Your intense debate over which year marks the real beginning of the United States—1619 (slavery’s arrival) or 1776 (Declaration of Independence)—has become predictably polarizing. You might even say that this argument over how to understand our history, repeated ad nauseam in school board meetings and on cable TV, has come to resemble what this nation was like before California entered the Union:

Boring as hell.

If we want to find a compelling origin story for the country in which we actually live, then it makes little sense to center the early human horrors of the tiny, pre-industrial 17th-century Virginia colony, or to elevate the propagandistic pretensions of 18th-century white men starting a country with a population as big as today’s Riverside County.

For all the differences between partisans of 1619 (progressives who see America as entirely founded on slavery) and 1776 (conservatives touting the whitewashed nonsense that America was founded on freedom), they share a common and still socially acceptable prejudice: East Coast bias.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project, touted as a more inclusive account of American history when first published in 2019, gives California just three cursory mentions. The Trump administration’s bonkers rejoinder to the 1619 Project, the 1776 report, supposedly devoted to American greatness, doesn’t mention America’s greatest state even once.

To close this culture war battle, the nation must look West toward reality. Much like a party that only truly starts when the coolest kid saunters in, today’s United States—antically ambitious, deliriously diverse, violently war-mongering, maniacally money-grubbing, and kaleidoscopically cruel—did not really get rolling until California arrived in 1848.

If we’re going to have a new historical curriculum built around just 365 (or 366) days, 1848, that year of revolutions around the world, is the obvious choice. Two 1848 events—California’s Gold Rush and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—together constituted an undeclared revolution, essentially re-founding the United States with different peoples, different borders, and far different aspirations.

James Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill brought people to California from every corner of the world, including a huge, unprecedented influx from Asia. The Gold Rush arrivals were not drab and pious Puritans, seeking religious freedom. They were a motley and largely unrefined lot, fleeing jailers and bad debts in search of fortunes, which they rarely found. What they would find were new debts, in a United States that their descendants would help turn into the world’s largest debtor nation.

The Gold Rush, wrote the historian H.W. Brands, was “one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after.” Among the things it changed was the scale and speed of American ambition, lighting a fire in the belly of a slow and dull country.

While “the old American dream…was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmers: of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year,” Brands wrote in The Age of Gold, “the new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.”

California would help redefine the reality and perception of the American character—as impatient, intemperate, volatile. “Changes of public sentiment are sudden and violent,” Lord James Bryce, the British political scientist, and student of the U.S., would write in his classic The American Commonwealth. “The most active minds are too much absorbed in great business enterprises to tend to politics; the inferior men are frequently reckless and irresponsible; the masses are impatient, accustomed to blame everything and everybody but themselves for the slow approach of the millennium, ready to try instant, even if perilous, remedies for a present evil.”

The Gold Rush also ushered in a bigger and more brutal economy. Gold mining, by requiring more capital and mechanization, hastened the arrival of the Industrial Age, and the rise of the larger banks and financial institutions that rule us to this day. It spurred entrepreneurial efforts in food and clothing (like Levi Strauss’s blue jeans), created demand for new transportation networks, and established a working class of wage laborers. In Europe, a writer named Karl Marx, having just released a manifesto in 1848, made notes on California’s creation of a “new stage of development” and began work on Das Kapital.

The second great event of 1848—the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, between Mexico and the U.S.—reinforced the seismic shifts of the Gold Rush with a change in borders. The U.S. expanded its territory by one-third, for just $15 million. California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado entered the union. The treaty, which ended the Mexican-American War, also made legal the 1845 annexation of Texas, which would become the only American state with credible pretensions as a California rival.

This land grab, one of the largest in world history, all but negated the country’s founding fairy tale of underdog colonists pursuing righteous revolution to overthrow the tyranny of big, bad Britain. The treaty also established a pattern of expansion by bullying and militarism. It was an unjust ending to what Ulysses S. Grant called “the most unjust war ever waged against a weaker nation by a stronger.”

That sin, and the expansion it enabled, launched a new era of American horrors. Many of these undergird our society today, but we don’t think nearly enough about this context. One irony of the deeply pessimistic 1619 Project is that, by focusing so extensively, on slavery and the African American experience, it lets the nation off the hook for the full scope of its awfulness.

The conquest of the West, and the settler ambitions inspired by gold, accelerated the extermination of the continent’s indigenous population. Historians have recognized official slaughter of California’s Indian population—which dropped from 150,000 in the 1840s to 30,000 by 1873—as a genocide. The Gold Rush began a wave of Chinese immigration and a new American method of discrimination: exclusion. This era also saw the U.S. turn Mexican Americans, whose citizenship had been guaranteed by the treaty, into a lower caste. And this was the beginning of California inventing rationales as diverse as its people to justify their imprisonment, en masse.

California’s defenders have long pointed to its ban against slavery in its 1850 constitution, 15 years before the United States prohibited slavery in 1865. But many of the American horrors invented in 19th-century California have never gone away. Mass incarceration remains a fact of life. The powerful and lawless police and sheriff’s departments that originated in 19th-century California still do violence, often with impunity, to people of color. Violence and hatred against people of Asian heritage is on the rise again. The Southern border is still militarized, and is still used as an excuse to deny the rights of mobility and citizenship to migrants and their loved ones. And wage slavery is as 21st-century as an Inland Empire logistics warehouse.

Contemporary politics, which has come to obsess the country, is also rooted in 1848. California and Texas are, of course, the two giants that determine much of what passes for governance in the U.S. these days. They also represent the giant industries—technology and energy—that both empower and threaten human civilization.

In 1619, this wasn’t even a country. In 1776, we were inventing a myth, rather than a nation. 1848 was the year that the United States became an oversized monster—the land that we love, and love to hate.

The post The United States Didn’t Really Begin Until 1848 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There are certain things about the nation’s founding era that many Americans don’t want to see messed with. The Declaration of Independence, despite its inaccurate claims that King George had already unleashed Indian warriors against the frontier, is an almost sacred text.

And George Washington, despite the barrage of criticism he attracted during his second administration, sometimes seems immune from criticism.

While I was working on a new book about Washington, someone asked me: “You’re not going to say anything negative about the General, are you?” As commander of the Continental Army during the Revolution, and as the first president of a nation that was not yet entirely sure it wanted to be, or could survive as, a nation, Washington united Americans, and Americans ever since have been united in their admiration.

One legacy of the father of this country is often overlooked.

At a time when the United States was still weak, many Indian nations were still strong and represented a significant threat to a precarious infant republic. Washington knew that he must build his nation on Indian land, and by war and diplomacy, he helped set the United States on a path of westward expansion that transformed tribal homelands into American territories and then into states.

From our time and perspective, the outcome might seem inevitable; from his time and perspective, it was anything but. His dealings with Native Americans in securing the nation’s independence, survival, and future growth could be considered as another measure of his greatness. Unfortunately, those same dealings inevitably call that greatness into question.

The primary goal of Washington’s Indian policy was to acquire Indian lands. In that, he succeeded. His second goal—and it was a distant second—was to establish just policies for dealings with Indian peoples.

“The Government of the United States are determined that their Administration of Indian Affairs shall be directed entirely by the great principles of Justice and humanity,” Washington informed treaty commissioners heading off to deal with the Southern Indians in August 1789. Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox agreed that the most honorable and least expensive way to get Indian land was to purchase it in treaties. Offering Indian tribes a fair price for their land, Washington hoped, would allow the United States to expand with minimal bloodshed and at the same time treat Indian peoples with justice.

But when Indians refused to sell, Washington was ready to wage war against them. “Extirpate” was the term he used. (The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides two definitions of the word: one is “to pull up by the root”; the other “to destroy completely: wipe out.”) After he dispatched armies to ravage their country during the Revolution, the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) called Washington “Town Destroyer.”

The Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, after visiting Washington in Philadelphia in 1792, warned other Indians: “General Washington is very cunning, he will try to fool us if he can. He speaks very smooth, will tell you fair stories, and at the same time want to ruin us.” Six months after meeting the president, the Cherokee chief Bloody Fellow declared, “General Washington is a Liar.”

The chief was right to be skeptical. A man who had swindled fellow officers out of the bounty lands they had been promised as payment for their services after the French and Indian War hardly could be expected to protect Indian rights against forces of expansion which he himself helped set in motion.

Yet Washington envisioned a place for Indian people in American society. He offered them the chance to remake themselves as Americans by extending them the benefits of American civilization—agriculture (to be practiced by Indian men, not, as had been the case for centuries, by Indian women), education, and Christianity.

Some tribes seized the lifeline. The Cherokees rebuilt their tribe after years of war and land loss. Looking back from the 1820s and 1830s when Andrew Jackson was leading the charge to remove eastern Indian peoples west of the Mississippi, the Cherokee chief John Ross remembered with reverence the first president who had dealt justly with Indians. Ross even named his son George Washington.

Washington’s decisions set precedents that are still with us. As the father of the country, he was also the father of America’s tortuous, conflicted, and often hypocritical Indian policies. While he aspired to a national Indian policy that might somehow reconcile taking Native land with respecting Native rights, he shared and shaped the attitudes and ambitions of his time, and employed deception and violence to attain his own and his nation’s ends.

For example, the Treaty of New York, which he signed with a delegation of Creek chiefs in August 1790, contained secret articles to secure the agreement of chief Alexander McGillivray. And in 1791 Washington dispatched an army to defeat Indian resistance to American expansion by destroying Indian villages in northwest Ohio (a tactic that backfired when the Indians destroyed the army).

In fall 2016, the museum at Mount Vernon opened an exhibit entitled “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” The exhibit quietly, directly, and honestly shows that Washington’s home, wealth, and daily life rested on the unfree labor and exploitation of hundreds of African slaves. Even though he worried about slavery and freed his slaves in his will, Washington’s record and legacy on slavery are deeply ambivalent.

So, too, are his record and legacy in Indian affairs. We can pretend that it wasn’t, or we can acknowledge it as we try to understand the first president and the nation he helped to build.

The post George Washington’s ‘Tortuous’ Relationship with Native Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I think we have trouble grappling with each of these issues because our capacity to think about equality has gotten weaker in the last half century,” Danielle Allen, winner of the 2015 Zócalo Book Prize for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, told a crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue. After accepting the fifth annual Zócalo Book Prize for the year’s best nonfiction book on community and human connection, Allen, a political philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, explained how the Declaration of Independence can help Americans relearn how to talk and think about equality.

Today, we tend to view the Declaration of Independence as being mostly about freedom. But Allen came to see it as a document about inequality while teaching night school classes to low-income adult students at the University of Chicago. Allen taught her students the Declaration because it was a foundational, important document, but short enough that everyone could read it. Delving into philosophy, history, and writing, Allen and her students read the Declaration very slowly, and came to the realization that it was not just a declaration of war but a “philosophically coherent” document that makes an argument we’ve lost sight of. Throughout its 1,337 words, the Declaration touches on equality five times, and makes clear that it is among the most important ideals on which a new nation would be built.

The Declaration’s “very robust picture of political equality” reflects the political actions that paved the way for its drafting. In the fall of 1775, said Allen, the Continental Congress advertised in colonial newspapers, asking people to write stories about what the British were doing. Colonial leaders took “an egalitarian approach” to deciding on a course of action: They held town hall meetings in farmers’ fields from New Hampshire to Georgia. There were no property qualifications to attend these meetings; every citizen was welcome.

What has happened since 1776, and why don’t we discuss the Founding Fathers’ commitment to equality today?

Up until the early 19th century, said Allen, people who cared about politics understood that “freedom and equality have to go together.” They understood, she said, that if some people are free but others aren’t, that’s not freedom. But the Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of a shift away from this view. Karl Marx seized on the extremes of wealth and poverty in this new, emerging society, and introduced socialism to the political conversation.

Marx did not separate equality and freedom, but his detractors did. An ideological divide opened. On one side were capitalism, “liberty, inequality, and survival of the fittest,” said Allen; on the other were communism, “not-liberty, equality, and survival of the unfittest.” This rhetoric of a conflict between equality and liberty was used to define the Cold War, and thus American 20th-century political life.

As a result, we have a wealth of clichés when it comes to freedom. Allen listed a few: “Isn’t this a free country?” “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

What formulations, asked Allen, do we have that help us think about equality? They don’t come easily to mind. Instead, we’ve seen an “atrophying of our collective intellectual capacity to understand the ideal of equality,” she said.

In order to jump-start our ability to think about equality, Allen said we have to understand that equality isn’t just about civil rights and voting rights but also about education, the economy, and social equality. To make the idea of equality useful again, we need to understand it not in opposition to freedom. And we need to take new approaches to political economy as well. We need to ask ourselves, said Allen, what kind of economic policies support an engaged citizenry?

This is a significant undertaking, said Allen, because for 150 years, economists have taken a utilitarian approach: They are willing to sacrifice political equality to maximize income. Instead, she said, we need to figure out how to build a political economy that supports political equality, and convinces people of the value of equality in and of itself. How do we do this? It’s a question Allen asked audience members to continue to think about in order to tackle some of the most urgent questions about equality facing America today.

In the audience question-and-answer session, Allen was asked to address the people who were not viewed as equals in the revolutionary period—Native Americans, African-American slaves, and women. Did the Founding Fathers put forth a “more truncated” vision of equality in the Declaration of Independence than Allen seemed to acknowledge?

Allen said that it’s important to understand that “the Declaration is a polyphonic text” written by multiple voices. Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, was a draftsperson for a committee led by John Adams, who never owned slaves and thought slavery was a bad thing. Allen said that the Declaration also helped start the movement toward abolition: Pennsylvania outlawed slavery in 1780. The Southern states also came to recognize that the Declaration of Independence was antithetical to their worldviews; they wrote a new version of the document in founding the Confederacy. She added that John and Abigail Adams disagreed about the place of women in the Declaration, and that Abigail predicted that women would continue to foment for voice and representation—which is exactly what came to pass.

The post Why Can’t Americans Talk About Equality? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality. It is out of an egalitarian commitment that a people grows—a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination. If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that the people’s strength resides in its equality. The Declaration also conveys another lesson of paramount importance. It is this: language is one of the most potent resources each of us has for achieving our own political empowerment. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence grasped the power of words. This reveals itself in the laborious processes by which they brought the Declaration, and their revolution, into being. It shows itself forcefully, of course, in the text’s own eloquence. When we think about how to achieve political equality, we have to attend to things like voting rights and the right to hold office. We have to foster economic opportunity and understand when excessive material inequality undermines broad democratic political participation. But we also have to cultivate the capacity of citizens to use language effectively enough to influence the choices we make together. The achievement of political equality requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures. Equality and liberty—these are the summits of human empowerment; they are the twinned foundations of democracy. What fragile foundations they are!

Political philosophers have taught us to think that there is an inherent tension between liberty and equality, that we can pursue egalitarian commitments only at the expense of governmental intrusions that reduce liberty. What’s more, in the last half century, our public discourse has focused on burnishing the concept of liberty, not equality. Consequently, we understand the former idea better. We have ideas ready-to-hand about the danger posed to personal freedom by excessive governmental regulation and the value that lies in autonomy and self-creation. What do we know any longer about equality?

Because we have accepted the view that there is a trade-off between equality and liberty, we think we have to choose. Lately, we have come, as a people, to choose liberty. Equality has always been the more frail twin, but it has now become particularly vulnerable. If one tracks presidential rhetoric from the last two decades, one will find that invocations of liberty significantly predominate over praise songs for equality. This is true for candidates and presidents from both parties.

Matters have gone so far, in fact, that we have even failed to notice the disappearance of the ideal of equality from our interpretations of the Declaration. In the 2012 presidential election, the candidates held their final debates in front of a blue backdrop on which the words of the Declaration were reprinted in white. This inspired the presidential challenger to riff on the founders’ language. He read out this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—

Then he dwelled on the ideas of life and liberty to argue for military funding; he focused on the word “Creator” to argue for religious toleration and freedom. And he emphasized the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to advocate caring for the needy, pursuing discovery and innovation, and pruning toward a minimalist government that gets out of the way of individual choices about how to pursue dreams.

What happened to equality? On the subject of equality, no more important sentence has ever been written than the one quoted by the candidate, but he had nothing to say about that ideal. Even more surprisingly, his opponent did not point this out. Nor, for that matter, did anyone else in the frenzy of subsequent media commentary.

I have told this story without naming the candidates because the candidates, the parties, do not matter. Yes, it was the Republican, Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, who glossed the most famous sentence of the Declaration—the very “proposition” about equality around which Lincoln crafted his Gettysburg address—without once invoking the idea of equality. But his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, our first African-American president, never called him on it either.

Political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other. As a public, we have swallowed this argument whole. We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality. Our choice in recent years has tipped toward freedom. Under the general influence of libertarianism, both parties have abandoned our Declaration; they have scorned our patrimony.

Such a choice is dangerous. If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place. I for one cannot bear to see the ideal of equality pass away before it has reached its full maturity. I hope I am not alone.

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