."

"My ancestors weren't even in the country during the time of slavery."

"Black people can work hard and find success in America just like other groups have."

 

To all of these evasions and denials, we hear Dr. King saying, "Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions." The bit about having nothing to do with slavery is probably one of the most common and most stupid refrains we white people make. I've heard it too many times to count. I used to espouse it myself. But think about it for a minute. It's a claim that implies the 150 years after slavery are irrelevant, despite the fact that black people were denied the rights and privileges of citizenship for the next 100 years. It assumes, too, that the amply documented current discrimination ongoing during our lifetimes is irrelevant. It implies that we as individuals somehow have the power to be completely distinct from a discriminatory society without taking proactive and painful steps to go against the grain.

 

More than that, it is false to our own experience and basic demographic statistics. The fact that I was born into a family identified as "white" meant that before I ever did anything, before my character was formed or I ever did a day's hard work, I was statistically less likely to have to attend a poor school or face violent crime or be denied a job offer because of my color. I was statistically more likely to have greater wealth, more social connections with rich people, and better educational opportunities.

 

These statistical realities are all undeniably a product of slavery and discrimination. How thoughtless and inhumane it is for me, then, whose life has been so dramatically altered by our history, whose successes have been directly tied to evils I oppose, to pretend that I can cut myself off from it and bear no responsibility for taking positive action to tear down these privileges and turn them into opportunities all can enjoy. As foreign and perverse as this sounds to so many white people, until we start thinking this way I truly believe we're part of the problem.

The Night Before He Died

MLK Day Thoughts

It is Martin Luther King Day, and that means it is time for all Americans to join together and appropriate King's legacy for our own ends, regardless of whether our ideas are antithetical to his. We mythologize all our great figures -- Lincoln is the Emancipator, never the complicated man who clung doggedly to his plan to send black Americans to Africa -- but the urge to do so is particularly strong with Dr. King because of the relative nearness of his life and the extraordinary esteem with which most Americans regard him.

We see this appropriation in buffoonish ways quite regularly, as when the Gun Appreciation Day founder said last week that Dr. King would support him were he alive today. In these laughable incidents we see the mythologizing urge taken to its logical extreme: historical truth is entirely beside the point; the goal is simply to endorse one's views with a great moral figure. The gun appreciation day guy might just as well have claimed to know that Buddha and Jesus support the second amendment.

But the mythologizing and caricaturing of Dr. King happen all the time in much more mainstream ways that many people find less obviously problematic. The thousands of Americans today who will quote one line from one speech (content of character/color of skin) without knowing much of anything else King said or believed are participating in this mythologizing. Those who try to fit him into our modern political categories, especially those who claim he was a conservative, are using him. They have no desire to know what King actually stood for. Many liberals, in turn, pay lip service to King's goals, but precious few politicians today truly prioritize the kind of pro-equality, pro-poor politics of Dr. King.

Many conservatives opposed the move in the 1980s to create the Martin Luther King holiday. There was a widespread sense that King was either a communist or their stooge, a view shared by President Reagan, who never really appeared to question an unequal America with whites on top. But when it became clear that King was passing into national hero status whether conservatives liked it or not, a new strategy was called for. In a process that was probably not entirely conscious, conservatives went from criticizing Dr. King's legacy to claiming it as their own.

Colorblindness, a racial ideology espoused most fervently by white conservatives, appeared to have Dr. King on record supporting it, in his most famous speech no less. What a coup! Nevermind that in its actual functioning colorblindness appeared to do a better job perpetuating white privilege than eradicating racism; Dr. King was a colorblind conservative! He didn't play identity politics like the current generation of black leaders who have betrayed his legacy! Nevermind that this represented an extreme misreading of the Dream speech, and that one speech does not summarize the totality of King's thought.

But if King was not the communist of the right-wing imagination, nor the colorblind conservative a later generation of conservatives would make up, what exactly was he? He was, I believe, a man with a moral center that stretched beyond the social and political boundaries of the American imagination. As such, he could appear both radical and moderate, as the occasion warranted, and was able to speak truth to all the compromised systems and values of the United States, whether of the left or the right. He expressed reservations about both communism and capitalism.

For a better sense of what King stood for, let's get away from his Dream speech and look, for example, at some excerpts from his last Sunday sermon, delivered less than a week before he died:

[W]e are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

 

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt...

 

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.

 

One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."

 

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

 

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

 

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

 

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

 

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You’re free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor...

 

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

 

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty...

 

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair." She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn’t worth sixty dollars." Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

 

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."

 

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

 

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

 

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.

 

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

 

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

 

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action...

 

And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference.

 

Yes, it will be a Poor People’s Campaign. This is the question facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.

 

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That’s the question facing America today.

 

Agree with him or disagree, this is who Dr. King was. And much of this text is anathema to modern conservatism. Heck, even modern liberalism doesn't want to hear this. Grapple with the real man.

Moving Forward On A Colorblindness Thesis

As I consider what I am going to do for my master's thesis I'm thinking about the related themes of continuity and colorblindness in American racial conflict. I'm interested in the ways white supremacy has been created, formed, changed, perpetuated, and protected over time, such that right down to the present day being "white" carries some very specific meanings and privileges. I'm also interested in how Americans identified as "white" have viewed themselves, the minorities in their midst, and the opportunities offered by American society.

My basic thoughts are utterly pedestrian in academia, but remain controversial among the broader public. My challenge is that I don't want to just write a serviceable thesis that corrects popular misconceptions while covering ground that has already been more competently explored by other scholars. I want to find a niche in the historiography where I can really contribute, while still speaking to the broader public (not that a thesis is for the broader public; I guess I'm speaking more of long term goals here).

It is far from original to point out that colorblindness -- a highly individualized sense of which is the dominant frame most Americans have for understanding race today -- is not the sharp break from our past that many assume but is rather the latest in a series of racial ideologies that have significant commonalities with one another. For example, though racial oppression has greatly decreased over time, all the dominant racial frames of American history, including colorblindness, serve the interests of the white majority better than minority interests. As such, colorblindness, far from being a frontal attack on our segregationist past, in fact naturally grew out of it. Rather than being a self-evidently good way of eradicating racism, it actually has at least as much potential to perpetuate white privilege.

This is boilerplate in dozens of books. But much of the public still finds it rather shocking. Similarly, the popular perception is of an enormous disjunction between pre- and post-civil rights America (or, even worse, between pre- and post-slavery America) in which the bad old racist America was defeated and we've arrived in the sunlit lands of racial egalitarianism. Americans, especially those hillbilly southerners, used to be racists, but suddenly around 1964 or so we set things right; the past is now dead and buried. Almost no one, of course, thinks quite this simplistically, but I believe this gets close to the assumptions many people have.

I argue that such a view is so simplistic and unbalanced that it is basically false. There is much that ties the America of the 1950s and before with the America of 2013. Indeed, it is not out of the question that future historians may periodize the civil rights era as extending right into the present day. How meaningful is it, for example, for North Lawndale and Garfield Park on the West Side of Chicago, to make a big distinction between a 1960s civil rights era and a 21st century post-civil rights era? In many ways, so little has changed that the distinction feels absurd. The remaining inequalities and discrimination are such that, after all, there may be more movements ahead.

I see colorblindness as a useful way of exploring this theme of continuity. I argue that during the time of a given dominant racial ideology we can discern the vestiges of the previous frame and locate the seeds of the next one. What does it mean for American society that the ideology of white supremacy gave way to the ideology of colorblindness? How, precisely, did this change occur, and over what period of time? Do we see hints of colorblindness in the 19th century (yes, I believe we do) and white supremacy in the 21st? (yes). What are the implications?

These are extremely broad themes. Moving forward, I will need to find a vehicle to employ them. A place, an event, a limited time period, a particular kind of source. Any thoughts or suggestions?