An Incomplete History Leads to an Incomplete Present

What do you know about the U.S. war with Mexico? The years it took place? Events leading up to the war?  The effects it had on each country? Chances are you know very little. You can blame your history teachers for this. Well, that's probably unfair because there's more than enough blame to go around. History textbooks devote only a couple of paragraphs to this war and the powers that create such documents as state standards are just fine with this. To read anymore might well lead one to question the morality of this conquest.


Take, for instance, this account of facts from Bill Bigelow (www.rethinkingschools.org):

The U.S. war with Mexico (1846-48) “gave”—in the words of history textbooks—California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado to the United States of America. And the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, formally ending the war, ratified the annexation of Texas, which had broken away from Mexico largely because of Mexico’s policies against slavery.
 
Most Mexicans know that the war against Mexico was another chapter in U.S. imperialism—a “North American invasion,” as it’s commemorated in a huge memorial in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park. But don’t take Mexicans’ word for it. Here’s what Col. Ethan Allan Hitchcock, aide to the commander of U.S. forces Gen. Zachary Taylor, wrote at the time in his journal about the war’s origins: “I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. … We have not one particle of right to be here … It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.”

Exactly. President James K. Polk, himself a slaveowner, had ordered U.S. troops into an area claimed by Mexico and inhabited by Mexicans and waited for them to be attacked. And when they were, Polk claimed aggression and the U.S. had its war. The invading U.S. Army actually called itself the Army of Occupation.

 The abolition movement regarded the war as a land grab to expand slavery. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass denounced the Mexican invasion as “a murderous war—as a war against the free states—as a war against freedom, against the Negro, and against the interests of workingmen of this country—and as a means of extending that great evil and damning curse, negro slavery.” Henry David Thoreau coined the term “civil disobedience” in defense of his position that people should not pay taxes to support the war against Mexico. Thoreau argued that a minority can act against an unjust system only when it “clogs by its whole weight.”

Here’s a U.S. infantry lieutenant who wrote his parents after a U.S. officer named Walker was killed in battle, quoted in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: “Gen. Lane … told us to ‘avenge the death of the gallant Walker’ … Grog shops were broken open first and then, maddened with liquor, every species of outrage was committed. Old women and girls were stripped of their clothing—many suffered still greater outrages. Men were shot by dozens … their property, churches, stores, and dwelling houses ransacked … It made me for the first time ashamed of my country.” In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant wrote that this was “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation …”



Any study of history should include the inclusion of multiple perspectives. However, this rarely happens. We learn of our history through the lens of the victors, or oppressors as it may be. We make heroes of slave holders and killers alike with little concern for their oppressive beliefs and practices. I've never been any more aware of this than last week when the following statement was made by Newt Gringrich in the Republican debate where good ol' South Carolina Republicans applauded like mad:



"We're in South Carolina. South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America's enemies: kill them."


The fact that it was actually "Stonewall" Jackson who said "kill them" aside, it's scary a presidential candidate would try to evoke the sentiments of a man responsible for the Indian Removal Act, a piece of legislature that led to the death of  thousands of Native Americans. But should anyone really be all that surprised Gingrich would communicate an "us versus them" mentality that places himself in a superior role? Consider the fact he openly, and proudly, demands that "Blacks need to stop demanding food stamps and begin demanding jobs." Or that he argues the "fact" that the poor have no work ethic. Or that marriage is not a civil right - at least not if you're homosexual.


I wonder how people like Newt Gingrich come to hate, belittle, and work to oppress others. Do they learn it from their families? The church? The media?


Their schools?


I'm becoming much more aware of our role as educators to teach not just tolerance but love and appreciation and respect. Part of doing this is to think about the language we use about those who are different than us and the underlying beliefs that fuel these statements. Another part is to engage in a critical study of our past (both the good and the bad) in hopes of better understanding our present. And the third part is to begin seeing ways in which our society marginalizes populations based on race, gender, religion, sexuality, class, and so on.


Maybe if our students learned to see the world for both what it is and what it isn't we'd find ourselves with far fewer Newt Gingriches.