One of the delights of reading history long after graduating from school is the discovery of the unmentioned stuff which, had you known, you might have changed your judgment about historical figures, their motivations and the things that made them do what they did.
Two examples: one concerning Lincoln and the other Hitler, two historical figures on the far ends of the spectrum of laudable to despicable.
The Lincoln story concerns the hanging of 39 Dakota Indians on December 18, 1862 in Minnesota, which remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. This incident is often cited by defenders of the Lost Cause, and by those who want to say Lincoln was no real friend of minorities--the Great Emancipator was a reluctant ally to non White races.
But, the general outline of events in Minnesota gets turned on its head, once you learn just a little bit more.
The story is that in 1862, just as the Civil War was tearing apart the nation, the Dakota Indians rampaged through white settlements, murdering women and children and raping some women. Lincoln was faced with insurrection in the South and now in the north.
Hundreds of Dakota Sioux were captured, tried and executed, their execution orders signed by Abraham Lincoln. Captured White Confederate soldiers were not executed.
For those who wish to fault Lincoln, the "trials" of these Indians were suspect: Often the process of charge, presentation of evidence and sentence occurred in minutes, not hours, and were conducted in a language the Indians did not understand.
So, there you have it: Lincoln signed on to all this and was merciless and maybe even racist.
Lincoln did harbor some of the attitudes of White men of the 19th century concerning Blacks. He remarked that "very intelligent" members of that race might be made citizens and allowed to vote, as exceptions, but later, after he had befriended Frederick Douglass, he pushed the 13th amendment which granted citizenship and the vote to all Black men--but not women.
And what of his blood lust for those Indians?
One thing about Black folks in the 1860's--most of them were not living "at large" but were imprisoned on plantations in the South, so they were under White control. Executions of Blacks tended to be singular events, with the exception of the much dreaded Black revolts.
But Indians lived in the wild, or more accurately on reservations, not under the daily control of white overseers. And just look what had happened under that system, the White military authorities said.
The Indians, it has come to light, were not just randomly doing the primitive savage thing--they were starving on reservations, having been promised delivery of food by the United States government, but that food never was delivered and the braves and warriors were seeing their women and children starve. So they were, one might say, provoked. Provocation does not justify murder and rape, but there is that context.
So, the numbers vary, but somewhere between 260 and 303 Indian warriors were captured and the plan was to hang every last one of them. But Lincoln intervened. Having ridden the circuit as a lawyer in his youth, Lincoln was adamant these Indians be tried as individuals, and that the records of those trials be sent as files to the White House, where he reviewed every single one of them, and he rejected the verdicts in all but 39, whose execution orders he signed.
The choice he was presented by the Minnesota authorities: "Either you allow us to hang at least some of them, or we hang them all." He chose the lesser of two evils.
Then there is Hitler and the Anschluss. "Anschluss" means "connection," or "Union." In 1938, Hitler, who was born in Austria, claimed that German speaking people in Austria were being mistreated. Of course, he didn't put it that way--these were not just German speaking people, but Aryan people of the German race, living among lower forms of humanity of Slavic origins, or worse yet, Jews. Vienna was the ultimate in polyglot, with Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Romanians and even people like Sigmund Freud, Jewish living side by side. All this racial mixing was intolerable. Good, racially pure Aryans having their racial purity poisoned.
The way this story was taught in my American schools is Hitler simply used the story of abuse of people of German ancestry as an excuse to invade and annex Austria, as he picked off various countries on his borders to establish a German, White, Aryan empire.
But as Mark Mazower notes in Dark Continent, this was just one small piece in a vastly more complicated quilt of events, cultural upheaval and post World War One carnage, chaos and restructuring in Europe.
The idea of a "nation" before World War I was a very different thing than what happened afterwards, after the Allies imposed the treaty of Versailles on the Germans. Before that war, Europe was almost entirely kingdoms, monarchies--except for Britain, a constitutional monarchy and France. When Wilson swept in, with his grand imaginings of nation states where the people within certain geographic borders would bind together in bonds forged by lines on a map and "self determination," the world so constructed in the minds of the diplomats had little connection to the people on the ground.
In the kingdom of Austria-Hungary, you were a subject and you belonged as a true Austrian, as long as you swore fealty to the Emperor, so you could be a Jew or a Hungarian or a French speaker or a Czech and you were in. But after the restructuring, whole groups were suddenly rendered stateless--Slavs, Jews, Roma, you name it.
The solution of finding yourself excluded as a foreigner in your ancestral home was, briefly, to simply get on a boat and immigrate to America, where you might not speak the language, but at least the streets were paved with gold and your children would have a better life.
The problem was, as President Wilson's advisors had warned him, with National citizenship in flux, the idea of "race" became ascendant, and the Harvard crowd, among others, fastened on eugenics and "The Passing of the Great Race" and even Teddy Roosevelt said admitting all these Jews and southern Europeans from Sicily, Greece, the Balkans, Russia was "racial suicide" for the United States and Congress in 1924 threw up the first barriers to immigration since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
So, the way out of Europe was blocked, just as the way out of Africa and "shithole nations" is now blocked by European nations, whose wealth and relative safety is a strong magnet to the residents of failing African and near Eastern nations now.
So when Hitler sought to annex Austria, the fact is the majority of Austrians, who spoke German, were only too happy, and the German troops marching across the borders where met as liberators, with flowers.
When Hitler was confronted about rounding up Jews and forcibly removing them from their homes in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and France he replied, "Well, nobody wants them. Look at the United States. They complain about my treatment of the Jews, but they reject them just as completely."
And he wasn't wrong about that. Even with FDR in the White House, famously boatloads of Jews arrived at American ports and were sent back to Germany, where Hitler's solution to what to do with these "undesirables" was concentration camps, and ultimately, death camps.
Which is not to say Hitler was anything more than a murderous dictator, but it is to say that he had a point: The nations who refused to take in these rejected "races" were complicit in the mass deaths of these peoples.
At the Nuremberg trials when Nazi doctors were tried for sterilizing Jews, and people judge to be mentally deficient they cited Oliver Wendell Holmes, of the Supreme Court of the United States, who ruled in the Buck v Bell case that a woman judged to be mentally deficient could lawfully be sterilized because, as he so memorably put it, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
So, does this additional information change our view of Hitler? Not at all.
But it might suggest that Hitler was not as much an aberration as we would like to think. The American Army was segregated, and fights between Black and White troops regularly broke out in England as the buildup to the invasion of Europe developed. There were bars for White soldiers and bars for Black soldiers. There were Black airmen flying in Black squadrons. There were water fountains for Blacks and water fountains for whites and even in 1967, as Mad Dog well remembers, when a Black boy was brought to the community swimming pool by a white friend, the manager of the pool got phone calls from people who wanted to know when he was planning to drain the pool and refill it, after the Black boy had swum in it.
The more information you get, the murkier the history gets.
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