Discuss the original Borg: American ideology, Westward Movement and ‘progress’

The Original Borg: American Ideology, Westward Movement and ‘Progress’

Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect of we “want to populate the nation with a thousand generations of Americans.” By “Americans” Jefferson, most certainly meant Anglo-Americans–those people from northern and western Europe who still dominate the political and economic affairs in the United States. The objective of this “lecture” is to get our heads around what historians have identified as some core ideologies that circulated throughout and continue to operate in the United States. We also want to remind ourselves of the context of westward expansion. This latter will be all-important as we watch the country make a mad dash for the Civil War.

Jefferson’s reference to Anglo-Americans in particular is important for two reasons. One, because his utterances expressed not only his own beliefs, but those of many other Americans, both those who made major decisions and those everyday folk who abided by them. Jefferson’s statements then, are also important because they clearly impact federal policy and public perception for years to come. Jefferson was influenced by a new set of scholars who were interested in intelligence testing. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (http://books.google.com/books?id=UO0OAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&cd=1&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=false), Jefferson asked the following questions of American Indians: What kind of clothes do they wear? What type of food do they eat? How do they raise their children? What are their kinship groups like? These ethnographic questions are the logical extension of what Jefferson and others thought about American Indians–that they are “formed in mind as well as in body on the same module with yhe Homo Sapiens Europaeus [sic].” Indian differences, Jefferson said, were not “a difference of nature, but of circumstance.” By this reasoning, one could change American Indians, Indians were salvageable. Cut her hair, make her speak English, don’t allow her to practice her religion, and the Indian can assimilate. You can always change your culture. At varrying times in North American history, Anglo-Americans, to quote The Borg, practiced a policy of “assimilate or die.”

Of African Americans on the other hand, Jefferson spoke in different terms, saying that physical and moral differences between Africans and Europeans were “fixed in nature.” The only thing that would help African Americans, according to Jefferson, was intermarrying with whites. Indeed, he argued that “the improvement of the blacks in body and mind” when they have mixed with whites, “proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” All this is important, for as I mentioned above, Jefferson is not the only one who subscribed to this racialized ideology.

By the way, this racial ideology means different things for American Indians than it does for African Americans. For Indians it will mean a system of either extermination or the more paternalistic notion of assimilation–again, the stripping of culture in order to make more “white.” If assimilation doesn’t come right away, then we will give you time to make the transition by putting you on reservations. African Americans on the other hand, must remain slaves, because their differences, remember, are “fixed in nature.” You can’t change them; they are biologically inferior. You must enslave them or deport them. Killing them is not an answer, because by the early 1700s European indentured servitude is no longer marketable and Indian servitude no longer feasible. Hence, generations of slavery for African Americans and generations of deception for Indians. To this day, Americans regard American Indians and African Americans differently, one from another. We have inherited many wacky legacies (for better and worse).

Another American ideology that figures prominently is the notion of “progress.” Americans used to have a preoccupation with Roman and Greek literature–the “classics”. Indeed, without going off on a tangent, it’s commonly known that the Revolutionary generation looked to Greek and Roman philosophers for their intellectual guidance. In their letters to each other (letter writing used to be considered an art; they would likely be horrified to see our emails, texts, IMs, tweets and posts today 🙂 18th and 19th century Americans used to sign their names with the pseudonyms “publius”, “Brutus” and “Cassius.” This literature taught Americans that human nature was constant and that similar external circumstances would yield similar results. This was part of an Enlightenment philosophy that said that there are universal principles at work in the physical world. Remember the “scientific method” that we were taught in grammar school? A key to our scientific experiments is that someone should be able to come along and read our notes for our experiment and replicate it, getting the same results because of the constant laws at work in the physical world. In his Two Treatises on Government John Locke argues that there are universal laws in politics just as in the ‘natural’ world. Hence, from the Enlightenment philosophers and then from the Revolutionary generation we have inherited a belief in progress–cumulative knowledge–the discovering of ‘laws’ and adding new ones to them. Things are getting better, and we know the way to make them better. Tacitly, we use this as justification for invasion of other nations.

The last ideology I want to discuss is what we call American exceptionalism. Americans, again Anglo-Americans, saw themselves as a favored nation of Providence (see OSullivan.htm). That is, they thought that God had given them a special mandate to show others what the right way of doing things was. This is seen most clearly in the Puritan notion of a “city upon a hill” put forth by Jonathan Winthrop. We also see it in our more evangelical Christian traditions, where some Christian denominations proselytize as part of their project. However, fairly early on, Americans politicized and secularized this notion.

A famous painting by John Gast that illustrates some of these ideas depicts a virginal woman (Columbia–a representation of the United States) floating through the air bringing in her wake, technology, order, civilization. She carries with her a book, presumably a book of law or perhaps the Bible. Behind her you see a family plowing the fields near their log cabin, much like Jefferson’s yeoman farmers. Railroads, canals, stage coaches, mountain men and settlers follow her. Laying telegraph line behind her, she brings light. In the dark, buffalo, American Indians deer and bears retreat at the advance of civilization. One can assume that soon they will be overtaken.

Essentially, what I would like us to do is ask ourselves two things broadly:

One: Am I right? (Awe, c’mon, you can say if you think I’m full of…beans). Do we see these things (racism, ethnocentrism, exceptionalism) operating in westward expansion, and if so where, let’s give specific instances from history?

And two: Do we have to have these horrible things (slavery, Indian removal, WAR, etc.) in order to have “progress”?

IT MUST BE 250-350 WORDS IN LENGTH


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