America the Obstructed

Timothy Egan on Lincoln:

Now think of the legacy on this anniversary of the American passion play. Think of free land for the landless, the transcontinental railroad, the seeding of what would grow into national parks, the granting of human rights to people who had none. …

… But beyond: Could the Republicans who control Congress in 2015, the party of no, ever pass a Homestead Act? That law, which went into effect the very day, Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln’s wartime executive order to free slaves in the breakaway states did, carries a clause that very few Republicans would support now.

Former slaves, “famine Irish,” Russian Jews, single women, Mexicans who didn’t speak a word of English — all qualified to claim 160 acres as their own. You didn’t have to be a citizen to get your quarter-square-mile. You just had to intend to become a citizen.

In that sense, the Homestead Act was the Dream Act of today. It had a path to citizenship and prosperity for those in this country who were neither citizens nor prosperous.

Consider the vision to stitch a railroad from east to west, an enormous tangle of infrastructure. In 1862, Lincoln signed legislation spurring construction of the transcontinental railroad. That same year, he approved a bill that led to the creation of land grant colleges.

And so on. He also signed a bill that allowed California to protect the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant Sequoias from being developed by private enterprise. President Ulysses S. Grant would later make Yosemite Yellowstone the first National Park in the history of the world.

All these things were essential to building the United States into the economoic powerhouse it would become in the 20th century. And Egan’s point is that today’s Republican Party would have just obstructed all of it.

Today, Congress will not even approve enough money to keep decrepit bridges from falling down, and has whittled away funds to help working kids stay in college. It’s laughable to think of Republicans’ approving of something visionary and forward-looking in the realm of transportation, energy or education. Government, in their minds, can never be a force for good.

And then there’s this:

The great, nation-shaping accomplishments of Lincoln’s day happened only because the South, always with an eye on protecting slavery and an estate-owning aristocracy, had left the union — ridding Congress of the naysayers.

There’s a lot of truth in that. The 19th century Democratic Party was anti-progressive. They not only favored slavery and later Jim Crow laws; they were also opposed to the role the federal government played in getting the railroads built. A lot of them reflexively opposed spending tax money on infrastructure projects, I have read.

The parties switched positions in the 20th century, so now the Dems are the progressives and the Republicans are the obstructionists. The point, though is that in the 19th century for a time the nation was able to invest in itself, and it became more prosperous thereby. Today’s Republicans like to warble about exceptionalism, but their policies are rendering the U.S. nothing but an exceptionally crappy place to live.

9 thoughts on “America the Obstructed

  1. Minor correction, Yellowstone was the first national park; Yosemite wasn’t established until 1890.

    I wouldn’t say that America was able to invest in itself only because the South had left; we invested in ourselves fairly well from the 1930’s to the 1960’s too after all. But I do agree that the current situation is something of a reversion to form for the would-be feudalists.

    • Evan — I’d say that for a time in the mid-20th century extreme conservatism was effectively eclipsed. The Right was blamed for the Depression, and rightly so. Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed a huge Democratic majority in Congress in his first term. The New Deal became wildly popular. The Right also was wrong about Hitler and the war in Europe. So for a time the extreme Right was shoved to the curb and the old guard Republicans were a reasonable crew about many things, although not about civil liberty. The Right used Red-baiting and then racist dog-whistling to claw its way back into power, but for a time real progress was possible.

  2. In the midst of our “Cold Civil War,” I sometimes wish that the New KKKonservative KKKonfederates would follow-through on their plans to secede…

    The problem is, that it’s no longer a matter of North v. South.
    It’s Rural v. Urban – with the suburbs being the battleground areas – all across this country.

    And, we can’t have every urban area be a ‘Little Berlin,’ with air-drops to get past the rural Secesh “Reversionist” country-side.

    So, what do we do?
    Since our conservatives and Republicans “married” the “Christian” Dominionist Evangelicals, there’s no way to make any progress.

    They want to bring back the early 19th Century – if not ‘The Middle Ages.”

    America is a borderline 3rd World Country, with only President Obama and the Democrats – no great saint’s either – in the way of being a Totalitarian “Christian” Theocratic/Fascist nation.

    FSM help us all!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  3. The Reich-wing MSM haw been wrong Sosooooooooooooo many things, it’s NOT worth complaining about!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  4. Another point about investment in infrastructure is that up until the latter half of the 20th century a lot of it was new stuff rather than maintenance. It’s usually easier to get new stuff paid for than maintenance, and that’s true for Democrats too. We need to do a lot of maintence on infrastructure now, and rebuild things like water systems so they work more efficiently (for instance in many places you can clean waste water and pipe it back to the areas it came from so it helps recharge the fresh water supply). The problem is you do that and all you have for your money is what you had before, or do it seems next to the big shiny new thing you could have instead. But if you don’t spend the money to have a “same ol’ same ol'” roof on your house occasionally, you eventually don’t have a usable house.

  5. I have some old newspapers from the late thirties. There are a few articles of particular interest. One is an Op-Ed that questioned the logic of people who preferred Stalin over Hitler. It is not strongly pro-Hitler, but the author thought that the press and public opinion were being a little harsh on Der Fuehrer while ignoring some of Stalin’s shortcomings. Then there is a charming story about a summer camp run by the Nazi Bund in New Jersey. The happy campers were all dressed like kids on the Nazi youth posters.

    I wasn’t around then, but, it does seem that both Germany and the USSR were being watched attentively by people on both sides of the political divide in the USA with the idea that we could learn something from them. I suppose you could expand a popular Sci-fi genre and write about what would have come about if WW II had never happened. Would we still be debating the comparative merits of Nazism and Communism? Which side would we finally have come down on? If we hadn’t had to rise to the occasion of WW II, how would we see ourselves as a nation? Maybe we would have settled and solidified into two irreconcilable opponents snarling at each other endlessly, and life would be pretty much the same, except that there might have been a president Gingrich. It’s easy to picture him as a boy sitting around a campfire, singing, “Mein vater war ein wandersmann …” It would all seem so innocent.

  6. goatherd …I can picture Newt and Callista singing Mein vater war ein wandersmann in unison as they travel the open road between engagements on their book signing tours. Life is good when you’re raking in the bucks by rewriting history and peddling American exceptionalism.

  7. Oh, by the way… Did you ever hear the story about Newt and Bürgermeister’s daughter?

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