I try to keep in mind that America, by definition, is not homogenous, but organized dissension. In fact, our nation has always been divided, dating back to the period between the Declaration of Independence to the drafting of the Constitution after the Revolutionary War.
One of the underreported concessions made by non-slave states to slave states was that the decision to own human beings and force them into labor was a matter of state’s rights — no federal oversight or enforcement of our central tenant that all human beings are created equal with inalienable rights. In turn, this centralized our Federal government to grant it preeminence at least in terms of national defense, currency, and commerce.
Previously America was a confederation with a weak central government serving as a connecting thread through the essentially independent 13 states. Following the revolution, this inherent yin and yang festered with cultural tensions broader than legalized slavery even though that abominable practice served as the flashpoint. In the period between the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 and up to the cannon blast on Fort Sumter in 1861 the country boiled over, best exemplified by the caning of U.S. Senator Charles Sumner by Congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. That violence portended what is still the largest bloodletting in our history — the Civil War.
Imagine the assassination of President Lincoln cheered by many Americans — at least in the percentage of those supporting Trump today. This was followed by the impeachment of his successor, the overtly racist Andrew Johnson who curtailed Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction and effectively reinstalled former Southern Confederates who illegally abolished freedoms for blacks and demanded autonomy.
Progress on through the 19th century and we have the election of Rutherford B. Hayes achieved through the electoral college, not the popular vote. We also had two other presidents — James Garfield and William McKinley assassinated. Good God, think of the deleterious impressions it made on the generations of that era.
In the backdrop to all of this madness was a decades-long calculated genocide of almost an entire race of people — Native Americans. This was the time of the rise of giant corporations who formed trusts to fix pricing to concentrate wealth into too few hands and cripple free enterprise. This may sound familiar, but with big corporations came big money to influence election outcomes and appointees.
In the 20th century, we saw the acrimonious rise of Republican Progressive Theodore Roosevelt who introduced tremendous reforms and regulations, not the least of which were the FDA, child labor laws, and environmental protection. The mercurial Roosevelt curtailed his presidency by not seeking reelection in 1908 — but four years later ran a third-party campaign that injected chaos into a nation grappling with the massive technological and cultural disruption produced by the industrial revolution.
The America First mentality became more evident in the face of two World Wars, the second of which might have been mitigated if the United States had engaged the world instead of believing in the insulation of the oceans and that somehow, in the face of technology that redefined what it meant to live on this planet, the country could turn a blind eye to the dangerous rise of fascism and the intrusions of an evil regime forcibly seizing territory from its neighbors.
After the worldwide carnage and the revelation of the Nazi holocaust, America emerged as the all-time giant of manufacturing and general commercialism. The resulting prosperity was enjoyed by white Americans and served to underscore the brutal divide between them and their black brothers and sisters. As Martin Luther King paraphrased Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but inevitably bends toward justice.” The civil rights movement ensued across the nation, and concurrently with the disastrous Vietnam War, we saw yet another presidential assassination with John Kennedy, as well as his brother Robert, King, and the shooting of George Wallace.
More recently we saw the outrageously destructive decision to initiate the Iraq War — a blunder that has cost Americans trillions and will continue to bleed us economically indefinitely. To my mind, all of this madness throughout our history did not divide us, but, like the corruption we see in Trump, it cast into the sunlight the inherent schism produced by our country’s ugly, ignorant underbelly. Indeed, such heinous acts are not confined to America, they are endemic to human nature, which is a fact the founders of our nation understood very well in drafting the Constitution under siege in this moment of history we are all a part of — right now.
There has been no perfect society in human history, but in our Union of disparate minds, I see a soul best exemplified by its collective aspirations and not its difficult, shameful past. I wish Martin Luther King could be our president today, but I take solace in his immortal words, “We shall overcome.”
