“America is a place where even the poorest immigrant can, through hard work, achieve the American Dream for his employer. It is a nation where freedom rings from coast to coast, over and over again, until you finally decide to pick up the phone and agree to cover a coworker’s night shift. A nation where anyone can arrive with nothing more than a few cents in their pocket, the hope of a better life, a passport, two I-9 forms, proof of employment, reference letters from reliable sponsors, and through sheer persistence finally convince a border guard to let them into the country. Where a person can go from rags to riches almost overnight, from riches back to rags in even less time, then write a book about it, option the rights to a TV network or film studio, and blow all that money on cocaine.”
—The Onion, Our Dumb World
In April and May 2019, Ben Berman took an overly-ambitious road trip across the United States of America. Now you may be asking, “Wait a minute Ben, what are you doing back in the US? You have the time and money to see all these cool places around the world for a year and a half, and you’re wasting two months in your boring home country, in the republic of mayonnaise?” I figured that while I have the time, it would be worth seeing some more of this country I was born into, since I haven’t been outside of the Northeast much in my life. Even if the culture isn’t as different for me, there are some incredible landscapes to see out west especially, and I have plenty of friends and family living in other places, so I’ll get to visit some of them too. And since I’ve been bashing a lot on the governments and injustices of the places I’ve visited so far, it’s only fair I apply that same self-righteous treatment to my own country, right?
Pretty much this one is just a saga of me national parks-hopping, stopping at some cities on the way to visit people, and me driving—a lot—in between it all. I unfortunately didn’t make much time for farm stuff on this trip in between everything, so instead of poetically naming this part after a crop like the others, I’m just calling it Turtle Island, the name which many Native American tribes used to refer to the lands of North America (in different languages, of course) before European colonization. And speaking of which, you won’t be spared the big history lecture for this one—if anything this one’s actually gonna be extra dense because I already know so much more about US history compared to the other countries that I get to show off! There’s also so much to cover in general because the US has this habit of always getting involved in world affairs.
Even though most friends or family reading this are American, I think it’s still important to have an overview for this one like for my other trips, just so we’re on the same page about how the US got to where it is today, especially for those of us who had boring history teachers back in school. This will be pretty easy to skim, it’s basically just a very abridged version of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History. I’ll leave out the names of characters in favor of just the overall story, and I’ll go easy on the hard dates too, but sometimes they’re helpful for letting us know where we are. As always, these overviews should not by any means be considered a complete history of a country, as so many stories and voices have to get left out in this short space; it’s just to give some context.
The indigenous
Humans first came to North America at least 15,000 years ago, probably earlier, through the old land bridge from Siberia into Alaska. From there they spread further south down to the tip of South America, and over the next many thousand years established a huge array of diverse cultures and civilizations, like anywhere else in the world. Right before Columbus’s arrival, there were some two thousand languages spoken across the Americas by at least 50 million people, possibly as many as 100 million, though it’s hard to know for sure. Some of the tribes in North America came to call all the lands they knew of beyond their own “Turtle Island,” based on their creation myths. Due to factors like geography, most of them didn’t build as many permanent buildings or large empires like the civilizations in parts of Central and South America, but some of them did build cities that still have remains today, like the Adena and Hopewell mound-builders around the Mississippi River, and especially the ancient Pueblo peoples around the Southwest who often built their adobe and stone homes in cliffs.
When European colonization started, some of the main players on the lands that would become the US were the Sioux/Ochéthi Sakowin on the Great Plains, the Navajo/Diné in the Southwest, the Cherokee/Tsalagi in the Southeast, and the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee in the Northeast. Some remained nomadic and less centralized, like the Sioux, while the Iroquois built more permanent longhouses and were united in a confederacy of five (later six) main nations with a form of democratic government, years before the US started its own. Among other peoples like the Cherokee, a council of women elders picked tribal leaders.
While it is important to at least mention some achievements of the indigenous peoples before the wrecking ball of colonialism hit, it would also be wrong to portray their societies in Turtle Island as perfect utopias. During the years of colonialism, the Europeans formed two simplistic images of the Indians. Sometimes whites viewed them as barbaric and violent savages, who practiced heretical witchcraft, and were perhaps agents of Satan, while other times they viewed them paternalistically as a simple and pacifist people, the “noble savage”. Both of these caricatures are wrong, because they are just that—caricatures. Native Americans were for sure more in tune with the land, and were less driven by individual profit and had more communal ownership. But from what I’ve seen most historical sources conclude, before the European invasions most native groups were merely more humans, no more or less violent than humans in Europe or other parts of the world; tribes did fight each other plenty, and to say that they didn’t is to false romanticize them (though this of course does not justify the Europeans destroying their world). Even so, there were many elements of Indian society
The invaders
In 1492, the Europeans arrive in Turtle Island. Columbus lands his ships in the Caribbean, kills and enslaves the Taino people, and everyone back across the ocean starts hearing about this New World, and we all know what happens from there. The Spanish spread out into Central and South America. While they killed many Indians with their guns and steel, and by enslaving them in silver mines, the biggest killer by far was the germs the Spanish unknowingly brought with them, especially smallpox; millions of Indians died over the next few decades. The diseases didn’t spread as much in North America at first, but with the arrival of the British and French in the 1600s diseases soon spread there too, and around ninety percent of most Indian communities were wiped out (also I’m going to keep referring to Native Americans as Indians starting now—though we know of course the term is inaccurate, most communities in the US today tend to prefer “American Indian” as the catch-all term).
In the 17th century the British and French set up their own colonies in the north and east of Turtle Island, while the Spanish were in the south (Florida and north of today’s Mexico). They brought in African slaves across the Atlantic for their new plantations of cash crops like tobacco and cotton. Relations between colonists and Indians in the Northeast started out as more cooperative, but as the British colonists showed less regard for Indian land, tensions rose, and the first major conflicts were between Virginia colonists and the Powhatan Confederacy starting in the 1610s. Over the next century, colonists gradually ate up more land, though complex relations developed among the various Indian and European groups. Sometimes there was war, sometimes peace and prosperous trade; some of the tribes got along better with some of the colonies, depending on the year. The colonial militias would often massacre entire towns when wars heated up, and Indian soldiers sometimes killed civilians in turn too. Indians adapted and learned how to play the rivalries of the British, French, and Spanish off one another, sometimes forming alliances when it was in their interests. By far the biggest Indian player around the Northeast was the Iroquois Confederacy, which grew closer with the British.
In the 1750s things finally came to a head between the French and British as they went to war. The British and their Iroquois allies won Canada from the French, but now of course the king of Britain was in debt, and we all know what happens next—he raises taxes in the colonies, the colonies revolt against taxation without representation, and the American Revolution explodes. The colonists win (with help from some tribes and France), and the United States of America is born in 1783. But the war had another effect—it tore the Iroquois apart. The Indians tried to stay neutral between the British and Americans at first but were soon dragged in, and the confused tribes took different sides, not sure which would win and continue better relations with them. With the Iroquois weakened, it was easier for the new United States to take more land from them and push them further west and onto new reservations. Many Indians were increasingly becoming alcoholic, and sold their land to dubious dealers to buy more of the drinks from the white traders. The US also went to war with the new Miami Confederacy of Indians around the Great Lakes, who allied themselves with the British in another war in 1815.
Expansion
The US also continued to strengthen its hold on Turtle Island down south. The Indians there had adapted much more to European culture and lived among American farmers, sometimes owning their own slaves. But states like Georgia were eyeing Indian land for white settlement, and the government soon passed the Indian Removal Act forcing all of the Indians east of the Mississippi to either give up their tribal identity and assimilate totally, or move west. The US army forcibly relocated most of them in the 1830s, especially thousands of Cherokee forced to march to the new “Indian Territory” on less fertile land in Oklahoma, and they faced further hostility from other tribes already living there. Some tribes resisted back east, especially the Seminole tribe in Florida (bought by the US from Spain), who were also harboring escaped slaves. The US army gained more control over the territory for settlers, and eventually the wars stopped, but they never did officially defeat the Seminole, who still call themselves the “unconquered tribe” today.
But the main story of the US in the 19th century is of course expansion into the West. The US had bought the vast territory from France, and slowly started to settle it. Relations were at first mostly peaceful with the Sioux Indians as settlers moved across the plains to the more fertile Oregon territory. Trade was beneficial to both sides. Things got more heated in Texas, then part of the newly independent Mexico, where more Americans farmers started moving and bringing slaves to in the 1830s. But the Mexican government had outlawed slavery, and annoyed at being ruled by Mexico, the Americans there revolted and started their own Republic of Texas. Texas joined the US, and in 1846 the US then sent troops over the border to provoke the Mexican army into a war, which the US won, taking the Southwest and California with the treaty. The flow of settlers westward intensified, occupying more Indian land for gold as well as routes for their new railroads, and more Indians found it was now their turn to be pushed off their land, and conflict started. Most tribes agreed to treaties with the US, which were soon broken by the far away government in Washington, DC, and usually not strongly enforced by the small army presence out west to curtail settlers’ violations.
Meanwhile, that government back in DC was also dealing with rising tensions over slavery in the 1850s as the abolition movement grew. There had also been more attempted revolts by slaves over the years. In 1860 the southern states, afraid that President Lincoln would end slavery, seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. The Civil War broke out, the northern Union won, and in 1865 slavery was abolished (except for people serving prison time, conveniently). A process of national Reconstruction started to bring the country back together and enforce protection of newly freed black citizens’ rights. In the first years after the war, blacks were actually able to vote across the South and some black representatives were even elected to Congress. While many were still stuck in poverty as sharecropper workers on white-owned plantations, blacks were gaining more opportunity, but support for Reconstruction soon faded. Southern states reacted by passing the first Jim Crow laws, starting a century of legal racial segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan formed to terrorize anyone opposed to this racial order.
With the conflict over slavery now “resolved,” the US moved to finish winning the west. Many Americans by now completely believed that it was their God-given destiny to rule over the whole continent (sound familiar?). Conflict between the Indians and settlers continued to escalate, and the US sent more troops to move the last free tribes to reservations. The army put down tribes in California more easily, while the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche of the plains and the Navajo and Apache of the Southwest scored some victories through the 1870s. But with the last major battles and outright massacres by US troops, they too were forced onto reservations. With their traditional ways of life ruined, the Indians left there were forced into dependency, and the government abducted many of their children to bring to “civilizing schools” to forcibly adapt them to white American society and complete the destruction of native cultures. Though there were small local battles up to as late as the 1920s, by the end of the century the frontier period had ended; the United States had completed its long ethnic cleansing of Turtle Island.
Empire
As the Europeans imperialized Africa and Asia, the US too turned its focus overseas; the industrial revolution required more raw materials to feed production, and markets to sell those new products abroad. The US bought Alaska from Russia, annexed Hawaii after American businessmen there overthrew its queen, and went to war with Spain in the 1890s, winning Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, though it took yet another war and occupation to completely win that last one. The US also went on some other fun adventures to expand its power abroad, sending troops to join European armies crushing a Chinese rebellion against foreign influence, and supporting various dictators across Central America who were friendly to US mining and agricultural interests, sometimes actually sending warships to take control of smaller countries’ ports and customs houses. With the US joining the winning side in World War I in 1917, its status as a world power was cemented.
It was on this foundation that the US boomed at home during these years, becoming a huge biggest draw for immigrants, the land of opportunity. There was still major inequality, and intense xenophobia against immigrants of all backgrounds, as well as continuing racial segregation. Thousands of workers (men, women, and children) went on strike against the new huge industrial companies in these years, demanding better pay and safer conditions, and police and military response was brutal. Gradually some progressive reforms were passed, and there still undeniably were much better chances for people in the US than in other countries. The prosperity of the 1920s was shown to be largely illusory when the stock market crashed however, drawing much of the rest of the world into the Great Depression as well, and the US didn’t really recover until the World War II years.
Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, bringing the US into the war, finally won against Nazi Germany and Japan in 1945. I haven’t gone into the human costs of all these wars I’ve mentioned so far due to space, but because WWII is more recent and so catastrophic, I should add that over 400,000 American soldiers were killed in this one, along with millions more soldiers and civilians across Europe and Asia. And while I personally will always be grateful that they saved the world from Nazi domination, there were other traumas that need to be counted as well, like the US interning 100,000 of its own citizens of Japanese descent.
*pauses to take a breath and sip of water* So, with all other countries weakened by the war, the US and the Russian-led Soviet Union (USSR) were now the two main global powers. The capitalist US and communist USSR started stockpiling nuclear weapons and competing for influence around the world, and since they couldn’t directly fight each other without completely blowing each other up in a nuclear war, they tried to use other countries to fight it out in proxy conflicts in what became known as the Cold War. In wars like in Korea and Vietnam, the USSR would back communist factions and the US would back the capitalists. The US gave support and weapons to anti-communist leaders and militias around the world, even when those leaders were often brutally authoritarian themselves, including the apartheid South African state. The US aided dictatorships across Latin America especially. This Cold War continued through around 1990, when the weakened USSR collapsed.
During these years at home, the US government also cracked down on anyone suspected of being a communist. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Americans frustrated with the repressive social order launched movements for racial civil rights, women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, and against the destructive Vietnam War. There were some triumphs, but it is hard to say just how victorious some of these movements were. The civil rights movement for example did end legal segregation, and led to new laws protecting the rights of all races, but it’s no secret that segregation and institutional racism still persist in many ways today, and in some ways are actually worse.
Today
And what of the American Indians, the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island? They didn’t just disappear after being forced onto the reservations. All Indians were given citizenship in 1924 while being allowed to keep their tribal membership, though many still weren’t able to vote until the 1940s. The government moved to break up the reservation system in the ‘50s and ‘60s so tribes would finish assimilating into general American society, and encouraged many to move once more to cities, but Indians and their advocates resisted this, and the reservations remained in place. The government passed some New Deal and civil rights laws to give Indians more economic and political autonomy, but they still faced severe inequality, and so an American Indian Movement rose along with all the other social movements of the 1960s. Indians from many tribes banded together more than they ever had in years to demand real self-determination as peoples native to the land, not content to be just marginalized citizens cut off from their roots and heritage.
The militancy and radicalism of the decentralized movement’s early years faded in the ‘70s, as did that of other movements, but up through the present day they still have continued to fight. They now fight in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in congress chambers, against companies and state governments still trying to take away the economic and political rights they have regained—rights to waters, to forests, to representation, to their autonomy. Their victories and defeats vary from tribe to tribe, state to state. After some groups neared extermination over a hundred years ago, there are now over 6 million Indians part of tribes in the US, over 1 percent of a total population of 330 million.
I’m going to avoid getting sucked into writing about current events and politics in the US here, like I did a little for the intros for Palestine and South Africa. All of us living in the US get bombarded with enough constant news 24/7 through social media these days as it is, and those of us living abroad probably get more news about the US than they’d like as well. Hopefully now it’s a bit more clear why I wanted to have the crash course in US history here before my trip; like I said at the start, it’s just such an influential country in the world, for better or worse, that it’s hard to fully wrap one’s head around it without knowing a bit about the context. You’ll see in my entries here that when possible, I include indigenous names for some places, and I also mention which Indian nations historically have lived in particular areas. It’s very limited, and I grappled with the best way to incorporate something like that, but it’s the least I can do here, on a symbolic level. As always, I do not mean to try to sound like an authority on things, as it’s all just based on some very light research I’ve done.
Well, I think I’ve set the stage for my upcoming road trip as well as I can—next stop, Turtle Island.
Foreign Fields 