One Early-American View of Trump-Right
I am troubled by the revisionist American climate created by the Trump presidency. I find his constituency’s presentations of America and Americans to be quite different from my family’s own experience, which is this:
I grew up in the Central Valley in the middle of the last century. I came of age picking peaches as a 15 year old. Others told me that working with the Mexicans was dangerous, but I wanted to make extra money. This was an epiphany for me as I found them to be the most hard-working, God-fearing, food sharing, humor-loving people I’d ever met. I learned to love being in the homes of 2nd generation Mexican-American families, who were always glad to see us, and had such pure Christian values. I never forgot this and now blanch when Mexican immigrants are demonized. After a career in Ag and Construction related endeavors, just try and get food produced or things built without Mexican immigrants in California, it won’t happen. Of course there may be a few bad apples, but this problem would seem to be easily fixed. How ungrateful of us U.S. citizens to bite the hand that feeds us, how lucky we are to have such willing (and loyal) Catholics nearby willing to work for us, while immigrant labor in Europe is sometimes less loyal and less Christian.
My father’s bomber went down in WW II and he and another were the only survivors of 11, sent to Stalag Luft III (the “Great Escape” prison camp). The day he was shot down, his bomber squadron was escorted by the “Red Tail” fighters, the African-American Tuskegee Airmen. He never forgot their acts of bravery and his first Veterinary hire was a Sikh man from Tuskegee (I guess Sikh immigrants couldn’t go to white veterinary schools back in the day). This man became like a 2nd father to me. My father was one of the first to rent housing to African-Americans in our central valley town. He’d take us to the far-off “Emerald City” of San Francisco to see larger than life heroes such as Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Nate Thurmond, who I thought were part of some super race. This was a sort of primitive education in Civil Rights for us, as our heroes always seemed so reliably great and gracious. Later, when I learned about racial prejudice, my young mind was in disbelief, asking “how could such wonderful people not be loved?” Witnessing the non-violent movements of MLK and Nelson Mandela later, I was reminded that black people pretty much lived their Bible better than whites, especially the concepts of pacifism, forgiveness, and redemption. Meanwhile, many white Christians behaved in an abusive and arrogant fashion, embarrassing and offending the better half of us. Unfortunately this hasn’t changed much.
My father’s own family was among the first American families, many of whom founded the religiously tolerant state of Rhode Island, and later became Vermont Green Mountain Boys prominent in the Revolution. We are descended at least three times over from Roger Williams, who was a great friend to the American Indians, insisting that they be paid market-value for their land. Williams started the New England Baptist Church, with premises of religious freedom, anti-slavery, and separation of church and state. Rhode Island became a sanctuary for religious dissenters, Jews and Freemasons who were not welcome in other States. Many of William’s ideas were the basis for our Nation’s First Amendment, yes the same First Amendment that Trump-ites are trying to distort to suit greedy corporations and conspiracy theorists who wish to compromise democracy and bankrupt the taxpayers.
My father’s great-great-grandfather helped run the New York underground railroad for runaway slaves. My eight great-grandfathers fought for the Union Army, six were at Antietam and Gettysburg, two at Andersonville Prison in SC. Their churches believed that slavery was immoral, unlike the Southern Baptist churches that justified slavery. They fought (and some died) as Lincoln Republicans dedicated to freeing the slaves. What on earth happened to the Republican Party? Roger Williams would have been horrified at the South and its shameless hijacking of the GOP. Some modern day people thrill to the supposed swashbuckling dash of the Confederate Army, but the reality was that they gained much of their wealth stealing land from the Cherokees and Seminoles and on the backs of slave labor, and had intentions of carving up Latin America into slave states. The modern-day Evangelical movement harkens back to Southern Baptist churches who sanctioned this behavior. This movement now creates its own mysticism, like the earth being 10,000 yrs old (not explicitly in the Bible and basically a human interpretation for anti-science expediency) and the degradation of our environment (does the Bible not teach us to protect God’s green earth?).
My father was held prisoner for a time in Hungary, with Jewish prisoners who were hauled off to be shot the next day. He was freed by General Patton, at a location near Dachau. Try telling those 100,000 GIs freed that day that there was no Holocaust. Try it and you’d likely get a 100-yr old knuckle sandwich. Those GIs fought and died to free those prisoners, and the only reason that cowards and demagogues can even come close to getting away with those statements is that those noble World War II veterans are dying off.
I am proud to merge our family’s early-American values with American immigrants with similar values. I married a woman (now deceased) who was the grand-daughter of Spanish Loyalists fighting Franco and Filipino-Hawaiian sugar-cane workers. My fiancé is the granddaughter of Armenians orphaned in the Turkish Genocide.
You see, our family never forgot that we are immigrants too, and that the most worthy citizens are those that work for it, regardless of their background. Our God is a God of tolerance, peace, and virtue, not gun-toting bigotry and materialistic pollution. Read James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Pioneers”, written in 1823 about the settlement of Cooperstown (which my ancestors helped settle). Then you will realize that this book is essentially an environmental treatise, begging the new settlers to respect Nature in the tradition of “The Deerslayer” (Natty Bumpo) and Native Americans. Republican revisionists have tried to make the founding fathers into heavily-armed, righteous Evangelicals, but they were more accurately science-minded Freemasons (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Daniel Boone, and Abraham Lincoln were Freemasons…do you see a pattern here?) with financing and fighting from patriotic Jews (Haym Solomon and Mordecai Sheftali among others). Of course Evangelicals through the ages have made up dark conspiracy theories involving Jews and Freemasons. Why? Basically because they are jealous of their incredible success in building functional societies, and their mastery of all that is revealing and rational, in the tradition of Socrates. We of true early American ancestry are not bigots, but more stewards of the founding father ethic that America is opportunity for all, and we have spilled blood in every war (from the Pequot War of 1636 and King Philips War of 1676 to Vietnam) to back up these beliefs. To my knowledge, not a one of us ever got a 4F designation for bone-spurs.
Mr. Trump, do you want a taste of your own medicine? Your people, the Germans and Dutch, helped sell the Indians guns, booze, and infected blankets in the 1600s. They helped broker the evil slave trade from the 1600s to 1800s. Then many German-Americans sided with the British in the Revolution. Your own people got here in the early 1900s and immediately became racists and opportunistic grifters, seeking to cheat or exploit less fortunate people, and of course your cousins in the Fatherland killed over 6 million Jews, among many other crimes against humanity. How a womanizing reality show brat like you, using the Devil’s methods, got elected by a bunch of self-righteous Southern Evangelicals I’ll never really understand, but suffice it to say some of our churches and the Republican party must obviously need a major overhaul. Why don’t your people go back to where they came from?
Enjoy these other Vern Scott articles regarding ironic American History!
