Over the years I have come to the realization that Americans view their country through rose-colored glasses. Variants on that theme are common, even in casual conversation. America is a country unlike any other, a moral leader with a global mission to spread freedom and democracy. “What makes American exceptionalism different is that we are the only people I know of in history to say power comes directly from God to each one of you” (Newt Gingrich as reported in Lawrence 2011). America has an “exceptional role on the world stage, that of a great champion of human dignity and human freedom” (Romney 2011). How we see our country and portray ourselves to the world is precisely what I want to examine in this essay.
American Exceptionalism has been a thorny issue for me for several decades, though it is a concept beloved by conservatives, moderates of varied stripes, libertarians, and liberals. Part of what I find troubling is that Exceptionalists typically extol the U.S. as the moral model of democracy—that rare system founded in equal measures on the consent of the governed and on the inalienable rights of freedom and dignity possessed by all people—as well as a socioeconomic success that should be envied and emulated by the rest of the world. Another troubling issue for me before every presidential election is the propensity of many incumbent and wanna-be politicians to work their bases into a state of political fervor by throwing out the red meat of Exceptionalism. Part of that trend is for those same politicians to try to outdo their opponents with respect to who is the most rabidly devoted to American Exceptionalism, more than suggesting that those who are even moderate in their expressed devotion to Exceptionalism are lacking in patriotism and thus are not viable candidates (Ledbetter 2012). To put it another way, in many political and ideological circles Exceptionalism = patriotism. I believe that situation calls for critical analysis of how historical events have been interpreted with respect to the claim of Exceptionalists that American is a great democratic country so dramatically different than and superior to others that it deserves the world’s adulation and emulation.
In this essay I do not engage in a full-scale analysis of the defining attributes of the American Exceptionalist concept (for such reviews see Hodgson 2010, Madsen 1998, Murray 2013, and Pease 2009). Rather, this evaluation is concerned with what I regard as key elements that were part of the American experience at the very onset of our becoming a new country, namely how the concepts of inalienable human rights—especially freedom, dignity, and equality—were expressed in American life and culture, not in high-minded words but in real-world actions. The specific historical elements in which this essay is grounded include the treatment of Native Americans and slavery and its aftermath. Although both topics are complex, my goal is to clarify their place in American history and thus their relationship to Exceptionalism.
Author’s Note: Few people are open to information that challenges their own beliefs, although most of us are quite capable of finding errors in the beliefs of others. What we all have inside us, at varying levels of intensity, is a confirmation bias (Nickerson 1998) that prompts us to seek evidence that confirms what we intuitively/emotionally know to be true and reject information that fails to confirm those beliefs. I do not know of a reliable way to counteract the internal bias or the inclination to engage in system justification (Jost et al. 2004) and motivated reasoning (Westen 2006) that we all have. My technique in this essay is to rely on historical documents and academic research despite knowing that technique will seldom persuade those who either reject objective evidence or minimize its relevance to a discussion. Nevertheless, in the hope of promoting a fuller understanding of American history, the sources I have provided herein are largely available online so people can read original research/documents and make up their own minds.
Treatment of Indigenous Nations
When Europeans began colonizing the New World, they found it populated with indigenous peoples engaged in hunting, fishing, gathering, complex social interactions with neighboring peoples that included trade and cooperation as well as conflict, and a wide variety of agricultural activities. Many of those native peoples, especially on the Eastern Seaboard and Piedmont, inhabited permanent, self-sufficient settlements or villages that were substantial in size and complexity. The typical English reaction to discovering native peoples in the New World, after their failures with the Popham and Roanoke Colonies, was to make clear their intent through words and deeds:
We seek land and resources. Because we are Christian, white, civilized, and better armed, we are superior to you in every way. Resistance will cause us to attack you. Your only viable option is to accept our dominion and sell your land to us at prices and conditions we determine to be fair (see Jennings 1975).
A chilling chapter
in North American history that was largely under-researched until the last several
decades concerns the enslavement of Native Americans. Today, most Americans have
at least passing familiarity with the displacement of Native Americans by
whites but little awareness of the specific ways in which displacement and
enslavement overlapped in early North American history. What a number of contemporary
historians have discovered is that the seeds of the African enslavement system
were sown in earlier European efforts to exploit Native American labor. That
white determination to force Native Americans into slavery intensified the turmoil
of contact between the two groups, disrupting what had been fairly well-established
inter-tribal relationships and creating volatility among native communities that
were struggling to determine their place in a radically new socio-political
reality forced on them by waves of white invaders.
A detailed
summary article on this critical topic is available in Rebecca Onion’s “America’s
Other Original Sin” published in Slate (see: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/01/native_american_slavery_historians_uncover_a_chilling_chapter_in_u_s_history.single.html)
A sampling of
recently published research into this topic would include the work of Gallay (2003 and 2015), Krauthamer
(2013), Newell (2015), Reséndez (2016), Rushford (2012), Saunt (2005), and
Snyder (2010).
And so adventurous and profit-seeking Englishmen proceeded to slowly but surely subjugate the indigenous peoples they found in the New World, taking what they wanted through varying combinations of mutual aid mixed with violence, coercion, and duplicity (Allen 1991), exploiting the land for their benefit, and establishing colonial outposts that mimicked the places from which they had come. The newly minted U.S. Government took its lead directly from England and continued in that imperialistic-colonializing mode despite the sacred promises of freedom/individual liberty, equality, and justice for all enshrined so prominently in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights (see Loesch 1993).
Two early U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Johnson v. M’Intosh and Cherokee Nation v. Georgia—sealed the fate of Native Americans long before most tribes across the continent knew much about white people in general, or about the law-less American frontiersmen/pioneers/settlers massing at their borders, boiling with lust for free land to homestead. Several principles established in those famous decisions are relevant today:
• The British right of discovery (meaning legal ownership) with respect to all land in the area comprising the U.S. passed directly to the federal Government when the former colonies became an independent country.
• The right of the U.S. to property it claimed in North America was ownership in fee simple and the Native American right to the land they had occupied for hundreds of years was comparable to a lease [Author’s Note: a condition clearly subordinate to and dependent on the legal owner, the U.S. Government].
• Native American rights to property could only be sold to the U.S. Government [Author’s Note: creating a monopsony of one buyer and one seller with the buyer able to “fix” the price to its advantage].
• Native Americans tribes were not independent nations but were “wards” of the U.S. Government “in a state of pupilage”; nor had the Framers of the Constitution considered them citizens with legal standing in court (Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia, pp. 30 U.S. 17-18; see also Naturalization Act of 1790).
Of interest is that the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh was reached without Native American tribes being present or represented by counsel. Thus, the Court was free to craft a “story” of Native American savagery that gave substance to its “new rule” of conquest but was at considerable variance with historical facts that were widely known at the time (Engle 2004; Kades 2000), facts the Court itself later acknowledged in Cherokee Nation (Krupat 1992).
Native American tribes were not sovereign nations under U.S. law but were defined by the Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation as “domestic dependent nations.” Thus, when the Government desired to buy tribal land, the Executive Branch negotiated a treaty that would be ratified by the Senate if judged appropriate. Those treaties were acknowledged by the Government as “contracts between nations” and as statutory obligations. In most treaties, a tribe would agree to give up (cede) its rights to part of its land while reserving the remaining portions for their use (reservation). In exchange, the U.S. Government would purchase the land from the tribe and promise to protect them from white encroachment and allow them to live permanently on treaty-authorized reservations. That was how it was supposed to work. Reality was considerably different.
What happened to the Cherokee Nation is illustrative of the reality that every tribe in the U.S. would eventually face. Article VII of the Government’s Holston Treaty (1791) with the Cherokee specifically stated: “The United States solemnly guarantee to the Cherokee nation, all their lands not hereby ceded.” However, due to intense pressure by white settlers to appropriate Cherokee land guaranteed by Congress as legally in tribal possession, the State of Georgia commenced an organized program to eject all members of the tribe from the State (see Mintz and McNeil 2013). When gold was discovered in Georgia in the mid-1820s on land owned and occupied by the Cherokee Nation, the pressure by whites on the national and state governments to take the land grew exponentially (Engle 2004). To solve that problem, President Andrew Jackson, via the Indian Removal Act of 1830, simply forced the Cherokee and the other Five Civilized Tribes from their lands despite the Tribes’ refusal to sign treaties acceding to Washington’s demands and in flagrant violation of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cherokees (Worcester v. Georgia). Those tribes and over two dozen Northeastern, Midwestern, and Southeastern tribes were removed by the U.S. military, typically without their consent, to what was called Indian Territory. In 1825, the Government had specified Indian Territory as all the land lying west of the Mississippi River and constituting parts of the present day states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, though that land had been occupied for many decades by other indigenous tribes. Forced removal of members of the Five Civilized Tribes alone opened approximately 25 million acres in the Southeast for white settlement, cotton plantations, and slavery. By 1850, over 100,000 Native Americans had been forcibly evicted from their ancestral homelands in the Midwest and Southeast to Indian Territory; approximately 15,000 Native Americans died along that brutal journey from disease, exposure, or malnutrition directly due to federal Government indifference and mismanagement (Perdue and Green 1995).
A statement from the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, reveals the reality of Government relations with Native American tribes. “The U.S. Government used treaties as one means to displace Indians from their tribal lands, a mechanism that was strengthened with the Removal Act of 1830. In cases where this failed, the Government sometimes violated both treaties and Supreme Court rulings to facilitate the spread of European Americans westward across the continent” (Source: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/indian-treaties).
Another prime example of U.S. Government duplicity with Native Americans involves the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that established the Great Sioux Reservation. One of the main Treaty provisions was the Government’s obligation to prevent non-Native American settlement or intrusion on treaty lands. The Treaty also guaranteed that all changes to the official document had to be approved by three-fourths of adult Dakota/Lakota males. The federal Government immediately violated the Treaty by failing to provide the stipulated food rations, clothing, medical care, and schools. Early in the 1870s, the Government again violated its Treaty obligations by allowing Northern Pacific Railroad survey crews on Treaty land without tribal permission and in the face of vociferous tribal opposition. But the final straw was when gold was discovered in 1874 in the Black Hills, land that was sacred to the Dakota/Lakota, and thousands of white miners invaded the Reservation. The Government’s immediate reaction was to demand the Treaty be renegotiated to allow purchase of the area, a demand the tribes overwhelmingly rejected and refused to relinquish their Treaty rights. Despite the supposed legally binding nature of the Treaty and the Dakota/Lakota refusal to sign a new treaty, the Government unilaterally ordered seizure of the Black Hills, extinguished tribal hunting rights on adjacent land that had been set aside in the Treaty for exclusive Dakota/Lakota use, and opened the area to settlement by gold-crazed whites. The Sioux War commenced and the rest is history as the U.S. Government rejected justice and morality and imposed its will by military power.
The Dakota/Lakota Tribes eventually sued over seizure of the Black Hills, losing repeatedly until in 1980 the Supreme Court heard the case and agreed with the Indian Claims Commission’s finding that the U.S. Government had “acquired the Black Hills through a course of unfair and dishonorable dealing for which the Sioux were entitled to damages” and also “remarked upon President Grant’s duplicity in breaching the Government’s treaty obligation to keep trespassers out of the Black Hills” (United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians 1980, 387-388). Not surprisingly, the Court ruled, in effect, that the U.S. Government got a pass on its bad behavior in abrogating its treaty obligations with the Dakota/Lakota Tribes but was obligated to pay for the Black Hills land it had seized illegally.
Author’s Note: The Dakota/Lakota Tribes did not deposit or cash the Government’s $107 million check it was awarded as a result of winning its suit, insisting that the Black Hills are theirs and a monetary award is irrelevant to that ownership.
A final example shines a spotlight on Government intentions/actions regarding its statutory treaty obligations with Native Americans. Because many people reading this essay likely have little training in legal matters, it is important to provide background by calling attention to United States v. Kagama (1886) and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903). The Supreme Court’s unanimous decisions in both cases determined that since Native Americans were “wards of the nation” (established in Cherokee Nation) and matters involving Indian lands were the sole jurisdiction of Congress, therefore Congress had the power to violate and abrogate the terms of ratified treaties without the consent of the affected tribes, no matter what the Government had agreed to or promised in the treaties (the plenary powers doctrine that is clearly extra-Constitutional and controversial). The Supreme Court handed Congress a legal license to steal and Congress immediately put that power to use by passing the General Allotment Act in 1887. For more information, see: http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24391 and http://outreach.asu.edu/book/resource-guide/plenary-power-cases.
The General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Severalty Act after its main sponsor, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts ) was one of the first efforts of Congress to deal with nearly all tribes in the U.S. as a single entity, rather than individually, and to alter across the board, without tribal participation or consent, rights previously guaranteed in several hundred treaties ratified by the Senate. That Law marked a major policy change since the Government had previously dealt with individual tribes through treaties, a practice Congress ended in 1871.
The General Allotment Law split almost all treaty-authorized reservations (with certain exceptions subject to later allotment) into numerous smaller units typically ranging from 40 to 160 acres and then allotted that acreage to the head of each family and other individuals within the tribe. The stated objectives of the Law were to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream culture by forcing them to become farmers/grazers and to free land for white settlement (Washburn 1975). The primary unstated but well-known objectives of the Law were to destroy tribal culture through the forced removal of Native American children from their families to distant, off-reservation boarding schools and to restrict the practice of indigenous religions, languages, and traditions. The Law stipulated that the Government would classify reservation lands remaining after the allotment process as “excess” and acquire them at minimal cost, frequently at a dollar per acre or less, and convey those lands to white Americans for homesteading. Even at the time, that scheme was understood as a brazen ploy to appease land hungry white settlers rather than as a legitimate effort to aid Native Americans. The Act was proposed, debated, and adopted as law by Congress without consultation with Native American tribes whose treaty-authorized lands were then taken without their consent in violation of several hundred ratified treaties (Gunn 2004). Before the Law was repealed in 1934, the U.S. Government had unilaterally but legally expropriated more than 90 million acres, or close to two-thirds of the land that had been granted by the Government to Native American tribes via more than 350 Senate-ratified treaties.
Author's Note: It is critical for readers to know that a 1928 study ordered by the Calvin Coolidge Administration, known as the Meriam Report, determined that the Dawes Act had been used to illegally deprive Native Americans of their land rights and that in general the U.S. federal government had failed to protect Native Americans, their land and resources, both personal and cultural.
After serving as the prime mover for the Allotment Act, Senator Dawes went on to concoct the “Great Sioux Agreement” of 1889 that was designed to destroy what remained of the Dakota-Lakota bands' traditional way of life and speed the process of forcing Native Americans from their treaty-guaranteed lands. In regard to the agreement, he openly acknowledged the illegal, unethical, and immoral techniques the federal government had used to deprive tribes of their land: “We may cry out against the violation of treaties, denounce flagrant disregard of inalienable rights and the inhumanity of our treatment of the defenseless . . . but the fact remains. . . . Without doubt these Indians are going to be absorbed into and become a part of the 50,000,000 of our people.” See: Francis Paul Prucha. 1984. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. For an analysis of Indian sovereignty and conflicts with the U.S. court system, see David E. Wilkins. 1997. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press.
The adverse effects of the General Allotment Law not only continue today but also have worsened over time. Those adverse effects include increasingly fractionated ownership of Indian land (parcels whose title is splintered into multiple undivided interests, leaving allotment heirs with tiny, unusable ownership fractions) that renders the land almost incapable of productive use, checkerboard ownership patterns where Native American land is typically surrounded by land in white ownership, and loss of access to sacred sites. Actions by the U.S. Government over the last 200 plus years have demonstrated that land that had been granted to Native American tribes via ratified treaties and held in “trust” for their use remained in trust only until demand for land by white American settlers rose to a fever pitch. Whereupon Congress abrogated the treaties, seized the land, and conveyed it to whites. One wonders how Native Americans are able to muster an iota of trust for a Government whose behavior has ranged from benevolent to exploitative to unjust-unethical and to what would be criminal in any other context.
When the U.S. Government wanted ancestral Native American land and resources they expropriated them through a combination of coercion, questionable court decisions, duplicitous negotiation-acquisition strategies (Schuyler 1783; Washington 1931; Kades 2008), and the clever frauds that were treaties (Engle 2004; Kades 2000; Williams Jr. 1990). Although Wilcomb E. Washburn (1976, 23), the well-known historian of Native American relations with the U.S. Government, has claimed “American Indian policy has, therefore, been an amalgam of insight and greed, implicit bias and practical concern,” on-the-ground results of application of that amalgam demonstrate beyond question the critical roles played by greed and bias on the part of white Americans. Native American tribal lands held in trust by the federal Government comprise 56 million acres, or slightly less than 2.3 percent of the U.S. land mass, an area totaling 2.436 billion acres. Thus, the area held by indigenous people prior to the arrival of the Spanish and English in the 16th Century declined from 100 percent to the 2.3 percent now held, a significant portion of which ranges from economically marginal land to that with no productive uses.
At this point we should reflect on what President George Washington said to the Seneca Nation in 1790 after passage of the original Indian Trade and Intercourse Act: “The general government will never consent to your being defrauded. But it will protect you in all your just rights.” History proved Washington wrong because he failed to take into account the land lust/greed that drove white settlers (Kades 2001, 2008; Washburn 1972) and the duplicity of the U.S. Government in expropriating lands and resources that had been officially granted to indigenous tribes in perpetuity through treaties ratified by the Senate. Washington could not wrap his mind around the idea that the Government itself would defraud the tribes through legalized chicanery.
Imagine your reaction of someone flipped a coin 500 times and it always came up heads. You would know immediately something was rigged. Apply that same logic to the interactions of the U.S. Government with Native American tribes. To summarize that relationship, Native Americans lost while white Americans gained with such uniformity as to defy characterization as accident, chance, or the unfortunate effects of unintended consequences (Washburn 1976).
The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government have consistently refused to recognize that many of the policies, decisions, and laws they adopted regarding relations with Native American tribes have authorized theft from the weak and powerless even though that is the precise historical result. The question as to why that is the case is addressed in the Discussion section below.
Slavery and its Aftermath
Much of the way I understand Exceptionalism is grounded in our historical relationships with blacks. [Author’s Note: Although other racial-ethnic groups have been targets of white American bigotry, the focus of this part of the essay is on how our treatment of slaves created the foundation on which later actions that discriminated against Black Americans were built.] Historical documents demonstrate that many of the Founding “Fathers” personally regarded the peculiar institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political reasons. Although the Founders may have recognized the many conflicts generated by white ownership of blacks with respect to rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they consciously turned their backs on resolving those conflicts. For the slave-owning Signers of the Declaration of Independence and ten of the first 13 Presidents of the United States, the unalienable rights of all to freedom and justice were trumped by property rights, wealth, self-interest, and status of white Americans. Because the very existence of their world and personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, white Americans elevated greed over morality and demonstrated that the concepts of unalienable natural rights and liberty were reserved exclusively for people exactly like themselves.
The seeds of racial bigotry and discrimination planted at the birth of the U.S. grew into a bitter harvest: the rise of King Cotton and the rapidly expanding plantation system that tortured slaves into ever greater production, the Civil War, and the short-lived Reconstruction (Baptist 2014; Derenoncourt 2014; McPherson 1988). Although the Thirteenth Amendment freed blacks from the chains of slavery, they were uneducated and illiterate, asset-less, and typically unskilled except as agricultural laborers and faced a country that wanted as little to do with them as possible other than to ensure their subservience to and separation from whites.
Author’s Note: President Andrew Johnson and many Congressmen opposed the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, arguing that it would lead to full citizenship for blacks and thus create a “mongrel government instead of a white man’s government.” (Colbert 1995, 11). In Blyew v. United States (1871), the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled that in Kentucky, and nearly all Southern and Border States, whites could kill, rob, or cheat Black Americans as long as the only witnesses were black because those states had laws prohibiting blacks from testifying in court against whites, thus no prosecution could result.
To circumvent contact between blacks and whites as equals, 34 of the then 40 states in the U.S. enacted Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that mandated white supremacy and effectively continued slavery. In the South, newly freed blacks were enticed by plantation owners into becoming tenant farmers who would receive anywhere between 33 to 75 percent of the crops they grew. But that system involved debt peonage (Ransom and Sutch 1972), a type of forced labor established and imposed by state law in which tenant farmers could not leave the property until all debts were paid in full. Since newly freed blacks were totally without assets, they borrowed on credit from white land owners and merchants the cost of food, clothing, seed, farm animals, farm implements, fuel, medical care, and even the shacks in which they lived to tide them over until the crops could be harvested. The land owner typically set the cost of those items as well as the price paid for the resulting crops. As a consequence, a great many if not most black tenant farmers were in long-term debt (Winters 1988). The KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, Red Shirts, Knights of the White Camellia, Sabre and Rifle Clubs, and other well-armed white supremacist groups in the South and Border States led the way in a physical and mental reign of violence and terror against Black Americans, who they felt were responsible for their loss of political privilege and socioeconomic status, by lynching (nearly 4,750 murders by 1968), firebombing/burning, beatings, public humiliation, false arrests, and other acts of atavistic violence.
Author’s Note: From 1882 to 1968, approximately 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress. Seven presidents and many dozen politicians fought for anti-lynching federal legislation, but no law was ever passed that made lynching illegal because Democratic Congressmen who controlled the Southern and Border States opposed all federal legislation, especially through Senate filibusters, that would have made lynching a violation of federal law.
In all Southern and Border States, voter registration laws, poll tax laws, grandfather clauses (if your grandfather had not voted before 1867 you could not vote), literacy tests, and violence prevented Black Americans from voting. State laws throughout the U.S. required schools to be racially separate; schools for Black Americans were very inadequately funded and staffed and were overwhelmingly located in high-poverty areas. Unbeknownst to most Americans, in Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court upheld the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination, a ruling that stood for the next 70 years. State laws prohibited inter-racial marriage and co-habitation and required segregation in education, housing, hospitals, commercial transactions, employment, transportation, hotels and restaurants, and public places like parks, swimming pools, and beaches. Publicly funded universities across the country rejected Black American applicants solely because of their race; as examples, the first blacks were admitted to the Universities of South Carolina and Alabama in 1963, despite the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
The first wave of Black American migration to northern industrial cities occurred from 1910 and 1930, when between 1.5 million to two million fled the rural South. When that first wave of migrants arrived in northern cities they found already in place a system of legally and socially enforced segregation and mostly low-wage, low-skill jobs. Municipalities had enacted racially restrictive zoning ordinances and property covenants that required segregation (Jackson 1985; Seitles 1998) The use of threats and physical violence, such as firebombing residential and office buildings owned by Black Americans to force them from white neighborhoods, was commonplace and culminated in widespread race riots that killed hundreds of blacks and dispossessed many thousands more of their homes (for examples see http://www.displaysforschools.com/rosewoodrp.html and http://digital.library.okstate.edu/ENCYCLOPEDIA/ENTRIES/T/TU013.html).
State and local laws restricted Black American’s right to own and lease property, conduct business, and move freely through public spaces in cities. Banks, savings and loan companies, mortgage firms, realtors, and insurance companies engaged in redlining [Author’s Note: no loans or policies were provided for individuals living within undesirable areas outlined in red] to ensure Black Americans lived separate lives from whites in areas characterized by dilapidated and deteriorated housing typically without indoor plumbing or running water and with minimal urban services, such as police, fire, street lighting, street repair, and trash pick-up.
By the time the second and much larger wave of approximately five million Black Americans migrated in 1940 to 1970 from the South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, West Coast, and Southwest, white America had fine-tuned its de jure and de facto systems of racial discrimination. In cities throughout the U.S., racially restrictive covenants had become private and were thus legal according to the Supreme Court. Redlining by banks, savings and loans, mortgage firms, realtors represented by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and insurance companies was the rule. Violence and threats of violence served to maintain all-white residential neighborhoods through the 1970s (Abrams 1955; Brown Jr. 1972). Federal programs like those run by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the U.S.-sponsored Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), Federal Housing Authority (FHA), and Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) systematically fostered racial segregation by refusing, via federal regulations, to lend money to black people for home purchase or improvements unless they lived in all-black neighborhoods, or to whites who lived in racially integrated areas, and also promoted racially restrictive housing covenants (Brown Jr. 1972; Hayden 2004; Jackson 1985; Massey and Denton 1998). In the post-war suburban expansion period, the HOLC, FHA, FNMA, and private banks required new suburbs to be uniformly white before investments would be made or insured (Mahoney 1995, 1671-1672) and used redlining to exclude homeowners in black neighborhoods from securing federally-backed mortgages and home improvement loans (Seitles 1998).
Perhaps readers can imagine this real-world situation: Black Americans seeking to buy homes could only get mortgages if they lived in all-black neighborhoods, but since all-black neighborhoods were redlined by the HOLC, FHA, VA, FNMA, and private banks as undesirable areas no federally-insured or conventional mortgages could be obtained. Local laws/ordinances also prevented low and moderate income housing from being built for minorities (Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel).
On May 24, 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously refused to hear Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), thus upholding private racially restrictive residential covenants and ensuring more than four decades of legal, racially motivated housing discrimination throughout the U.S. As examples of the widespread nature of racially restrictive covenants, by the 1940s about 85 percent of the housing in Detroit and between 75 to 80 percent of Chicago housing was subject to such covenants (Sugrue 1996). Effectively that meant until the Supreme Court’s 1968 Jones v. Mayer decision, FHA and HOLC regulations stipulated that if housing developers sold to blacks, they would not be able to sell houses in the same neighborhood to whites who needed home loans. Home loan programs administered by the U.S. Veterans Administration had similar if not completely identical racially discriminatory regulations. In many thousands of cases, black families unable to obtain a standard conventional or U.S. Government-insured bank mortgage had no other option but to buy houses in black-only neighborhoods using a financially punitive housing “contract” system that preyed on poor, option-less black buyers (Satter 2010).
Author’s Note: Even as late as 1998, racially restrictive covenants in largely white, middle- to upper middle-class cities like Kirkwood, Missouri, were still attached to house deeds in residential subdivisions (Schuessler 2014). Although the covenants were no longer legally enforceable, they served as powerful reminders that discrimination against blacks was pervasive throughout the metropolitan landscape and not just in large central cities.
As a result, those practices created a system in which buyers, sellers, realtors, bankers, insurers, and housing developers worked in concert with the federal Government to maintain existing all-white neighborhoods and all-black ghettos and to build all-white suburbs that were largely financed through FHA and VA programs (Jackson 1985; Mahoney 1995). In the context of VA loans, I must mention that the one million Black Americans who served in the U.S. military during WWII were as racially segregated as they were in the Deep South (until July 26, 1948, when President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 that integrated the armed forces). They could fight and die for democracy against totalitarian enemies overseas but were nearly powerless against the overt racism and bigotry that typified white America. Here’s an example that is both telling and chilling: in 1942 the American Red Cross refused to accept the blood of Black American volunteer donors (Gates 2013).
Readers should not assume housing discrimination is a thing of the past, in 2009 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against leading mortgage lender Wells Fargo, alleging the company steered Black and Latino homebuyers into riskier subprime loans and charged them more than it did white customers. Wells Fargo settled the suit in 2012 by agreeing to pay $175 million in damages. In December 2012, the DOJ settled a similar lawsuit with Bank of America for $335 million over loan discrimination by its Countrywide Financial unit. In June 2014, the city of Miami sued JPMorgan Chase, accusing the bank of engaging in discriminatory lending practices in minority neighborhoods since at least 2004 in violation of the U.S. Fair Housing Act. In November 2014, the city of Los Angeles filed similar claims of predatory mortgage lending in minority neighborhoods against JPMorgan Chase for allegedly steering minority buyers into high risk loans they could not afford. In mid-January 2017, the U.S. DOJ accused JPMorgan Chase & Co of violating the U.S. Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act between 2006 and 2009. The lawsuit stipulated that JPMorgan Chase showed "reckless disregard" for the rights of at least 53,000 African American and Hispanic borrowers by allowing mortgage brokers to charge them more for home loans than they did for other borrowers. On the same day the DOJ suit was filed, the bank agreed to pay $55 million to settle the suit while maintaining it had not discriminated against minority borrowers.
Author’s Note: Lest we forget, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not repeal anti-miscegenation laws found in 16 states that prohibited blacks and whites from co-habiting or marrying, including every Southern state plus Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Delaware. In 1967, those laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Loving v. Virginia. Years prior to that ruling, 41 of the then 48 states had passed anti-miscegenation laws. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to officially remove an anti-miscegenation provision from its Constitution. Although 60 percent of those voting approved that ballot measure, nearly 526,000 Alabamans, the remaining 40 percent, voted to continue the prohibition of racial inter-marriage.
Discussion
In this essay I have been concerned with evaluating American Exceptionalism in terms of historical evidence as to how the U.S. Government treated Native Americans and slaves, including Black Americans in the aftermath of the Thirteenth Amendment. Although certain characteristics were shared by both Black and Native Americans, one stands above all others as critical: according to federal and state law and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Native Americans and blacks were non-citizens innately inferior to whites (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia; Scott v. Sandford; Naturalization Act of 1790). As non-citizens/non-persons they were not afforded the same recourse to legal protections or remedies enjoyed by American citizens.
The harsh treatment suffered by Native Americans included being deprived of property rights as their lands were taken from them by the federal Government via coercion and legalized fraud/deceit, their freedom of religion denied, and their cultures marginalized and even destroyed. The harsh treatment suffered by blacks included slavery and the plantation torture system and also the non-citizenship of freedmen, who could not vote, hold public office, sign contracts, live where they desired, marry whom they chose, attend public school with whites, patronize white-only establishments such as hospitals and commercial enterprises, or otherwise enjoy the prerogatives of citizens. The harsh treatment suffered by Black Americans after being freed from slavery was far more complex but can be summarized as to their being discriminated against by the majority white culture at nearly every turn, especially in the reign of racial terror that characterized Southern and Border States, and by federal housing regulations and many hundred racially discriminatory laws passed by almost every state and city in the nation (laws found constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court) that ensured they were segregated from the white population and treated unequally.
Those non-citizens/non-persons were officially excluded from the United States of America, a country founded on the consent of the governed and on such popular phrases as “all men are created equal” and “liberty and justice for all.” The very beginning of this country can be characterized as a massive divergence or separation of high-minded thoughts and words as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution from the real-world actions of slavery and taking the core of the North American continent from Native Americans by Government duplicity and coercion.
A question that has troubled me is why a country ostensibly founded on freedom and equality—“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”—could build itself by means of duplicity, oppressing and terrorizing minorities, and inequity. Since intentional, cold-hearted dishonesty stretching across more than a century is neither logical nor supported by documentary evidence, I believe the explanation must be found elsewhere. The leading candidate is Eurocentrism, that deep-rooted sense of white entitlement, white privilege, white superiority, and white bias (Harris 1993; Leonardo 2004; Mahoney 1995; McIntosh 1988; also see U.S. Naturalization Act of 1790).
Here’s how I think it worked. Because white rights took precedence, the U.S. Government was able to break its sworn word (statutory obligations) to indigenous peoples and take land promised in ratified treaties would be tribal property in perpetuity and give it to white Americans and not feel dishonorable or treacherous. Because white rights took precedence, white Americans could enslave and torture blacks and not feel legal or moral obligations to treat them as human rather than as chattel. Because white rights took precedence, white Americans could deny citizenship to blacks and Native Americans (as well as Asians) and not recognize the astounding divergence of those actions with ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Because white rights took precedence, in the 1930s approximately 800,000 Mexican-American citizens were deprived of due process and forcibly and illegally deported to Mexico by the U.S. and state governments (Valenciana and Ordonez-Jasis 2012). Because white rights took precedence, white Americans felt no guilt in amassing the collective power of federal, state, and local governments to oppress Black Americans freed from the chains of slavery and force them by law into a racially separate and inferior world. Because white Americans—whether Supreme Court justices, Congressmen, land-hungry settlers, or men and women in the streets—were confirmed in their superior station over subordinate non-persons of color, they knew their actions regarding them were right and just.
The existence of overt racial bigotry and bias in relations between dominant whites and sub-dominate people of color in the U.S. is well-documented in our history and our daily lives (Dollard 1949; Johnson Jr. 1995; Massey and Denton 1989; Myrdal 1944; Steinberg 1995). My guess is most Americans are completely unaware that the Naturalization Law of 1790 limited citizenship to immigrants who were “free white” persons of good character, thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and Asians. Although overt racial bigotry has declined, recent empirical psychological research (Greenwald and Pettigrew 2014; Lai et al. 2014; Nosek et al. 2014; Nosek, Hawkins, and Frazier 2012) has documented the pervasiveness of implicit racial bias in Americans.
The U.S. has never adequately addressed its history of institutional racism or inequality (see Gotanda 1991; Spring 1994)—witness the Chinese Exclusion Law (1882) that prevented Chinese from immigrating to the U.S. and from becoming citizens once here was not repealed until 1943 when the U.S. desperately needed China to continue fighting Japan, the forced relocation and imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps during WWII as the Supreme Court refused to consider the Constitutional issue of incarcerating U.S. citizens without due process, or the multi-century bigotry against Hispanics in the Southwest—and most likely never will because too many Americans deny the existence of institutional racism and inequality and are comfortable with the present situation.
The fault, many Americans claim, lies with the millions of Native and Black Americans who have willfully chosen not to participate in the quintessential American Dream and thus are responsible for such individual shortcomings as laziness/no work ethic/lack of initiative, dependence on government hand-outs, poverty, poor education, unemployment, etc. (Wilson 2009). Those Americans hold tight to their glorification of our country as having been made Exceptional through our unique democratic spirit and therefore worthy of uncritical love, devotion, and patriotism and ignore or trivialize the existence of Supreme Court mandated non-persons and reject structural causes of inequity.
American imperialistic history was grounded in ethnocentrism uncritically adopted from England and other European countries. Exceptionalists celebrate that history while refusing to acknowledge the true nature of those events. As a country we have systematically mythologized that imperialism as the triumph of Manifest Destiny and other trumped up premises of superior racial/cultural entitlement, our frontier-pioneering spirit, free enterprise/market economics, and rugged individualism, never willing to peel back that slick facade to see the greed and biases that drove white Americans to rob native peoples of their lands, their livelihoods, and their essences and to enslave more than four million blacks and compel them through systematized torture on plantations into back-breaking labor designed to destroy their spirits and enrich their owners (Baptist 2014). The U.S. Government in effect operated as a bully who consistently used coercion, duplicity, and naked power to achieve its desired goals while holding its hands up in wide-eyed innocence, boasting of its superiority over tainted European-style government.
Many serious and complex problems are the direct result of the U.S. creation of non-citizens/non-persons and its aftermath. Native American treaty-granted resources are still held in “trust” for the tribes despite more than 150 years of federal corruption and massive mismanagement. Examples of that mismanagement (a polite way to say swindling) abound but of particular significance is the $3.4 billion settlement reached in December 2009 between the U.S. Government and Native American plaintiffs concerning federal mismanagement of funds and other trust assets, including royalties owed to Native Americans for oil, gas, grazing, and other leases. Another example is the federal Government’s 2014 settlement of nearly $555 million with the Navajo Nation over U.S. mismanagement of trust fund assets dating back to 1946. Why the Government continues to hold tribal resources in “trust” as if Native Americans were incompetent and the government managers are not defies decades of experience as well as rational explanation other than bureaucratic/political inertia or that we enjoy wielding colonial power while treating Native Americans as our inferiors.
Irrespective of tribal affiliation, Native Americans who today live on reservations face lives characterized by economic adversity, poverty, unemployment, substandard education, and what the U.S. Indian Health Service (2014) termed “discrimination in the delivery of health services.” The IHS also determined that Native Americans die at higher rates than other Americans from chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (368 percent higher), diabetes (177 percent higher), unintentional injuries (138 percent higher), assault/homicide (82 percent higher), intentional self-harm/suicide (65 percent higher), and chronic lower respiratory diseases (59 percent higher). It should come as no surprise that in 2010 the poverty rate on reservations was 28.4 percent, compared with 15.3 percent among all Americans.
Nor has the federal Government addressed the results of callously throwing five million newly freed, illiterate, asset-less, and basically unskilled blacks into the cauldron of American society and then ignoring its responsibility to incorporate them into that society and to protect them from the very people and states that had been their enslavers and oppressors. Moreover, the Government has never addressed the multitude of adverse effects of federal, state, and local laws and majority white culture that intentionally discriminated against and oppressed Black Americans for well more than 100 years.
The inequity resulting from that discrimination is highlighted in research by sociologists and economists at numerous universities (Shapiro et al. 2013) and more recently by Kochhar and Fry (2014) of the Pew Research Center who reported the median household wealth for whites in 2013 was $141,900 and $11,000 for blacks, a wealth gap of nearly 1,300 percent. Their research found that from 2010 to 2013 “the median wealth of non-Hispanic white households increased from $138,600 to $141,900, or by 2.4 percent” while during the same period the median wealth of non-Hispanic black households fell 33.7 percent, from $16,600 to $11,000. Unless broad public policy and institutional changes are initiated at the federal level to address racial disparities in homeownership, education, employment, income, wealth, and inheritance, closing the black-white inequity gap will be an unfulfilled dream (Shapiro 2004, 2006; also see Johnson 2014).
The socioeconomic playing field was not designed from the birth of this country to be level for Black or Native Americans. That discrimination resulted in the inequities that are present today and has denied them opportunities other Americans enjoy. Because federal and state laws and regulations produced this situation, it is obvious those governments have the ability to undo the results of that creation. But, absent political will, that is impossible.
Concluding Thoughts
Since many if not most Exceptionalists would agree with Mitt Romney (2011) that “It is our [the American people’s] belief in the universality of . . . unalienable rights that leads us to our exceptional role on the world stage, that of a great champion of human dignity and human freedom,” perhaps they could address the following questions.
- How much human freedom and dignity did blacks have when enslaved in a country dedicated to unalienable rights and human freedom and dignity?
- How much human freedom and dignity did Black Americans have when they were forced into separate, unequal lives from the majority white population by federal, state, and local laws found constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court?
- How much human freedom and dignity did Black Americans have when they were terrorized by white bigots throughout the South and Border States?
- How much human freedom and dignity did Native Americans have when the U.S. Government classified them as non-citizens/non-persons in a country founded on the universality of unalienable rights?
- How much human freedom and dignity did Native Americans have when the U.S. Government broke its promises by unilaterally abrogating ratified treaties and taking land promised to the tribes in perpetuity?
In reality, the U.S., like many other countries, was founded on hubris, greed, ethnocentrism, and self-serving nationalism but presents itself as an Exceptional democratic nation endowed by God to be admired by all. It should come as no surprise that I reject the Exceptionalist concept because it is an unhistorical, self-aggrandizing myth (see Walt 2011) that smokescreens our reality of internal imperialism and pays lip-service to high-minded ideals while ignoring actions that are morally repugnant and reprehensible.
Until Americans and Exceptionalists understand our country’s history and finally reject the myths they hold so closely, as a country we will never be able to come to grips with the many challenges we face today and into the future. If we are ignorant of the mechanisms our ancestors used to grow this country into the large and powerful nation it is today, if we are ignorant of the origin of our racial troubles, real-world solutions will forever evade us. But, facts are not the issue when it comes to ideology. When a majority of Americans deny, ignore, or turn their backs on historical reality we will continuing living our version of the movie, Groundhog Day. That's why we will continue to have many more incidents of racial violence and white people will shake their heads and wonder what in the world is wrong with black people that they have not moved on to the good life American Exceptionalism promises. Surely, it's their fault because all their problems are in the past and no longer pertain to the present.
The lesson I have discerned from American history and geography is that the ideal of a country founded on the consent of the governed and the values of individual liberty, justice, and dignity innate to all humans, although perhaps not a perfect solution to the enormous challenges of governance, is the most viable alternative to monarchies, oligarchies, and authoritarian regimes. However, the failed execution of that ideal from our very inception as a new country and the continued refusal of Exceptionalists and others to acknowledge that flawed reality cannot be ignored or glossed over.
When a strong country subjugates the weak and powerless through coercion, duplicity, and legalized inequity, the legitimacy of that society is diminished. A country that has acted in such a manner and denies the results of those actions are its responsibility to remedy should never be held up as an example to be emulated or admired uncritically.
Legal Cases
Blyew v. United States, 80 U.S. 13 Wall. 581 581 (1871). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/80/581/
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 5 Pet. 1 1 (1831). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/30/1/case.html
Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/271/323/
Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/21/543/case.html
Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/392/409/case.html
Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/187/553/case.html
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/
Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/
Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel, 119 N.J. Super. 164 (1972) 290 A.2d 465. Available online at: http://law.justia.com/cases/new-jersey/appellate-division-published/1972/119-n-j-super-164-0.html
United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/118/375/case.html
United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980) 448 U.S. 371. Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/448/371/case.html or http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=448&invol=371
Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832). Available online at: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/31/515/case.html
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