Back to the Future – I

~ How do we separate fact from fiction in America’s “great” history? ~

(Part 1 of a 3 part article.)

You’re sipping a cool drink in a steamy New Jersey diner when your friend Marty McFry raises his chin and flashes a sassy grin across the table.

“So you wanna make America great again,” says McFry.

As the jukebox spins tales about fast cars and slow kisses, you squint an eye and tip your head. “You got a problem with that?”

McFry chuckles. “Make America great again,” he says, stretching the final word like taffy. “Sorry, pal, but I can’t seem to recall the first time America was great.”

With patriotic indignation, your face turns red, your knuckles white and the veins in your neck blue. You’ve known McFry since high school and this is not the first time he’s pulled this stunt. And yet you can’t dismiss him with a reflexive string of sophomoric imprecations because he’s a Time Traveler. He cruises through the years in his uncle’s souped-up Delorean. From the arrival of Columbus to the assassination of JFK, Matt McFry was there.

“Calm down,” insists McFry. “I didn’t say this isn’t as good of a place to live as anywhere. I’m only talking about again. Tell me about the first time America was great. Because if we don’t know what great was, we’ll have a helluva time trying to make it great again.”

“The end of World War II,” you exclaim. “Hitler and the Japanese were brought to justice. We picked up the pieces and helped rebuild the world.”

“Right on,” says McFry, “and we ought to celebrate that. But we gotta look at the whole picture of America’s so-called greatness. Don’t forget that throughout the twentieth century, white men were oppressing women, gays, blacks, Native Americans, Asians, foreigners and more. And look how we used that victory in 1945 to bully the world.”

“You’re the worst killjoy I ever met,” you say.

“I ought’a know cuz I was there,” says McFry. “Before we even entered the Second World War, I slipped into a meeting with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. Those guys crafted a post-war policy — and I quote — ‘to hold unquestioned power … to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.’”[1]

“Blah, blah, blah,” you say.

“It’s their words, not mine! You can read about it in history. But listen … you need to go back a lot further than the twentieth century to get the whole picture of America’s game.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you say. “You’re gonna tell me about all the Europeans devils who tormented the perfect little brown angels in North America.”

“You know as well as I do that both sides did a lot of bad stuff,” he says. “But the indisputable facts are first, that the Europeans wanted land that wasn’t theirs, second, that they believed they were a superior race, and third, that they were willing to use their superior power to subjugate the indigenous people. Agreed?”

McFry tips his head at you, awaiting a response. “Go on,” you say.

“The white man’s arrogance and lust for land caused him to provoke all kinds of wars and wickedness,” he says, “while breaking over 500 written promises to the Native Americans. And we’re still breaking those treaties today. Even Christian churches won’t return lands that they stole from their indigenous neighbors.”

“That land was stolen before the United States was even a nation,” you object.

“Negative,” says McFry. “Sure, some of it happened before 1776, but afterward, nothing changed. Which solidly dispels the myth of America being founded by good Christian men.”

“It’s not that America’s founders were Christian,” you blurt. “But they were influenced by God and the Bible. Everybody knows the republic they created wasn’t perfect but they got a lot of things right. We can make America great again by getting back to their basics.”

“Their basics?” says McFry. “Like what?”

“Like the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, and the simple moral truth that everybody is created equal.”

“I think you meant to say that all property-owning, white males of influence are created equal,” McFry says. “Words are cheap. Look at their actions and you’ll see an elite, greedy, oppressive society of rich men who carried on the tradition of domination and expansion. All that talk of equality was blowing smoke. It never happened. Not even for women. Surely you didn’t sleep through the lesson on Manifest Destiny in high school.”

“You’re making my ears tired,” you say.

“Manifest Destiny tells the story of greedy folks that squashed Native Americans with their elite ‘inalienable rights,’ driven by divine voices in their heads.”

“Those people were on the fringe,” you argue. “There were plenty of good Christians who made peace with the natives. They traded with the Indians. They brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the lost.”

“In other words, they waited patiently until the soldiers completed the genocide before they walked in to build their towns and shops and farms and churches,” McFry says. “The Native Americans had no choice but to swallow the religion of their oppressors. I personally saw the ‘good Christians’ kidnap children, forcing them into orphanages, robbing them of native language and culture, giving them no choice but to say they’re Christian. I watched missionaries pierce these kids’ tongues with needles if they dared to speak their native languages. The last boarding schools closed in 1969 and the residual curse still haunts us today.”

“The good folk back then probably didn’t even know it was happening,” you say.

“You’re talking about all the comfortable white Christians sitting with their fingers in their ears,” says McFry. “I still remember the most perfect Norman Rockwell Christmas you can imagine. It was 1838, in a cozy church in Southern Illinois. The cutest little kids dressed like Mary and Joseph placed a baby Jesus doll in the manger, to the ornery bleating of a real lamb. As candlelit hymns brought tears of joy and yuletide cheer, I slipped outside and crossed a frozen field stubbled with the epitaph of summer’s bounty. That’s when I saw them moving like gaunt ghosts through the forest, just beyond a barren apple orchard.

“Scores of Cherokee men, women and children dragged frost-bitten feet through the snow. In the span of five minutes, I watched two women and one child drop dead from exposure and starvation. I watched Andrew Jackson’s soldiers kick the frozen carcasses into a heap along the Trail of Tears. No burial. They were left for the wolves and vultures, half a mile from plump church-goers who were thanking God for blessings of family and prosperity. Be assured, this cute little Norman Rockwell Christmas stopped just short of the Trail of Tears. No refrains of Silent Night were heard out there. It was as if the smoking ovens of Auschwitz stood just outside the church windows. And this was only one small facet of a the genocidal atrocity that spanned centuries, while good Christians played dumb, thanking the Lord for the bounty they had received from the blood of the innocent. And many of these folk still play dumb today.”

You shake your head. “Think of all the good white soldiers in the Civil War,” you plead. “Lots of them fought and died to set the slaves free.”

“They were ‘sort of’ freed,” says McFry. “As soon as the federal troops left the South, the Southerners terrorized and beat and lynched blacks for another century, giving them no choice but to lay low. The lynchings happened in the North as well as the South. Former slave owners put up Confederate flags and statues to incite fear in the hearts of black men and women. They created Jim Crowe laws to keep them segregated, and red-lining to keep them poor and in ghettos. When the blacks were too successful in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Wilmington, North Carolina, the whites simply massacred them.[2] Not one year passed that people of power and influence weren’t oppressing and killing the weak ones, while most white Christians just bit their tongues.”

The waitress arrives with your orders of burger, fries and cola, bringing a hiatus to your debate over America’s checkered past.

To be continued …

Image, Detroit neighborhood sign, by Arthur S. Siegel, February 1942, Wikimedia Commons.

[1] “Memorandum of the War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, with State Department participation, 19 October 1940.” Laurence Shoup & William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (Monthly Review Press, 1977), 130ff.

[2] “Wilmington Insurrection of 1898,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898.

“Tulsa Race Massacre,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre.

READ “Back to the Future – II”

READ “Back to the Future – III”