Sexton has called this book an alternate history of America, one which accepts white supremacy and its myths of exceptionalism as its throughline. It’s a compelling read, revealing, as it does, far more connecting dots that your typical reader would be aware of.
The Aryan Mound Builders
To bolster this belief [that the American people were the guardians of Western Civilization, the pinnacle of the Anglo-Saxon race, and, by their ethnic superiority, the inheritors of the world], America became obsessed with pseudo-science that proved its theory of racial superiority, including the quack science of phrenology and a rogue form of history and archaeology that claimed the white race had originally settled the continent of America. This bizarre story had its roots in the myth of the “Mound Builders,” a so-called lost people who left behind strange mounds and structures in parts of the country. The discovery of these works so impressed Americans in the nineteenth century that they refused to believe Native Americans capable of such feats and reasoned that obviously an Aryan people had first settled the continent, only to be overthrown by the “savage” race of Native Americans.
I live not far away from one of these mounds -- now at Aztalan State Park in southeastern Wisconsin -- and regret that I have never actually visited it. I’ve driven past it hundreds of times on I-94, obscured now from that vantage point by a motocross track that bears the same name. But I learned from an early age that Aztalan and mounds like it throughout the upper Midwest were built by the indigenous people that lived there in the early 1000s. To discover that they once bolstered a nineteenth century conspiracy theory -- one of the first Big Lies in American history -- is just one of the surprises that is waiting for readers of this book.
Among the first critics of this baseless, ignorant theory was Thomas Jefferson, who had excavated one of the mounds himself in 1784 and declared it of Native American origin, but the myth of Aryan Mound Builders continued as it was “comforting to conquerors” who wished to see Native Americans as “intruders who had brutally shattered the glorious old … civilization.”
Does that sound familiar? A lie that provides comfort to conquerors? Even then, it seems, you could always identify the authoritarians by their projection of their own sins onto their opponents. We are not the conquerors. They are! To wit:
In Andrew Jackson’s 1830 State of the Union, as he argued for the forcible removal of Native American tribes, he bizarrely cited “the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West,” who had been “exterminated or had disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes.” In this alternate reality, the Native American genocide might be excused as repayment for a previous, imagined eradication, this one having been perpetrated against a mythic Caucasian race.
Jackson’s story cast the United States as the executors of redemption, a nation of great people who, like the mythical Jackson, had risen from nothing, armed with only their superior sense of intellect, morality, and historical drive, to create an awe-inspiring society -- people tasked to go forth and conquer the West as a means of redeeming their ancestors who had been so obscenely interrupted.
This myth found its way into the art and literature of the day, perhaps most notably in William Cullen Bryant’s famous poem “The Prairies,” a work of Romanticism documenting the seductive call of the West and the need for Americans to reclaim their destiny after a band of Natives decimated the true Mound Builders. From this ruin, however, Bryant dreamed he could hear the approach of Western civilization to redeem the land, a call echoed by his contemporaries in their poems and works.
I had never heard of this before -- but its seems to provide some essential context to understanding the motivations of Jackson, Bryant, and others who truly felt the obligations of maintaining Western Civilization -- a phrase now eerily resonate in my ears having just recently seeing a video of Roger Stone taking the initiation oath of the Proud Boys:
"Hi, I'm Roger Stone. I'm a Western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for the creation of the modern world."
I’m sure Sexton would congratulate me on making that connection, because connections like that are pretty much the point of American Rule. The myths of white supremacy have been with America since its founding, and they have driven far more of American history than many would like to admit.
The 1st Chihuahua Volunteers?
Here’s another one of those connecting dots.
Following the Mexican-American War, the debate over whether to annex parts of Mexican territory or the entirety of the country revealed deep and toxic motivations. Politicians spoke openly and derisively about the Mexican people, as well as which races were capable of self-governance and which were destined to be owned and lorded over. Though Christian charity and the concept of benevolent empire continued to tinge the conversations, the nation had already strayed from its benign principles. Its politicians and citizens, however, excited by military victories and apparent dominance, cheered on the craven expansion.
The remaining debate centered around race and white supremacy as James Buchanan, then President James K. Polk’s secretary of state, prized the racial purity of the United States over the potential for maximal expansion. He advocated only annexing portions of the territory already settled by Americans, asking of Mexico proper, “How should we govern the mongrel race which inhabits it? Could we admit them to seats in our Senate & House of Representatives? Are they capable of Self-Government as States of this Confederacy?”
It’s an interesting choice of words. The Mexican-American War ended in 1848, thirteen years before the creation of the Confederate States of America -- so Buchanan here is clearly using that word to refer to the United States -- but imagine, for a moment, an alternate history in which the United States did annex all of Mexico, and then the states that were made of that territory joined the coming Confederacy and sent troops to fight against the Federals in the American Civil War. One has to wonder if those extra men would have made a difference in the outcome of that war.
But, primarily because of the myths of white supremacy, shared by Northern and Southern Americans alike, that alternate history never really had a chance to be.
Representative Jacob Collamer of Vermont warned that by bringing Mexicans into the Union “we should destroy our own nationality … We shall cease to be the people that we were; we cease to be the Saxon Americanized.” His colleague Edward Cabell of Florida shared his skepticism and asked, “Shall we … by an act of Congress, convert the black, white, red, mongrel, miserable population of Mexico … into free and enlightened American citizens, entitled to all the privileges we enjoy?”
Perhaps the most boisterous and memorable opposition to Mexican annexation came from John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a two-time vice president who had served under both John Quincey Adams and Andrew Jackson and was one of the most powerful senators at the time. An avowed white supremacist, Calhoun took the floor on January 4, 1848, and declared, “Ours, sir, is a Government of the white race. The greatest misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the white race.” Calhoun warned it was a “great mistake … when we suppose that all people are capable of self-government,” maintaining that America’s form of government and freedom were dependent on the rarefied intelligence and capability of its white citizens.
Much of this is baffling to me, raised, as I was, to understand that America’s form of government and freedom were, explicitly, for everyone. That bringing America’s form of government and freedom to the whole planet was the entire point of the American experiment. It has been extremely troubling to me to see so many not only reject that view, but to work so actively against it. But, evidently, that’s nothing new. It is another of the great American contradictions. Freedom for me, but not for you.
An Agreement with Hell
In Sexton’s telling, much of this trouble coheres back to the founding documents of America -- and especially the Constitution.
It had been that covenant with death that had troubled the nation since its authoring in 1787. Whether it was the disgusting Missouri Compromise or the disastrous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, ill-fated workarounds that irresponsibly kicked the question of slavery down the road, the country had frantically tried one haphazard measure after another to avoid confronting America’s original sin. Nearly a century earlier, James Madison and his Northern colleagues had been so desperate to avoid economic revolution they had indeed forged an agreement with hell. It was destined to fail, but in the meantime it had damned millions of men, women, and children to brutal slavery and had ensured an instability in their republic that would always end in apocalyptic violence.
The American Myth of manifest destiny is told as a triumphant race to the west but was instead a fevered run from the inevitable disaster of that original compromise, the consequences constantly nipping at the nation’s heels.
The compromise in question is, of course, the one over slavery. That a nation, dedicated to freedom, should continue to hold men in chains, explained only and always by the myth that the white man was superior to the black one. When the nation finally tore itself apart over this constitutional contradiction, it was the Southerners who would, unfortunately, have the bulk of constitutional authority on their side.
The Noble Lie of the Confederate States, the new narrative that competed with the American Noble Lie, was that the South recognized an undeniable truth in the inequality of the races and that the North had violated the contract of the Constitution. Confederate president Jefferson Davis maintained that the new nation illustrated “the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed, and that is is the right of the people to alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive to the ends for which they were established” and that the Confederacy embodied Jefferson’s belief in perpetual revolution and “merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable.”
They were not completely wrong. Wrong about human freedom, clearly, but right in the sense of what the text of the original Constitution said. And therein lies the essential rub of the conflict. “Defending the Constitution” becomes mixed up with “Preserving White Supremacy,” and if one is not careful, it becomes extremely difficult to rhetorically separate the two.
One of the big ideas here is the idea that -- with the exception of the cases where the Constitution itself has been amended -- this is a contradiction that we still live with today. Those who would prioritize human flourishing over the text of the Constitution can always be accused of trying to subvert the founding document of our nation -- as many have been through the subsequent one hundred and sixty years of Congressional legislation, Executive action, and Judicial decision-making.
But Sexton points out that, even in the case of the Southern Confederacy, those who care so much about the strict language of the Constitution are often an elite minority with ulterior motives.
Though it is often painted as a universal action, and celebrated by Confederate apologists as a regional identity, the rebellion wasn’t unanimous or particularly populist. The planning elite, the center of all power in the nineteenth-century South, spurred the secession of the Southern states, but most Southerners didn’t own slaves. The institution itself was a means by which enslaved labor could be used to keep in place a stark class divide while ensuring continued social harmony. The very existence of slaves meant a class of people existed for poor whites in the South to feel superior to. As Georgia governor Joseph Brown explained, “Among us the poor white laborer … does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal … He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of [white men].” Or, as James P. Holcombe, a wealthy slaveholder, so plainly put it, “African slavery reconciles the antagonism of the classes that has elsewhere reduced the highest statesmanship to the verge of despair, and becomes the great Peace-maker of our society.”
The intended hierarchy -- not just rich over poor, but white over black -- therefore has its own sustaining power. Rich can’t rule without some poor on their side, and what better way to recruit the poor to your elite cause than to tell them that they are also part of the ultimate elite?
Corporations Are People Too
I had no idea this stupid argument went back as far as it did.
On behalf of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, former New York Senator Roscoe Conkling stood before the Supreme Court in December 1882 and presented one of the most audacious and consequential claims in American history: that corporations were people and could appeal for “protection against invidious and discriminating state and local taxes.”
1882. This was news to me, thinking that the “corporations are people too” argument was a more modern phenomenon, carted out to justify the Citizens United decision in 2010 and the Hobby Lobby decision in 2014. But evidently not. And perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that its entire justification was based on a lie.
During his time in Congress, Conkling had served on the committees that drafted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Reconstruction articles ensuring rights of “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States and prohibiting restriction of voting rights based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Conkling had been a leader among Radical Republicans who fought tooth and nail for African Americans to get a fair shake in the post-Emancipation United States, but in the interest of his corporate employers, he was more than willing to sell that noble mission to the highest bidder.
As the only surviving member of the committee that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, Conkling perjured himself in front of the court by claiming the intention in the wording of the amendment was to protect not only freed slaves but also corporations, testifying that the law was meant to “embrace artificial persons as well as natural persons.” To strengthen his claim, Conkling produced his never-before-seen journal and a corresponding entry that supposedly detailed the debate within the committee and the choice between using the word ‘citizen’ and the word ‘person’. The latter, he argued, had been chosen to make room for corporations. Years later, examination found that Conkling had misrepresented the contents of the journal and that no such debate had ever occurred.
He lied. But like so much political dogma, the lie was quickly forgotten. Like ‘welfare queens’ and ‘tax cuts create more revenue to the government’ (hat tip to Rick Perlstein, there), the dogma must always be maintained.
Though Conkling’s case was settled out of court, his argument lived on. In the matter of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Supreme Court did not decide that corporations had the same rights and privileges as private citizens under the Constitution, but court reporter Bancroft Davis, himself a former railroad executive, misleadingly reported that the court had upheld Conkling’s claim.
Davis’s fabrication reverberated for decades to come. Stephen Field, a Supreme Court justice so tainted by corporate money and influence that he’d personally advised businesses on which counsels to employ for cases and shared with them internal court documents, used Davis’s assertion as a means to enshrine corporate personhood in law. In a ruling on another case, Field dishonestly cited Davis’s misrepresentation of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, laying the foundation for future business-friendly justices and lawmakers to use the idea as precedent moving forward and creating corporate personhood from out of thin air.
What do you call people who intentionally lie in order to create a precedent for what they want to be true? And what do you call people who pick up that precedent and knowingly run with it for their own benefit and aggrandizement? I referenced Roger Stone earlier and I know what his term is for a person that engages in that kind of conduct. It begins with ‘rat’ and ends with ‘fucker’.
Wreckers
But maybe there is a more polite term? There’s a passage in The Gulag Archipelago that I dogeared but failed to report on in my blog post on that book.
But new waves rolled from the collectivized villages: one of them was a wave of agricultural wreckers. Everywhere they began to discover wrecker agronomists who up until that year had worked honestly all their lives but who now purposely sowed weeds in Russian fields (on the instructions, of course, of the Moscow institute, which had now been totally exposed; indeed, there were those same 200,000 unarrested members of the Working Peasants Party, the TKP!). Certain agronomists failed to put into effect the profound instructions of Lysenko -- and in one such wave, in 1931, Lorkh, the so-called “king” of the potato, was sent to Kazakhstan. Others carried out the Lysenko directives too precisely and thus exposed their absurdity. (In 1934 Pskov agronomists sowed flax on the snow -- exactly as Lysenko had ordered. The seeds swelled up, grew moldy, and died. The big fields lay empty for a year. Lysenko could not say that the snow was a kulak or that he himself was an ass. He accused the agronomists of being kulaks and of distorting the technology. And the agronomists went off to Siberia.) Beyond all this, in almost every Machine and Tractor Station wrecking in the repairing of tractors was discovered -- and that is how the failures of the first collective farm years were explained!
Wreckers! That is why our policies are failing! They are sabotaging us! The cry sounds familiar to my modern ears. And in American Rule, I stumbled across something similar.
The targeting of government workers revealed the agenda. Mirroring Soviet political purges, figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy, joined by young and ambitious politicians like Richard Nixon, brandished investigations like modern agents of the Inquisition, claiming falsely that the government had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. These claims were based primarily on rumors and gossip among conservative circles, many of them exemplified in the salacious Beltway book Washington Confidential, written by conservatives Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, a bestseller that described an infected DC where “sex-starved government gals” were recruiting “colored men” and “meek male clerks” to wreck America from the inside out. It’s important to note that the perpetrators of this proposed conspiracy to bring down the United States on behalf of the USSR were professional, independent women, African-American men, and gay men: individuals who threatened the unbridled dominance of straight, white men.
There is a sarcasm in Solzhenitsyn’s text that is missing from Sexton’s, but the fantastical nature of the relative claims remain equal. Wreckers! That is why our policies are failing! They are sabotaging us!
The American Christian Mythos
As I’ve already mentioned, this book is chock full of anecdotes that I had never heard before, but which provide essential context to understanding the forces that are shaping our political reality. One of those forces is Christian Nationalism, and it, perhaps more than other forces, seems absolutely dependent on its own mythology of America’s founding.
Bizarre and superstitious ideas shaped Reagan’s worldview and, through him, infected the political discourse and warped shared reality. In his years as an actor, he had been steeped in conspiracy theories and myths, maybe none more conspicuous than his faith that Americans had been preordained by divinity and history as a chosen people. Touting the principles of manifest destiny, Reagan told students at William Woods College in 1952 that he saw America “in the divine scheme of things … as a promised land.” As a proof, he relayed to them “a legend” concerning the Declaration of Independence and how, as the Founding Fathers struggled with their conviction to affix it with their signatures, a stranger appeared in the room and demanded, “Sign that document, sign it if tomorrow your heads roll from the headsman’s axe. Sign that document because tomorrow and the days to come your children and all the children of all the days to come will judge you for what you do this day.” According to this legend, the mysterious speaker was the force that inspired the signing that founded the country, and once the deed was done he simply disappeared, as if he were a ghost.
Bizarre and superstitious ideas, indeed. But where did it come from? Did Reagan invent it? Unfortunately, not.
The story was inspiring, but the legend of divine interference in Philadelphia was completely fabricated and had originated in a book called Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution, an 1847 volume of popular myths authored by writer George Lippard. Lippard was a close friend of Edgar Allan Poe and wrote countless tales for a living that featured invented instances of the supernatural during the American Revolution and capitalized on the previous success of Parson Weems’s myths about George Washington and his cherry tree.
It is one of literally hundreds of myths that intertwine divine intervention and providence in the founding of America and the lives of the men who secured it. It is literally a religion, whose adherents believe all this on faith, often in the face of contradictory evidence.
What Would Ayn Rand Say?
This might be my favorite anecdote of all.
Like a record on repeat, the American economy crashed as trusting bankers and corporations to police themselves backfired as it always does. The sad truth was that the loss and the destruction were as predictable as the turning of the seasons, but in two centuries, American leaders had yet to see the pattern and take necessary precautions.
On October 23, 2008, as the economy faltered, the usually steadfast Alan Greenspan appeared before a House committee and admitted he had discovered “a flaw,” saying, “I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.” Asked if the flaw was his belief that self-regulation worked, Greenspan relented: “Absolutely, precisely.”
Greenspan, of course, was a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time, who had been preaching the gospel of free market capitalism for years. I stumbled across several of his essays in Ayn Rand’s collection: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, where he was profiled as one of her most astute students.
Two years later, Greenspan presented a report to the Brookings Institution nicknamed “The Crisis Paper.” In this report, Greenspan, a Randian economist who had perpetually cursed regulation of any kind, admitted the economy was inherently unstable, that his decades of belief that the market was self-sufficient and, above all, always right might have been in vain. The infallibility of the market, the defining tenet of the neoliberal order and the new world, had been a myth all its own.
“Unless there is a societal choice to abandon dynamic markets and leverage some form of central planning,” Greenspan said, “I fear that preventing bubbles will in the end turn out to be infeasible. Assuaging their aftermath seems the best we can hope for.”
Central planning! Heavens! What would Ayn Rand say?
What had shaken Greenspan to his core?
A market that had grown so huge and independent of oversight and regulation that it had cannibalized itself as banks sought more and more profit and cast aside even the appearance of good faith. Years of irresponsible lending, of preying on overleveraged consumers who desired homes beyond their means, of selling the illusion of transcending class on the backs of reckless loans, and of creating new concepts like derivatives, a trading chip that even seasoned economists barely understood, had created a house of cards destined to collapse. Even those who worshipped the market as if it were a deity had to admit that the world was tied to an unstable and mercurial system.
One expert called it a “circular Ponzi scheme.”
The market will correct -- of course it will. That’s what markets do and do well. However, markets do that not instantaneously, but over a timescale that allows for destruction and human misery. When it grows, any market will leave people behind. But when it crashes, it drags just about everyone down with it.
Central planning may or may not be a better answer. But the fact that Alan Greenspan thought so is certainly noteworthy.
Barack Hussein Obama
Let’s end on this one.
As the economy melted down, Americans yearned for a new direction. A young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama offered a fresh vision of the American Myth tailored to stabilizing a volatile world. Back in 2004, Obama had captured the national imagination in a speech to the Democratic National Convention in Boston that pushed against the notion that America had divided into two separate nations, saying, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America.” He leveled his criticism at pundits and partisans who “like to slide-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States,” rejecting the conventional wisdom that politics had to be trench warfare, and exhibition of zero-sum game theory. “We are one people,” he said, promising that with that right imagination and right intentions, America could transcend its differences and unite in the common good.
I remember those heady days. It really was like a breath of fresh wind was blowing. But…
For all of his soaring rhetoric, Obama functioned as a pragmatic politician who straddled the divide between left and right much as Bill Clinton had. In his acceptance of the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2008, he spoke of “individual responsibility and mutual responsibility,” a bridging of liberal and conservative ideology that nodded toward cooperation within the neoliberal system. The united America Obama spoke of was still predicated on a free market that operated the way Ronald Reagan had envisioned.
He was not a revolutionary looking to overthrow the system. He was an orator, who had the ability to bring people together around common rhetoric. He was not a socialist or even a liberal. He was, at worst, a moderate. But…
Despite his advocating traditional policies mixed with uniting rhetoric, Obama was continually harangued by a conservative media that seemed obsessed with the fact that he was an African-Amercan man and, strangely enough, convinced the center-left Obama was somehow a closeted socialist.
Regardless, he won an easy victory in 2008 over Republican John McCain, and in subsequent meetings with congressional Republicans it became very obvious very quickly that Obama had actually meant what he said about wanting to govern the country in a bipartisan, healing fashion. For once, a leader who had crafted an ideal America genuinely tried to bring it to life. He communicated with Republicans, heard their thoughts and concerns, and was willing to compromise.
Instead of accepting his gestures of good faith, Republicans were terrified. While such a president might be good for the United States of America, particularly following the disaster of the Bush presidency, such a unifying Democratic president would be terrible for the Republican Party.
As one Republican staffer remarked after a particularly inspiring meeting with Obama, “If he governs like that, we are all fucked.”
This is so key to understanding our current situation. Obama was a pragmatist who wanted to do what was good for the country. And that meant working with Republicans, and that meant moving to the political right on some issues to make compromises and move things forward. But…
And so, instead of working with Obama to create a better future for the people, Republicans responded as they had with Clinton. They chose to confront a fictional version of Obama the conservative media had built during the 2008 campaign. … Conservative media doubled down on their portrayal of an America divided by race and ethnicity, perpetuating a sense of grievance among the Republicans’ white base. The narrative was that in the post-recession struggle, minorities were being favored by a Democratic Party desperate for votes. They believed Obama was obsessed with redistributing wealth and proof of a dangerous, racial shift in power.
Republicans wouldn’t have it. Stuck in their mythology of two Americas -- the “real” one of the white, Christian cowboy, and the “usurped” one of the brown, socialist bandit -- they felt more loyalty to their brand than to the people that actually made up their nation. And so, as they had done with Bill Clinton, they vilified Obama as the leader of a left-leaning movement bent on destroying America. That movement, largely existing only in people’s fevered imaginations, is what I have come to understand as “The Left” that conservatives today so often decry and demonize.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
