Uncovering the Real American History

I recently read an article in the New Yorker that so shocked me that I knew I had to tell you, my small audience, all about it. Vast tracts of land owned by African Americans were taken from them in the 20^th century. At the heart of the story is racism in many forms: how the promise of emancipation after the Civil War was broken; how whites used bureaucracy and twisted legalisms to take black land from owners too poor to defend themselves; how the teaching of American history was whitewashed to bury this story. I was shocked because, after decades of studying history, I had no idea about this fundamental cause of economic inequality in America. Writing this article pushed me into investigating the even larger story of how black Americans were prevented from owning real estate, one of the fundamental sources of wealth.

Here’s a short version of the history. At the time of Emancipation, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman declared that 400,000 acres formerly held by Confederates be given to African Americans. His order came to be known as the promise of “40 acres and a mule”. But the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau was never able to control enough land to fulfill this promise. In 1866, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, opening up 46 million acres of public land in southern states for Union supporters and freed slaves. The land was uncultivated forest and swamp, difficult for penniless former slaves to acquire or use. Southern bureaucrats made it difficult for blacks to access any land and southern whites used violence to prevent blacks from occupying land. Within 6 months, the land was opened to former rebels. In 1876, the law was repealed.

The much more extensive Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of government land in the West to any American who applied and worked the land for 5 years. Over the course of the next 60 years, 246 million acres of western land, the area of California plus Texas, was given to individuals for free. About 1.5 million families were given a crucial economic foundation. Only about 5000 African Americans benefitted.

Despite obstacles, many black families had acquired farmland by World War I. There were nearly 1 million black farms in 1920, about one-seventh of all American farms, mostly in the South. During the 20^th century, nearly all of this land was taken or destroyed by whites. Sometimes this happened by violent mob action, as in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, or the lesser known pogrom in Pierce City, Missouri, in 1901, when the entire black community of 300 was driven from town. A map shows many of the hundreds of these incidents of white collective violence, concentrated in the South. Many of the thousands of lynchings were directed at black farmers in order to terrorize all blacks and make them leave.

Other methods had a more legal appearance. Over 75 years, the black community of Harris Neck, Georgia, developed a thriving economy from fishing, hunting and gathering oysters, on land deeded to a former slave by a plantation owner in 1865. In 1942, the federal government took gave residents two weeks notice to leave, their houses were destroyed, and an Air Force base was created. That site was chosen by the local white politicians. Black families were paid two-thirds of what white families got per acre. Now the former African American community is the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge.

Vast amounts of black property were taken by unscrupulous individual use of legal trickery, because African Americans did not typically use the white-dominated legal system to pass property to their heirs. White developers and speculators took advantage of poorly documented ownership through so-called partition sales to acquire land that had been in black families for generations. One family’s story is highlighted in the New Yorker article, co-published with ProPublica. The 2001 Agricultural Census estimated that about 80% of black-owned farmland had disappeared in the South since 1969, about half lost through partition sales.

Decades of discrimination by the federal government made it especially difficult for black farmers to retain their land as farming modernized. The Department of Agriculture denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure, and hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their land. Even under President Obama, discrimination against black farmers by the USDA continued.

Because land was taken by so many different methods across the US, and the takers were not interested in recording their thefts clearly, it is impossible to know how much black land was taken. The authors of the New Yorker article say bluntly, “Between 1910 and 1997, African Americans lost about 90% of their farmland.” That loss cost black families hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2012, less than 2 percent of farmers were black, according to the most recent Agricultural Census.

While rural blacks lost land, real estate holdings of urban blacks were wiped out by a combination of government discrimination and private exploitation. Because black families could not get regular mortgages due to redlining by banks, if they wanted to buy a house they had to resort to private land sale contracts, in which the price was inflated and no equity was earned until the entire contract was paid off. If the family moved or missed one payment, they lost everything. A recent study of this practice in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s showed that black families lost up to $4 billion in today’s dollars.

For the first time in decades, reparations for African Americans who were victimized by the white federal and state governments are being discussed seriously. This story about whites taking black property shows how superficial, disingenuous and ahistorical are the arguments made by conservatives against reparations. When Sen. Mitch McConnell delivered his simplistic judgment last month, he was continuing the cover-up of modern white real estate theft: “I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.”

Surveys which demonstrate that the majority of white Americans are against reparations only demonstrate how ignorance of America’s modern history informs both public opinion and survey questions. Gallup asked, “Do you think the government should – or should not – make cash payments to black Americans who are descendants of slaves?” While blacks were in favor 73% to 25%, whites were opposed 81% to 16%. A different question might elicit a more useful response: Do you think the government should make cash payments to millions of black Americans whose property was stolen by whites and who were financially discriminated against by American government since World War II?

Today’s economic gap between black and white began with slavery. Emancipation freed slaves, but left them with nothing. Hundreds of millions of acres of land were given away to white families. When blacks gradually managed to get some land, it was taken by violence and legal trickery during the 20^th century. After World War II, blacks were denied access to another giant government economic program, the GI Bill, which helped millions of white veterans acquire houses. The collusion of federal, state and local governments, banks, and real estate professionals bilked African Americans of billions of dollars in real estate, with the subprime mortgage crisis only a decade ago as the latest chapter. What I have written here is only an outline of the racist narrative.

Despite the ravages of slavery, the American story would have been very different if the ideas and practices behind Lincoln’s Emancipation had been put into effect. Instead, white supremacy reemerged in the South and throughout the US. The power that white supremacists exerted in 20^th-century America is symbolized by James F. Byrnes, a South Carolina politician, who served in the House of Representatives 1911-1925, was one of the most influential Senators 1931-1941, was appointed to the Supreme Court by FDR, but then led the Office of Economic Stabilization and the Office of War Mobilization during World War II, became Secretary of State 1945-1947, and was Governor of South Carolina 1951-1955. In 1919, he offered his theory of American race relations: “This is a white man’s country, and will always remain a white man’s country.” He followed that motto throughout his career.

Our nation is still paying the price.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 30, 2019

Another Kind of Patriotism

I went to a patriotic rally on Sunday. There was a lot of talk about flags, which were shown with great reverence. Military veterans were honored as heroes, due great respect. It was colorful and loud.

The rally had nothing to do with Trump. The event was a traditional Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe or Chippewa, Pow Wow, celebrated every year at the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in northwestern Wisconsin. The Honor the Earth Homecoming Pow Wow is the opposite of the “patriotic” rallies that Trump is holding as the beginning of his re-election campaign.

On the way to the site, signs were posted along the road urging everyone to think of themselves as unique and worthy persons. Inside, the focus was entirely on the celebration of Native American traditions, wisdom, and culture, without any hint of comparison to other cultures. Members of the local tribe were joined by tribes from across the region, each of whom could sing and drum their own songs. There were no enemies, just friends.

Ojibwe veterans from all service branches were named and honored for their service to the American nation and to the Ojibwe nation. But no weapons were displayed, except ceremonial versions of traditional hunting weapons displayed by brightly costumed dancers.

Politics was conspicuously absent, as was any complaint about how the Ojibwe and all other Native Americans have been treated by white settlers who invaded the lands they lived in and took them for their own. The only historical hint I heard from the announcer, who was also broadcasting over the reservation’s radio station WOJB, was his brief mention that the Anishinaabe had been defending their land for hundreds of years, long before the appearance of whites.

The messages of the Pow Wow were clear: “We are patriots. We love our land and our unique culture. We love America and have defended it in every war. We welcome and respect all Americans.”

Donald Trump’s rally in North Carolina, and his whole constant campaign about himself, send the opposite messages. “We are patriots, better patriots than you. We love America and therefore we hate you. Hating you is true patriotism.”

I find the implicit violence of the crowd in North Carolina to be just a few steps away from the real violence of the white supremacists in Charlottesville. What if a woman in a hijab had walked in front of that crowd as they chanted “Send her back”? That is the new Republican model of patriotism.

What could love of America mean? It could be love of the land, the amazing lands of our 50 states, encompassing beautiful vistas of mountains and lakes and prairies and desert that might be unmatched anywhere else. The Ojibwe love their land as a sacred trust from previous generations, the little bit that has been left to them after centuries of white encroachment. They wish to preserve it forever.

Love of America could be allegiance to the principles at the foundation of our political system. Those principles have not been consistently followed, and a truly democratic and egalitarian nation is still a dream to be realized, rather than a reality to be defended.

It could be reverence for American history, our unique national story of the creation of a new democracy by European immigrants and the evolution of the United States toward a more perfect union by embracing the lofty principles set forth in our founding documents. That story has many dark chapters, but we could say that American history is a narrative of overcoming – the struggle to overcome regional division, racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, a struggle that may continue long into the future.

Love of America could be affection for Americans. I think of my own tendency to root for American athletes when they compete against athletes from other nations at the Olympics, the World Cup, or in tennis Grand Slams. Americans are incredibly diverse, and it is not easy to put into practice a love for all Americans, no matter ethnic, economic, educational, regional and personality differences. At the least, it should mean that one practices good will toward another American until proven wrong by inhumane behavior.

I don’t see any of these forms of love for America in contemporary conservative politics. Conservatives support digging up American land rather than preserving it and fight against every attempt to preserve clean water and air. They taunt conservation organizations who worry about global warming, deny the science of climate change, and oppose all efforts to prevent our own land and the whole globe from becoming less friendly to human habitation. The Trump campaign now sells Trump-branded plastic straws as a deliberate sneer at attempts to save ocean life from being overwhelmed by plastic. For today’s conservatives, American land is a source of financial exploitation: don’t love the land, love the money you can make from it.

Today’s conservatives, preceding and following Trump, don’t respect the democratic principles that America has at least tried to embody. From blatant gerrymandering to vote suppression to attacks on the free press to praise for dictators and criticism of foreign democracies, principles have been entirely replaced by temporary political advantage as the source of conservative action.

Conservatives hate American history, instead trying repeatedly to substitute myths for facts. They deny the historical realities of racism, the “patriotic” excesses of McCarthyism, the expropriation of Native American lands. They attack historians who simply do their job of uncovering evidence about how Americans behaved in the past, good and bad. And they celebrate some of the worst Americans: the Republican state government in Tennessee has now named July 13 as “Nathan Bedford Forrest Day”, honoring the Confederate general who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Conservatives don’t like most Americans. Again led by Trump, and operating as his megaphone, Republican politicians attack Democrats as enemies of America, despite that fact that Democrats represent the majority of American voters.

I didn’t see any Trump hats at the Ojibwe Pow Wow, and I doubt that any Native Americans cheered for Trump in North Carolina. These very different rallies represent opposing ideas about patriotism and America. In my opinion, one expresses a beautiful vision of land and people that has stood for America for hundreds of years. The other is an incoherent reverence for a cult figure of dubious value.

I never liked cults.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook, WI

July 23, 2019

What is a Concentration Camp?

A new argument has broken out over the Holocaust, or more precisely, over references to the Holocaust in contemporary life. The sequence of events is revealing about politics, but not especially reliable about history.

In response to the increasing comparison of right-wing populists in Europe and America to Nazis, last December Edna Friedberg, a historian in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education, wrote an official statement for the Museum about the dangers of Holocaust analogies. She was clear about what she condemned: “sloppy analogizing”, “grossly simplified Holocaust analogies”, “careless Holocaust analogies”. Dr. Friedberg criticized the political use by left and right of “the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel”. She urged upon everyone better history, “conducted with integrity and rigor”.

This was not controversial, but rather typical of what historians say about the much too common references to Hitler and Nazis and fascism in our political discourse.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said last month on social media that the U.S. is “running concentration camps on our southern border”. Many Jewish organizations and Holocaust institutions condemned her remarks, as well as the usual chorus of conservative politicians. Although she did not mention the Holocaust, it was assumed that she was making one of those careless analogies for political purposes.

This appears to have prompted the USHMM to issue another brief statement on June 24, that then ignited a wider controversy: “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter,” referring to Dr. Friedberg’s earlier statement.

In response, an international list of over 500 historians, many or most of whom write about the Holocaust, signed an open letter to Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the Museum, published in the New York Review of Books, urging retraction of that recent statement. They criticized the rejection of all analogies as “fundamentally ahistorical”, “a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide.” They argued that “Scholars in the humanities and social sciences rely on careful and responsible analysis, contextualization, comparison, and argumentation to answer questions about the past and the present.”

There have been many media reports about the Museum’s June statement and the historians’ letter criticizing it. But there has been no discussion of the obvious distinction between the original statement by Dr. Friedberg and the newer unsigned “official” statement. Dr. Friedberg had noted that the “current environment of rapid fire online communication” tended to encourage the “sloppy analogizing” she condemned. Ironically, the too rapid response by someone at the Museum to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks ignored the difference between bad historical analogies for political purposes and the careful use of comparisons by scholars. Now the stances of the Museum appear contradictory.

The outraged historians also ignored the difference between the two versions of Museum statements, and demanded a retraction of the recent version without reference to Dr. Friedberg’s thoughtful statement.

An easier out for the Museum is to issue one more statement affirming that Dr. Friedberg’s formulation is their official position, excusing itself for the poorly worded June statement, and thanking the historians for defending the proper context in which the Holocaust ought to be discussed and the proper means for that discussion.

Lost in this furor is the fact that Ocasio-Cortez did not make a Holocaust analogy when she referred to concentration camps. Widely accepted definitions of concentration camp are worded differently but agree in substance. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines concentration camp as: “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers some history: “a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the Boer War (1899–1902); one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939–45.” The Encyclopedia Britannica offers a similar definition: “internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order.”

Perhaps the most significant definition of the phrase “concentration camp” in this context comes from the USHMM itself, on its web page about Nazi camps: “The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. . . . What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.”

From what we have learned recently about the actual conditions in the places where asylum seekers are being held on our southern border, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term fits closely within these definitions. She is supported by people who understand the realities of concentration camp life. The Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest Asian-American civil rights group, calls the camps which the US government set up to hold Japanese American citizens “concentration camps”, and repeated that term in June 2018 to condemn the camps now used to hold asylum seekers.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez used careful and responsible analysis to make a comparison between current American policy and a century of inhumane policies by many governments against people who are considered enemies. It will take much more contextualization and argumentation to tease out the differences and similarities between all the regrettable situations in which nations have locked up entire categories of innocent people. But given the emotions which have prompted even the most thoughtful to leap to briefly expressed one-sided positions, it appears unlikely that such rational processes will determine our discourse about this important subject.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

July 16, 2019