Forgotten History -
Friday, January 20, 2006
"Little known facts and overlooked
history"
The Indian Wars and the Emergence of the United States as a
World Power
In 1889 Theodore Roosevelt wrote a book called
"The Winning
of the War", which Alan Trachtenberg describes as a "half-
mystical imperative of "race history, a culminating moment
in the drive of 'the English speaking peoples for dominance
in the world.'" In a review of Roosevelt's book, Frederick
Jackson Turner, who would speak to Chicago Exposition of
the World's Fair in 1893, said, "American history needs a
connected and unified account of the progress of
civilization across the continent."
The Indian wars had been going on since the time of Columbus
and the record of American atrocities including the "Trail
of Tears" had left a long bitter history. The thought of
what to do with the Indians fell into two camps. The first
camp called for their extermination and the second for their
assimilation, under control of whites of course, to American
culture. They represented a problem because the Indians were
numerous and had a distinct culture of their own, which was
different to European culture.
This coupled with the fact that they could inflict damage to
whites and sometimes, as in the rout of Custer's army in the
Battle of the Little Big Horn, defeat whites in battle.
Their ability to do this presented problems, so the U.S.
army, under the leadership of many of the Civil War generals
such as William Sherman, were given the job of defeating the
natives. Native-Americans were forced to leave their lands
and live on reservations. This struggle ended at Pine Ridge,
South Dakota, during the assassination of Chief Sitting Bull
and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. The Indian Wars, which had
been going on since the arrival of Columbus were finally
over and the United States, in response to the closing of
the West, looked to markets overseas to increase its wealth
and to claim its mark as an imperial empire.
The opportunity arose in 1898 when the battleship Maine was
blown-up by what seemed at that time to be Spain, but later
turned out to be an internal explosion. The public became
enraged and, with the goading of the Hearst Press, declared
war on Spain. While many had supported the independence of
Cuba earlier, the racism of the time, fueled by segregation
laws and the Indian wars, soon had the United States
imposing its will on Cuba and fighting against the Cubans
in revolt, who were mostly black, to insure their dominance
over the island.
An additional booty prize of the war was the taking of other
Spanish colonies, such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines,
the people of the Philippines had been fighting a war of
their own for independence, but when the United States took
control of the island, it soon became necessary to go to war
to establish a base in the Philippines, according to the
forces of empire. It was a ghastly brutal war in which
Americans, fueled by the racism of the time, committed
horrendous atrocities.
There were people who opposed the war and the empire
building That came with it. So, the anti-imperialist
league was born. Its ranks included, among others, Mark
Twain:
"We have pacified some thousands of islanders and burned
them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and
turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished
heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots;
subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent
Assimilation, which in the pious new name of the musket;
we have acquired property in the 300 concubines and other
slaves of our business partner, The Sultan of Sulu, and
hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by
these Providences of God-and the phrase is the government's
not mine-we are a World Power."
Books of the period: "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", Dee
Brown, "The Incorporation of America", Alan Trachtenberg,
"A People's History of the United States", by Howard Zinn,
William Appleman Williams, "The Roots of Modern American
Empire", "Empire as a Way of Life", and Marilyn Young, "The
Rhetoric of Empire".
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