A Liberal Dose, July 27, 2023 "The Commons Are Not Tragic"

 

A Liberal Dose

July 27, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Dispossessing the Poor, Part 8- The Commons Are Not Tragic”

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

 

I started this 9-week series by mentioning “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin. I am going to wind up with it, as well.

As a reminder, that term describes land that was set aside for the use of everyone in the village in the Middle Ages. Peasants were therefore able to supplement their farm-grown food by fishing and hunting in the forests of the commons, or foraging their livestock on the pastures of it. In the 1500s, nobles started fencing off the commons, reserving them for their own use (to make money) and denying them to the peasants, who were plunged into disaster -with those who survived forced to “learn to work harder” (from the nobles’ perspective).

Now, to me, the “tragedy” is that the commons were fenced off and the peasants were shafted… but that is not what Hardin was getting at in 1968. To him, the tragedy was that the commons were always destined to fail, in any culture, because they are unsustainable. He explained it like this: let’s say several villagers owned sheep, and they all grazed them on the commons. The commons can only support so many sheep, so it is in the best interests of the whole village for the number of sheep to be limited. But any individual herdsman is going to do the calculations in his head: too many sheep will ruin the pasture, yes, but if I get just one more sheep, to benefit myself, THAT won’t do it. Okay, maybe two sheep. Or three. The danger is that EVERY herdsman is going to think that way, and they will all be doomed. Better that they each have their own private acreage, because they will be much more likely to maintain it properly.

On the surface, that sounds like a very reasonable argument. I teach U.S. environmental history, and that argument is the very crux of the whole thing. Americans are virtually incapable of thinking in terms of the long-term good of the whole community, when there is profit to be had in the short term. This actually helped lead to the Civil War -cotton planters KNEW that they should rest their fields or they would become barren, but no one wanted to lose a potential year’s profit by doing so. Thus their fields became depleted, and they NEEDED to gain new lands, where of course they wanted to have slave labor, leading to the arguments about the spread of slavery.

But Hardin’s logic has a flaw. His argument only works with cultures that value the individual over the group, AND that place heavy value on profit. There have been cultures, in fact, where the concept of the commons worked quite well.

This includes most indigenous cultures of North America, the vast majority of whom were agricultural rather than nomadic. Each town would have a common cornfield, in which everyone would work together. At harvest-time, each family was given what it was approximated would hold them through winter. Of the remainder, part of it was sacrificed and part was put into a communal storehouse where anyone who fell short could draw from as needed. No one took more- because they had a strong sense of communal responsibility. No one accumulated extra- which prevented the development of capitalism. At the same time, it was not quite communist -there was no state that would enforce everyone’s conformity, because (ironically) Natives were both communal AND individualistic. NO ONE could order anyone else to do anything. Leaders had to PERSUADE.

Many indigenous people still have similar attitudes. They are less than 2% of the U.S. population, but they show up in huge numbers at any environmental protest. They do so with UNITY. For every action, they consider the repercussions seven generations from now.

I don’t subscribe to Adam Smith OR Karl Marx… but to Black Elk and Luther Standing Bear. I think we all should.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

  You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, November 25, 2021 "History of Voting Part 4: Native Americans"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 25, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“History of Voting, Part 4: Native Americans”

Read PART 1

Read PART 2

Read PART 3

 

As our look at the history of voting has been chronological, the next topic after last week’s discussion at the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement would be what are called “the Reconstruction Amendments.” That refers to amendments 13, 14, and 15, all passed in the first few years after the end of the Civil War. #13 ended slavery or any other form of involuntary servitude, except in prison. #14 specified that anyone born within the geographic boundaries of the U.S. was a citizen, with all the rights of any other citizen. That amendment was meant to specify that the newly-freed slaves could be citizens and vote. Finally, #15 guaranteed that no citizen could be denied their voting rights “because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Since this is Thanksgiving week, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look at what this meant for Native Americans, and save our discussion of African Americans until next week.

What did these amendments mean to Native people? Absolutely nothing. They were not considered citizens, although born in the country. They could be denied the vote because of their race or color. They were literally the only people the 14^th amendment did not apply to. Why? Because they were considered members of their tribe, which was separate from the United States even though it was physically within the United States. The government considered tribes “dependent nations” and “wards of the state.”

Think about that for a minute. Indigenous people have been called “American Indians” and “Native Americans”… but they were not considered Americans. This started to change, oddly enough, as a result of World War I.

A large number of Native Americans -including quite a few women -volunteered to serve in the U.S. military during the war. Unlike black troops of the time, or Japanese-American troops in WWII, they were not put into segregated units; they were scattered among the regular units, with the white soldiers. And there were a large number of them. In fact, in every American military conflict since WWI, Native Americans have had the highest proportional enlistment rates. The first “code talkers” were used in WWI, mostly Choctaws, while the more famous Navajo ones served in WWII. It was a way to celebrate their own military/warrior culture, and was also a way to show they were every bit as American as anybody else.

Odds are, just about every company had a few “Indians.” Their white comrades got to see that they had not become extinct, that they were patriotic, and that they were brave. When the war was over, as people learned that the Native people they had fought beside could not vote, there was an outcry. In 1919 citizenship and the vote were given to all Native war veterans. It was a start, but it was not enough. Finally, in 1924, Congress conferred full citizenship on Native American people. This happened 148 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which had called them “merciless savages.”

Just because a Native person was legally allowed to vote, though, did not mean he or she would be physically allowed to vote. In states that had large indigenous populations -in the West and in Alaska -the Native vote was suppressed for decades, in much the same way the black vote was suppressed in the South: through violence, intimidation, coercion, deception, and general chicanery.

You’ve no doubt heard of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and know that it was passed to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. What you might not know is that it was also meant to protect the voting rights of Native Americans in the West. Legislatures in some western states still pass laws specifically designed to make it harder for Natives to vote.

This Thanksgiving, think about how little honor and appreciation have been shown to the first Americans.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

A Liberal Dose, April 1, 2021 "Flags, Mascots, and Outrage: Empathy Is the Key"

 

Flags, Mascots, and Outrage: Empathy Is the Key

Troy D. Smith

I talked in this column before about the differences between liberal and conservative approaches. Liberals, I pointed out, are usually focused on changing things –from their perspective, for the better and moving toward the future. Conservatives, on the other hand, want to keep things the same or change them back to how they used to be –in effect, to “conserve” the status quo. This makes conservatives real strong on maintaining tradition. Liberals are also real big on trying to be more “tolerant, accepting of different cultures, and willing to accept new ideas and new ways of doing things.” (Yes, I just quoted myself.) There is also the difference in how the two groups think the government should spend money, but we are not going to focus on that part much this time. Instead, we are going to take a couple of examples that are in the news right now, both nationally and in the Upper Cumberland, and see how liberals and conservatives approach them and what that tells us. Spoiler alert: the key is empathy.

Recent studies indicate that the more empathetic you are, the more likely you are to lean left. Now, bear in mind, empathy is not the same thing as compassion. Conservative people can be extremely compassionate when it comes to helping people in need. Empathy has more to do with understanding how those other people feel. This comes down to the previous definition of terms. Conservatives want to preserve the status quo, and believe everyone else needs to get with that program. Liberals are more likely to value several perspectives on things rather than a straight this-is-good, that-is-bad, nothing in-between approach. One frequent by-product of this is that, as a result, Democrats have usually been more easily divided than Republicans. This is what led Will Rogers, a century ago, to say things like “Of course Democrats don’t agree with each other, if they agreed with each other they’d be Republicans” and “I am not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.”

Let’s get to our examples. The first one: athletes kneeling in protest during the National Anthem. Many conservatives go crazy over this one. I know senior citizens who are lifelong football fans who refuse to watch an NFL game because athletes are allowed to protest in this manner and still have jobs. More specifically, when black athletes and their non-black allies protest the pervasive police killings of unarmed black men. To many conservatives, this is such a profound flouting of tradition –and lack of respect for that tradition –that it is unjustifiable. They tend to see it simply as “hating America,” and not –as liberals tend to do –as a peaceful, even respectful, gesture protesting the fact that, in that specific area, America needs to be better. People incensed by kneeling have probably never read the stirring words of Frederick Douglass’s (I hear he’s doing great things) 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” They may have a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that the great (and Republican) baseball star Jackie Robinson said, in 1972, “I cannot stand and sing the anthem; I cannot salute the flag. I know I am a black man in a white world.” Never having experienced what it is like to be treated as a second-or-third-class citizen in one’s own country, white conservatives rarely seem to imagine how they would feel and how they might want to attract attention for their cause. Or, perhaps even more telling, when white conservatives feel their absolute right to exercise power and say what they want with no social consequences is being impinged, they cry to the heavens about how persecuted they are –without ever seeming to realize that other groups have suffered and are suffering far worse indignities than they are.

There were white people just as incensed, and saying many of the same things, about African Americans peacefully sitting in protest at lunch counters in the sixties. Many today are primarily angered at the “disrespect” and violation of tradition in this form of protest (kneeling). Now, we have to admit, there are a large number of white Americans today who would be incensed at any form of black protest, peaceful or not, and who are enraged at any mention of the Black Lives Matter movement. And we also have to admit to ourselves, white American neighbors, that a lot of people who have chanted “Blue Lives Matter” were among the seditious mob who tried to beat cops to death with fire extinguishers and flagpoles a couple of months ago, so there is more going on there. By more, of course, I mean blatant racism. But I know that is not true of all conservatives. So let’s look at my other example, and then tie them together.

Protesting Native American sports mascots is not a new thing, as many people seem to think. Lakota activist and future American Indian Movement spokesman Russell Means was leading protests in Cleveland against their baseball team’s name and mascot in the 1960s. Other major league sports teams were being regularly criticized by Native American organizations by the early 1970s. While many people argue that American Indian-themed school mascots are meant to honor indigenous people, most Native Americans find them to be offensive on several levels- appropriating and trivializing Native culture and identity, reinforcing insulting stereotypes, and profaning things that many Native people hold as sacred. For example –and you probably didn’t know this –the ceremonial long feathered headdresses worn by Plains tribes, and appearing on many school mascots, have a very specific meaning. It is both spiritual and social. Only certain people in a tribe earn the right to wear them, and each feather represents an act of courage or service to the community. Dancing around in one without earning it is kind of like dressing as the Pope but covered with Purple Heart medals. Which many conservative Americans would find extremely offensive.

Nothing, though, is as insulting to indigenous people than the mascot used until recently by the Washington NFL team and still used by public schools around the country. That particular word has never been considered an “honor”- dictionaries literally define it as insulting and offensive. It is a racial epithet of the sort that used to be publicly applied to various minority groups but which now get bleeped out on television (appropriately). And yet when Native individuals protest such mascots –even “the R-word” –they are frequently harassed, intimidated, and even targeted with death threats (I’ve seen it happen).

Empathy would teach you that Native Americans’ feelings on this matter are very similar to your own feelings when your treasured cultural traditions are treated in a way you find insulting. But too many people only see how things affect them or their group, without trying to imagine the feelings of the other side. I wish everyone would try an experiment for a week or so- every time you want to say “political correctness” substitute the phrase “human kindness and decency” and see how your sentences sound.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

www.troyduanesmith.com