If education is about anything other than being able to earn more money (and it may not be about any other thing), that other thing is intelligent problem-solving and humans relating to one another in mutually constructive ways. But educational institutions and some of our most distinguished scholars have considered the cooperation among human beings and mutually constructive goals to be fourth- and fifth-rate concerns where they were concerns at all. The history of the country is all the proof one needs that it is so.
Now no one can fault the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his point of view. But we can fault him for not owning up to what his point of view is. It might prove a useful exercise, in this regard, to look at some of the things our conquerors (our forefathers), our men of vision and power in America have actually said.
Andrew Jackson, December 3, 1833:
“Indians have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”
Theodore Roosevelt (to Owen Wister) 1901:
“I entirely agree with you that as a race and in the mass the [blacks] are altogether inferior to the whites.
“I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western view of the Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
General Ulysses S. Grant:
(to) General Webster
La Grange, Tenn.
November 10, 1862
“Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”
Holly Springs, Miss.
December 8, 1862
General Order
“On account of the scarcity of provisions all cotton speculators, Jews, and other vagrants having no honest means of support, except trading upon the misery of the country…”
Sam Houston, U.S. Senate, 1848:
“The Anglo-Saxon [must] pervade the whole southern extremity of this vast continent….(The) Mexicans are no better than the Indians and I see no reason why we should not take their land.”
Freeman’s Journal, March 4, 1848:
“Our object is to show, once more, that Protestantism is effete, powerless, dying out though disturbed only by its proper gangrenes, and conscious that its last moment is come when it is fairly set, face to face, with Catholic truth.”
Richard Pike, Boston, 1854:
“Catholicism is, and it ever has been, a bigoted, a persecuting, and a superstitious religion. There is no crime in the calendar of infamy of which it has not been guilty. There is no sin against humanity which it has not committed. There is no blasphemy against God which it has not sanctioned. It is a power which has never scrupled to break its faith solemnly plighted, wherever its interests seem to require it; which has no conscience; which spurns the control of public opinion; and which obtrudes its head among the nations of Christendom, dripping with the cruelties of millions of murders, and haggard with the debaucheries of a thousand years, always ambitious, always sanguinary, and always false.”
New York Tribune, 1854
“The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the barest order.”
General William Sherman:
“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case. The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they will all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1751:
“Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?”
William Byrd, Diary, Virginia, 1710–1712:
2/8/09: Jenny and Eugene were whipped.
4/17/09: Anaka was whipped.
5/13/09: Mrs. Byrd was whipped.
3/23/09: Moll was whipped.
6/10/09: Eugene [a child] was whipped for running away and had the bit put on him.
9/3/09: I beat Jenny.
9/16/09: Jenny was whipped.
9/19/09: I beat Anama.
11/30/09: Eugene and Jenny were whipped.
12/16/09: Eugene was whipped for doing nothing yesterday.
(In April I was occupied in my official capacity in assisting the investigation of slaves “arraigned for high treason”—two were hanged.)
7/1/10: The Negro woman ran away again with the bit on her mouth.
7/8/10: The Negro woman was found, and tied, but ran away again in the night.
7/15/10: My wife, against my will, caused little Jenny to be burned with a hot iron.
8/22/10: I had a severe quarrel with little Jenny and beat her too much, for which I was sorry.
8/31/10: Eugene and Jenny were beaten.
10/8/10: I whipped three slave women.
11/6/10: The Negro woman ran away again.
Its editors describe him as “Virginia’s most polished and ornamental gentleman…a kindly master [who] inveighed in some of his letters against brutes who mistreat their slaves.”
Such is language, the vision, the memory bequeathed to us in this society. They said other things, and they did other things—some of which were good. But they also said, and more importantly felt, that.
Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we.”