The Try-Works

As anyone who’s turned on a television or radio in the past week knows, there’s a huge brouhaha boiling over jazz singer, Rene Marie’s choice to sing the so-called Black National Anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” instead of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Denver Mayor’s address to the city last week.  Ms. Marie has since enjoyed the kind of racial invective usually reserved for American Indians in our fair cowtown, prompting moral morons Mayor Hickenlooper and Governor Ritter to publicly condemn her.

After a day of measured responses, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper on Wednesday issued a sharply worded rebuke of a singer who replaced the words of the national anthem with lyrics from another song before a Hickenlooper speech.

Reading from a prepared statement beneath gathering afternoon clouds on the steps of the City and County Building, a visibly angry Hickenlooper said the singer’s actions overshadowed what he wanted to convey in his Tuesday morning speech.

The annual state of the city address is the mayor’s biggest speech of the year and sets the agenda for the course of city government in the coming year.

“No one paid attention to that speech,” said Hickenlooper, who said that he had spent at least 72 hours preparing
the speech and that his staff had spent weeks preparing for the event.

Instead, the mayor said, his office had been deluged with angry telephone calls and e-mails. At least 80 people had expressed displeasure Wednesday with Rene Marie’s song choice Tuesday.

The local jazz singer and actress, who had been invited to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner,” instead sang a song recalling the life-threatening conditions slaves were forced to endure in the 19th century called “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The song, which Marie sang to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is also called the “black national anthem.”

. . .

Other politicians also were weighing in. Speaking during his monthly appearance on the “Mike Rosen Show” on 850 KOA on Wednesday, Gov. Bill Ritter said the performance had been “inappropriate.”

“If you invite someone to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at an event, you invite them to do just that,” Ritter said.

“The problem here is she was invited to do one thing, and she chose to do another thing,” Ritter said.

“It’s a fair interpretation to say it’s disrespectful.”

The mayor had used much milder language the day of his speech. He said then that Marie had apologized and told him she meant no disrespect.

On Wednesday, he said he had grown angrier after watching televised interviews of the singer. It became clear, he said, that she “was making a political statement.”

He said that while he thinks the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” are beautiful, it wasn’t appropriate to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” during an official city function.

“‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is sacred, one of our most beloved traditions,” the mayor said.

Keep reading.

One of our “most beloved traditions” you say?  Well, maybe, but sure as hell not one of mine.  See, unlike the geniuses inhabiting our City and State office buildings, I know something about the history of “The Star Spangled Banner’s” adoption as the national anthem.  After all, the key proponents were none other than two of my favorite exterminationist confidence men, Buffalo Bill Cody and Theodore Roosevelt.

Cody, the most dedicated mover, played the tune for some thirty years to kick off his Wild West, an outdoor drama which began as a series of corny New York plays about himself, based on dime novel fantasies penned by the likes of Prentiss Ingraham, and grew into a global phenomenon.

Buffalo Bill never let his Wild West be called the Wild West Show, insisting the that what was being presented was no mere representation of the Wild West, but the Wild West itself.  And, in at least one regard, Cody was correct to insist on its authenticity: the show presented the march of Manifest Destiny as the historical inevitability which has formed the core of American Indian-Hating and Empire-Building ever since.  The spectacle opened with the forest primeval, complete with savages skulking through the underbrush, and led the viewer through the so-called civilization of America, depicting, as Richard Slotkin put it in Gunfighter Nation, “the struggle between Red Man and White on the American frontier [as] the archetype and precedent for the world-wide struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘savage’ or ‘regressive’ races that shaped the modern world.”

Or, as Cody put it in the Wild West’s handbill:

The central figure in these pictures is that of THE HON. W.F. CODY (Buffalo Bill), to whose sagacity, skill, energy, and courage . . . the settlers of the West owe so much for the reclamation of the prairie from the savage Indian and wild animals, who so long opposed the march of civilization.

Although one has to wonder at the logical contortions inherent to any claim of an Anglo-American right to “reclaim” the prairie from its original inhabitants, the handbill couldn’t be clearer about the racist assumptions of this particular confidence game.  Unlike the later softening of the winning of the American West that has come with more politically correct sensibilities, Cody’s Wild West wasn’t a place of cultural exchange, where Indians simply vanished before the oncoming civilization; it was unabashed in its worship of the cult of extermination.

Not that, for all his insistence on historical accuracy, Cody was particularly vested in the principle.  He was a confidence man.  My favorite example of Cody’s chicanery comes with George Armstrong Custer’s etiquette lesson at Greasy Grass.  At the time, Buffalo Bill was nominally employed as a scout for the 5th Cavalry, taking a break from his career of play-acting himself in an attempt to bolster his authenticity.  Hence, a few weeks after Custer’s defeat, the 5th Cavalry scouts, led by Cody, hunted down a party of Cheyenne who had nothing to do with Custer’s defeat, and butchered them.  Cody then scalped one of the corpses and proclaimed it the “first scalp for Custer.”

As Richard Slotkin notes, again in Gunfighter Nation, this incident became “the core of the Buffalo Bill legend, and the basis for his national celebrity.  Before the year was over he would be hailed as the man who took the first scalp for Custer,” and in only a few months time, Cody had already translated the skirmish into a play entitled The Red Right Hand; Or, The First Scalp for Custer.  In the play, Cody’s battle with the Cheyenne warrior, Yellow Hand, mutated into a hand-to-hand duel, with Cody holding the scalp above his head and shouting the line, “The First Scalp for Custer!”  Yellow Hand himself was transformed into a prominent Cheyenne war-chief, who had been present at the Little Big Horn.

Even better, it seems that Buffalo Bill anticipated the massacre by donning a black and scarlet velvet Vaquero outfit on the morning of the murder in lieu of his usual buckskins, allowing him to later stand on stage in the East, declaring truthfully that he stood before the audience in the very garb he was wearing when he took the first scalp for Custer.

Nor was that the end of it.  Yellow Hand’s scalp was displayed on advertisements for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for the entirety of its run, and Buffalo Bill himself played Custer in the culmination to his show for decades.

In fact, besides “The Star Spangled Banner”, the murdered Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hand’s scalp was the most consistent feature of the Wild West.

There’s a continuity there that one really needn’t bother remark on.

So how’s about Roosevelt?  Well, Roosevelt is widely understood as having inaugurated the movement which led to “The Star Spangled Banner’s” becoming the national anthem.  And he fell in love with it at Cody’s Wild West.  He was generally impressed with the historical lesson Cody provided, but was particularly moved by the swell of feeling given him and the audience by the playing of the song.  So moved, that he had his volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders — who took their name from a portion of Cody’s Wild West entitled “The Congress of the Rough Riders of the World” — play the tune when they hoisted the first American flag in Cuba.

And it gets better.  See, when Roosevelt returned, Cody replaced the closing act of his Wild West, wherein he played a courageous General George Armstrong Custer, with a reenactment of the Battle of San Juan Hill, wherein he played a courageous Teddy Roosevelt, leading his Rough Riders in their famous charge.  (A famous charge which, it’s worth remembering, was essentially a mop-up operation, as a black cavalry regiment had already taken care of most of the combat.)

Cody understood what Roosevelt understood, and that was that the invasion of Cuba was US Indian policy on the road.  It was, and is, the kind of militaristic racial expansionism which they both recognized in “The Star Spangled Banner”.

Am I being too hard on Roosevelt, calling him an exterminationist and a racial expansionist?

Well, don’t take my word for it.  Following are some quotes from his four-volume Indian-killing, expansionist epic, The Winning of the West (which was plagiarized by no less a racial expansionist than Adolf Hitler):

During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance . . . There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion — as distinguished from mere conquest, — but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid.

. . .

Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghanies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of savages, war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and had we refrained from encroaching on the Indians’ lands, the war would have come nevertheless, for then the Indians themselves would have encroached on ours.

. . .

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.

. . .

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.

. . .

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

. . .

Yet the very causes which render this struggle between savagery and the rough front rank of civilization so vast and elemental in its consequence to the future of the world, also tend to render it in certain ways peculiarly revolting and barbarous. It is primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and of iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality. The armies are neither led by trained officers nor made up of regular troops–they are composed of armed settlers, fierce and wayward men, whose ungovernable passions are unrestrained by discipline, who have many grievous wrongs to redress, and who look on their enemies with a mixture of contempt and loathing, of dread and intense hatred. When the clash comes between these men and their somber foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of indescribable horror. It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.

. . .

Yet in its results, and viewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind. It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable. Huge tomes might be filled with arguments as to the morality or immorality of such conquests. But these arguments appeal chiefly to the cultivated men in highly civilized communities who have neither the wish nor the power to lead warlike expeditions into savage lands. Such conquests are commonly undertaken by those reckless and daring adventurers who shape and guide each race’s territorial growth. They are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with a weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.

Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples. It is useless to try to generalize about conquests simply as such in the abstract; each case or set of cases must be judged by itself. The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar. This is true generally of the victories of barbarians of low racial characteristics over gentler, more moral, and more refined peoples, even though these people have, to their shame and discredit, lost the vigorous fighting virtues. Yet it remains no less true that the world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should of necessity be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people. That they are in truth birth-pangs does not lessen the grim and hopeless woe of the race supplanted; of the race outworn or overthrown. The wrongs done and suffered cannot be blinked. Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has been achieved.

Sigh, nothing like reading Teddy to get that old Teutonic blood flowing.  Gee, wonder why people of color might feel a tad bit, shall we say, alienated by that kind of horseshit?

Anyway, to be honest, my opposition to “The Star Spangled Banner” has very little to do with Cody or Roosevelt.  It has to do with it being a monstrously stupid piece of hammer-rhyme hackwork.

But, that aside, there’s something particularly fucking repellent about all those talk-show clones on the local channels getting worked up about Rene Marie’s statement that she never felt “The Star Spangled Banner” applied to her.

I don’t think the song in itself is racist — just fucking awful — but, in the same way that there are survivors of Nazi concentration camps who’d rather not listen to Wagner, one can certainly understand Ms. Marie’s desire to sing something else.

Most of you will recall that I’m an avid T. Roosevelt hater. I’ve often stated that his weird brand of metaphysical racialism, combined with his extermination and expansionist rhetoric, would not be out of place in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. So, since Mr. Martin seems to be calling Ward Churchill a liar for pointing out that Adolf Hitler notes America’s racial expansionism as part of his own model, I thought I’d offer up the following.

Adolf Hitler’s abridged version in Mein Kampf:

In North America, where the population is prevalently Teutonic, and where those elements intermingled with the inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America. In these latter countries the immigrants–who mainly belonged to the Latin races–mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.

T. Roosevelt’s expanded version which sets the tone for his entire Western expansion epic — of which I’ve read all four volumes, God help me — in The Winning of the West, Volume One:

After the great Teutonic wanderings were over, there came a long lull, until, with the discovery of America, a new period of even vaster race expansion began. During this lull the nations of Europe took on their present shapes. Indeed, the so-called Latin nations–the French and Spaniards, for instance–may be said to have been born after the first set of migrations ceased. Their national history, as such, does not really begin until about that time, whereas that of the Germanic peoples stretches back unbroken to the days when we first hear of their existence. It would be hard to say which one of half a dozen races that existed in Europe during the early centuries of the present era should be considered as especially the ancestor of the modern Frenchman or Spaniard. When the Romans conquered Gaul and Iberia they did not in any place drive out the ancient owners of the soil; they simply Romanized them, and left them as the base of the population. By the Frankish and Visigothic invasions another strain of blood was added, to be speedily absorbed; while the invaders took the language of the conquered people, and established themselves as the ruling class. Thus the modern nations who sprang from this mixture derive portions of their governmental system and general policy from one race, most of their blood from another, and their language, law, and culture from a third.

. . .

It is of vital importance to remember that the English and Spanish conquests in America differed from each other very much as did the original conquests which gave rise to the English and the Spanish nations. The English had exterminated or assimilated the Celts of Britain, and they substantially repeated the process with the Indians of America; although of course in America there was very little, instead of very much, assimilation. The Germanic strain is dominant in the blood of the average Englishman, exactly as the English strain is dominant in the blood of the average American. Twice a portion of the race has shifted its home, in each case undergoing a marked change, due both to outside influence and to internal development; but in the main retaining, especially in the last instance, the general race characteristics

What I find particularly interesting is Roosevelt’s entirely insane notion of blood purity. It is inseparable from Hitler’s.  I have a hard time believing Hitler had not read Roosevelt, and to a large degree, internalized the metaphysical racialism inherent to lebensraumpolitik.

And more food for thought: Hitler and Roosevelt shared points of inspiration, both being avid devourers of the Western romances which exemplified their shared racial vision. (Quotes from Hitler and His Secret Partners, lifted from Blue Corn Comics.)

Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.

He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government’s forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large ‘reservation’ in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.

. . .

Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said: “For them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we’ll obtain no sympathy…There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.” Having been a devoted reader of Karl May’s books on the American West as a youth, Hitler frequently referred to the Russians as “Redskins.” He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or “Redskins.” “I don’t see why,” he said, “a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.”

I’ve read more Theodore Roosevelt than anyone I know. That’s not to brag, it’s just to give some indication of my obsession. I endured Rough Riders and I even managed to crawl through the horrifically insipid Hero Tales from American History. I’ve laughed through his horseshit outdoor escapades, I’ve suffered through his purple prose, and not too long ago I finally knocked out all four-volumes of The Winning of the West, something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while.

Roosevelt’s the purest confidence man as Indian-hater. A myopic, asthmatic, upper-crust, paunchy goon who re-envisioned himself as a frontiersman, and somehow carried it off in the popular imagination, creating an entire historical/scientific mythology to cement his role. It’s the most Herculean feat of self-invention in human history, and all the more so because it’s so easy to deconstruct. His biography borders on the ludicrous, every quality he wanted to emulate being transmuted into the palest imitation of itself.

He was a dilettante who only delved into the wilderness when surrounded by competent guides to keep him from killing himself.  His life had no more relation to his frontiersman heroes than the average National Guard member has to John J. Rambo. But he constructed a masterful simulacra, right down to his co-founding of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, a conservation club for paunchy gentleman hunters. Its membership included his good buddies Fredric Remington, Owen Wister, the anthropologist George Bird Grinnell and conservationist Gifford Pinchot, whom were kind enough to help launch the American Museum of Natural History. Their primary concern, however, was to foster hunting to produce “vigorous and masterful people” possessing the qualities of “energy, resolution, manliness, self-reliance, and a capacity for self-help “. . . without which no race can do its life work well.”

Which all makes sense, given his historical model: a terrifying mish-mash of racial expansionism and extermination rhetoric. And The Winning of the West doesn’t disappoint. There were times I found myself in awe of Roosevelt’s genocidal fervor.

But, hell, read for yourself.

[Our American forefathers] also, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose shortsighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land. Throughout the continent we therefore find the white, red, and black races in every stage of purity and intermixture. One result of this great turmoil of conquest and immigration has been that, in certain parts of America, the lines of cleavage of race are so far from coinciding with the lines of cleavage of speech that they run at right angles to them — as in the four communities of Ontario, Quebec, Havti, and Jamaica.

. . .

The English had exterminated or assimilated the Celts of Britain, and they substantially repeated the process with the Indians of America; although of course in America there was very little, instead of very much, assimilation. The Germanic strain is dominant in the blood of the average Englishman, exactly as the English strain is dominant in the blood of the average American. Twice a portion of the race has shifted its home, in each case undergoing a marked change, due both to outside influence and to internal development; but in the main retaining, especially in the last instance, the general race characteristics.

. . .

Thus the modern [Latin] nations who sprang from this mixture derive portions of their governmental system and general policy from one race, most of their blood from another, and their language, law, and culture from a third . . . The English race, on the contrary, has a perfectly continuous history.

. . .

During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance . . . There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion — as distinguished from mere conquest, — but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid.

. . .

Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghanies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of savages, war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and had we refrained from encroaching on the Indians’ lands, the war would have come nevertheless, for then the Indians themselves would have encroached on ours.

. . .

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.

. . .

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.

. . .

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

. . .

Yet the very causes which render this struggle between savagery and the rough front rank of civilization so vast and elemental in its consequence to the future of the world, also tend to render it in certain ways peculiarly revolting and barbarous. It is primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and of iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality. The armies are neither led by trained officers nor made up of regular troops–they are composed of armed settlers, fierce and wayward men, whose ungovernable passions are unrestrained by discipline, who have many grievous wrongs to redress, and who look on their enemies with a mixture of contempt and loathing, of dread and intense hatred. When the clash comes between these men and their somber foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of indescribable horror. It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.

. . .

Yet in its results, and viewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind. It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable. Huge tomes might be filled with arguments as to the morality or immorality of such conquests. But these arguments appeal chiefly to the cultivated men in highly civilized communities who have neither the wish nor the power to lead warlike expeditions into savage lands. Such conquests are commonly undertaken by those reckless and daring adventurers who shape and guide each race’s territorial growth. They are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with a weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.

Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples. It is useless to try to generalize about conquests simply as such in the abstract; each case or set of cases must be judged by itself. The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar. This is true generally of the victories of barbarians of low racial characteristics over gentler, more moral, and more refined peoples, even though these people have, to their shame and discredit, lost the vigorous fighting virtues. Yet it remains no less true that the world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should of necessity be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people. That they are in truth birth-pangs does not lessen the grim and hopeless woe of the race supplanted; of the race outworn or overthrown. The wrongs done and suffered cannot be blinked. Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has been achieved.

Also, see this post on Adolf Hitler’s cribbing Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West and this one on Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill, and the “Star-Spangled Banner”.

Update: Thanks, Rocketeer.

Bully - Martin Espada

In the school auditorium,
the Theodore Roosevelt statue
is nostalgic
for the Spanish-American war
each fist lonely for a saber,
or the reins of anguish-eyed horses,
or a podium to clatter with speeches
glorying in the malaria of conquest.

But now the Roosevelt school
is pronounced Hernandez.
Puerto Rico has invaded Roosevelt
with its army of Spanish-singing children
in the hallways,
brown children devouring
the stockpiles of the cafeteria,
children painting Taino ancestors
that leap naked across murals.

Roosevelt is surrounded
by all the faces
he ever shoved in eugenic spite
and cursed as mongrels, skin of one race,
hair and cheekbones of another.

Once Marines tramped
from the newsreel of his imagination;
now children plot to spray graffiti
in parrot-brilliant colors
across the Victorian mustache
and monocle.

Update II: Since we’re feeling poetic, this one from a Nicaraguan poet, after Roosevelt’s infamously imperial corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Told you I was obsessed.

“To Roosevelt” - Rubén Darío

The voice that would reach you, Hunter, must speak
in Biblical tones, or in the poetry of Walt Whitman.
You are active and modern, simple and complex;
you are one part George Washington and one part Nimrod.
You are the United States, future invader of our naive America
with its Indian blood, an America
that still prays to Christ and still speaks Spanish.
You are a strong, proud model of your race;
you are cultured and able; you oppose Tolstoy.
You are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar,
breaking horses and murdering tigers.
(You are a Professor of Energy,
as the current lunatics say).
You think that life is a fire, that progress is an eruption.
that the future is wherever
your bullet strikes.

No.

The United States is grand and powerful.
Whenever it trembles, a profound shudder
runs down the enormous backbone of the Andes.
If it shouts, the sound is like the roar of a lion.
And Hugo said to Grant: “The stars are yours.”
(The dawning sun of the Argentine barely shines; the star of Chile is rising … )
A wealthy country, joining the cult of Mammon to the cult of Hercules;
while Liberty, lighting the path
to easy conquest, raises her torch in New York.
But our own America, which has had poets
since the ancient times of Nezahualcoyotl;
which preserved the footprints of great Bacchus,
and learned the Panic alphabet once,
and consulted the stars; which also knew Atlantis
(whose name comes ringing down to us in Plato)
and has lived, since the earliest moments of its life,
in light, in fire, in fragrance, and in love
the America of Moctezuma and Atahualpa,
the aromatic America of Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America where noble Cuauhtemoc said:
“I am not on a bed of roses”-our America,
trembling with hurricanes, trembling with Love:
0 men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,
our America lives. And dreams. And loves.
And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful.
Long live Spanish America!
A thousand cubs of the Spanish lion are roaming free.
Roosevelt, you must become, by God’s own will,
the deadly Rifleman and the dreadful Hunter,
before you can clutch us in your iron claws.
And though you have everything, you are lacking one thing:
God!

Update III: The Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It ought to ring familiar.

It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.