AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
So, the United States, at the cost of more than 620,000 lives and the destruction of several southern cities, has established itself as a non-slave nation. Your elementary school history books will tell you the North won the Civil War. I’m not so sure.
The only leader executed for his role in the Civil War was President Abraham Lincoln. And for the next hundred years, the South legislated against and terrorized Black people, largely keeping the mass of them in perpetual poverty and political impotence. Southern segregationists would wield outsized power in the US Senate and House even if no southerner was elected president until Jimmy Carter in 1976. The likes of Dick Russell of Georgia, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and James O. Eastland of Mississippi, by their antediluvian, regressive, racist votes and pronouncements, wouild have made Reinhard Heydrich grin. George Wallace would become one of the most successful third party candidates for president in American history. He crowed while Alabama’s governor, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and rode that sentiment into 10 million votes, or 13.5 percent of the total in 1968.
To this day, people in both the South and the North wave Confederate flags.
The 75 million or so people who voted for Donald J. Trump for president three times expressed contempt, either intentionally or not, for every step forward in race relations in the United States since 1865.
Barack Obama, whose father was Black, served two terms as President of the United States but his presence in the White House ignited the basest, most hate-filled reaction imaginable over the next ten years and into the foreseeable future.
Barack Obama
Yes, the surrender of the Confederate States of America signaled the end of slavery in the United States, but that’s all. Black people have been relegated to a secondary status in this country ever since, just as millions of pariahs would have been had Nazi Germany had its way. Perhaps the best thing I can say about race relations in the US since the Civil War is the authorities never really engaged in a systematic, institutionalized genocide of Black people, although tons of individuals did their damnedest to bring that about.
The last significant Confederate force to capitulate signed its cease-fire on June 23, 1865, more than two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender. The commander of that last southern army was Gen. Stand Watie of the First Indian Brigade of the Trans-Mississippi. He was a native Cherokee who, understandably, held no affection for the United States government even though by the end of the war most Cherokees had aligned with the North.
Stand Watie
Where, then, did the United States head once the minimum good, the end of slavery, had been accomplished? Believe it ir not. America almost immediately plunged into an era that threatened not just a race of people, but the entirety of humanity.
On October 26, 1865, just six months after the Civil War had effectively come to an end, a fellow named John D. Rockefeller began formalizing a business partnership that would eventually become Standard Oil of Ohio. That company and its progeny would steer the nascent petroleum and subsequent automobile, airplane, and god-knows-whatever-other internal combustion engine industries over the next 160-plus years. Rockefeller would become, some argue, the richest man in the world. The oil industry would become the single most important driver of global economics and geo-political relations by the middle of the 20th century.
The burning of oil to power engines, warm and light our homes, run our power grid, and otherwise make modern life possible, would profoundly affect the composition of the atmosphere of the entire planet, not to mention spark countless wars over territory, control, and transportation of petroleum-based stuff.
Millions of people have died in clashes to challenge or prop up the global oil industry. As dramatic as that number sounds, it pales in comparison to the number of potential deaths as global warming and climate change foul our air, raise our sea levels, create extreme weather, force environmental migration, and more over the next few decades.
John D. Rockefeller
For the last century and a half, Rockefeller largely has been portrayed as a great American hero. Whoever among us remains in the next century and a half surely will view him as perhaps humanity’s greatest supervillain.
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