by Glenn Beck
When Grant died in 1885, a group of black Union veterans stated, “In General Grant’s death, the colored people of this and all other countries, and the oppressed everywhere, irrespective of complexion, have lost a preeminently true and faithful defender.”
Other faithful defenders of black citizens in the South during and after Reconstruction include the hundreds of northern white men and women, many of them supported by Christian missionary organizations and the government’s Freedmen’s Bureau, who opened schools for black children throughout the South. Booker T. Washington would later write, “The history of the world fails to show a higher, purer, and more unselfish class of men and women than those who found their way into those Negro schools.”
One of that class was former Union Army general Samuel C. Armstrong, who founded Hampton University in Virginia to educate black men and women and, later, Native Americans. He became Booker T. Washington’s close mentor and lifelong friend. When Armstrong received a request from Tuskegee, Alabama, for a white man to organize and run a new school for black students there, Armstrong replied that he did not know a good white candidate, but he had the perfect black candidate for them: Booker T. Washington. The Tuskegee Institute became Washington’s life’s work.
In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, Washington wrote that General Armstrong was “the noblest, rarest human being that it has ever been my privilege to meet. . . . It has been my fortune to meet personally many of what are called great characters, both in Europe and America, but I do not hesitate to say that I never met any man who, in my estimation, was the equal of General Armstrong. . . . It was my privilege to know the General personally from the time I entered Hampton till he died, and the more I saw of him the greater he grew in my estimation. One might have removed from Hampton all the buildings, classrooms, teachers, and industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would have been a liberal education.”
Booker T. Washington was a pivotal, often overlooked champion of black civil rights. Though he clashed with President Theodore Roosevelt over Roosevelt’s mishandling of the 1906 Brownsville incident mentioned earlier, they both took positive, if small, steps for American race relations. Roosevelt took considerable heat for inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, a first for a U.S. president.
During World War II, the U.S. military established a flight school for black pilots at Tuskegee. Six hundred pilots went through the program, and they became known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Their stellar combat record in the skies over Europe earned the men 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Their success helped pave the way for President Truman to finally desegregate the military by executive order in 1948.
It took America nearly a century to unravel the tangled mess of Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court helped in 1954 with its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which effectively desegregated America’s schools. Three years later, President Eisenhower enforced the Court’s decision by deploying twelve hundred federal troops to override Arkansas governor Orval Faubus’s attempt to prevent nine black students from enrolling at Central High School in Little Rock. The federal troops remained for the rest of the school year to protect the “Little Rock Nine” as they entered and left the high school building each day.
When you look at some of the photos of the leering white crowds confronting the black teenage girls on the sidewalk outside Little Rock Central, it’s amazing that within those students’ lifetime, attitudes have changed so dramatically, not only about integrating schools and colleges but even when it comes to interracial marriage. Gallup polling shows that in 1958 only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. By 2013, it found that 87 percent of Americans approved. That is progress. This should be celebrated as we continue to move forward.
Yes, America had slavery, and yes, it is shameful. But often all the left wants to talk about is the depressing, shameful part of the story. It’s like they want to ignore that there is a happy ending—slavery was abolished. As Lincoln said, paid for in blood. Millions died to stop this scourge. Of course, the left argues that there hasn’t been a happy ending for minorities, especially blacks—that they’re still in metaphorical chains created by a society built on the backs of slaves. That is a self-defeating outlook. When will we learn from the Asians who literally built the main infrastructure of this nation while enduring terrible conditions and racist horror? It is not what happened to you historically; what matters is what you do with it now. It can either build you or destroy you. Let’s find a way to hearing, healing, and helping others help themselves.
For progressives, there is little redeemable about America’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But once again, it’s unfair to judge President Truman and his military advisors from our 2018 vantage point. It’s disingenuous for modern critics to presume they would not have dropped the bombs when more than 111,000 American soldiers had already perished in the Pacific theater. Nowhere is mentioned the estimated 3 to 14 million civilian and POW deaths ordered by Hirohito or the horrors of Unit 731, which engaged in medical experiments, some of which made the actions of Nazi doctors look tame. And nearly always missing in our history class discussions of the atomic bombs is that the U.S. dropped millions of leaflets over Hiroshima and Nagasaki warning residents to flee these cities. Each leaflet explained, in what must have seemed like hyperbole, the overwhelming destructive power of the weapon that would be dropped if they did not surrender. We also took the extraordinary step of telling people to take food and water with them, as it would become scarce in that area. I have dozens of these in our vaults at the Mercury library. I have yet to meet the American of any age who has ever even heard of these leaflets, let alone seen one.
Also lost in the wider discussion are the resources the U.S. poured into Japan after World War II. For five years after the war’s end, the U.S. oversaw the reconstruction of Japanese industry and government, including the writing of a new Japanese constitution. Then the U.S. handed Japan the keys and left. The result is a thriving democracy and America’s closest Asian ally. Who could have predicted this miracle in 1941?
And finally, more than forty years after World War II, the surviving Japanese American family members who lost three years of their lives in internment camps were given reparation payments of $20,000 per family by Congress. It is the understanding of what, who, and why it happened that will ensure we never repeat it, and unfortunately, those details are not taught.
Here is a key point: Though it’s often too little, too late, America does try to right wrongs. Though we can debate what and how much retroactive congressional action is appropriate, the fact is that despite popular progressive belief, America is not heartless.
So which are we? Good or Evil? We are attempting to be judge, jury, and executioner of an entire culture without actually looking at the full picture. Our past has been bad, and it has been good. We are no worse than every country and civilization in all of human history. We are like Winston Churchill, both hero and villain. Our job is to learn from our mistakes and grow stronger and better as a people.
But our cultural bloodlust is so intense that we don’t even want to wait to hear the evidence; we focus on the bad, the injustice, and any of the good, “Well, that could have happened anywhere or even in spite of America.”
In his epic book The History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900, Andrew Roberts concludes:
It is in the nature of human affairs that, in the words of the hymn, “Earth’s proud empires pass away,” and so too one day will the long hegemony of the English speaking peoples. When they finally come to render up the report of their global stewardship to History, there will be much of which to boast. Only when another power—such as China—holds global sway, will the human race come to mourn the passing of this most decent, honest, generous, fair-minded and self-sacrificing imperium.
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Shaving Ockham
So for a long time the human race is sort of bumbling along, taking from somewhere around 300,000 years ago until about 1804 AD to reach 1 billion people. Progress is slow. Then the U.S. comes along, and it’s another 120 years or so to get to 2 billion, another 33 more years to get to 3 billion . . . you get the idea. Today, we sit at just over 7.6 billion of us.
Of those, about 320 million are lucky enough to call the United States of America home, or about 4.4 percent of us. Yep, 4.4 percent of the world’s population are our fellow citizens, the ones we keep getting outraged about all the time. What’s interesting is that while we’re only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, we own over 25 percent of the world’s wealth (much more if you count U.S. companies housing cash and assets in foreign countries), consume 33 percent of the world’s energy production, hold command of all seven seas, own 48 percent of all satellites in orbit, are the only nation that has sent men to the moon (four times), and consume 41 percent of the world’s chewing gum.
Okay, so, not 100 percent sure the last figure is one to brag about, but you get the idea.
In barely 120 years we grew to become the world’s most powerful nation, and 100 years after that, the world’s lone “superpower.” We’re pretty well set up for the future, too, at least as far as resources are concerned, with more than 55 percent of the world’s shale oil and 65 percent of the world’s uranium under our control. We have enough energy to provide power to the entire planet, including projected population growth, for the next two thousand years. Doubt that last one? Google “TerraPower Wave Reactor.”
Let’s see, what else . . . the bottom 10 percent of our population by way of wealth is still in the top 10 percent compared to the world’s population as a whole. We have 68 percent of the world’s PhDs living among our population (many of them foreign born/educated, but the money is better here).
In the #MeToo era, it’s easy to focus on the very real and disgusting cases of violence against women that flood the media. But it’s worth noting that violence against women is actually dropping. Violence against wives and girlfriends has actually dropped by about 75 percent since the 1990s.
While the news cameras point at Charlottesville, at Richard Spencer and his band of tiki-torch-toting buffoons, and at NFL players kneeling to protest police brutality and racism in our police departments, hate crimes against blacks have dropped by about 50 percent.
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The amount of money we spend on necessities such as food, home, transportation, clothing, furniture, utilities, and gas has been cut in half since the 1930s.
Globally, the rate of children dying before the age of five has dropped by over half since 1990. This is a miracle that has gone almost completely unnoticed.
As Max Roser and Jaiden Mispy illustrate, that’s like averting twenty-seven major plane crashes filled with children every single day.
The improvements cover the spectrum of horrible ailments and accidents no one wants to be associated with.
Deaths from:
Malaria down 32 percent
HIV down 50 percent
Neonatal preterm birth complications down 55 percent
Protein-energy malnutrition down 57 percent
Diarrheal diseases down 64 percent
Lower respiratory infections down 66 percent
Measles down 91 percent
As Arthur Brooks notes: “It’s the greatest anti-poverty achievement in the history of mankind. And it happened within our lifetimes.” The causes for this are numerous but are largely the result of the spread of capitalism, technological and medical innovation, and free trade.
Putting this miracle into perspective is incredibly difficult, especially because it doesn’t have the energy of a partisan firestorm around it. So, let’s insert one.
If you happen to be of the pro-life persuasion, you probably have fought hard to stop the funding of Planned Parenthood. You probably want the doors shuttered immediately. However, you would have to eliminate the number of abortions that occur annually because of Planned Parenthood more than nineteen times over to equal this improvement.
But don’t worry, progressives! If you have been fighting to repeal the Second Amendment with the hopes of stopping all gun-related homicide, I have more good news. This incredible global lifesaving achievement is equivalent to more than 630 years’ worth of gun-related murders.
It’s such a wonderful development that you could forgive a modern society for losing track of some of the real problems that remain. Instead, we do the opposite. We are on a constant search for kneeling players, cultural appropriation, white privilege, and tweets that are slightly askew.
Now, I’m not in any way saying America is perfect. Far from it. We’ve done some pretty horrible things over the years; I get it. But all in all, something about this place has really worked out.
Lots of Jared Diamond–type intellectuals have tried to decipher how and why we seem to kick so much ass all the time, coming up with theories involving the luck of our geography, geology, climate, isolation from enemies, and so on. Actually, there are probably valid elements and pieces of all those arguments. I mean, I agree it’s great that we have two oceans to our east and west, frozen tundra and mountains to our north, and barren deserts to the south. Note that it wasn’t always that way. The thirteen colonies had enemies on all sides, but we still whipped the British, the Spanish, the British (again), and Mexico as we expanded west, and numerous Native American tribes (moral inventory!).
It’s strange—we don’t have a cohesive religion, ancestry, or biology, we don’t have the heritage of a shared ethnic background or creed, and we’re made up of every race on earth, every culture.
One thing that’s always troubled me about the various conjecturing that goes on about why the U.S.A. has been so dominant for so long is that it all fails the Ockham’s Razor test: The simplest explanation is generally the true one. All the origin stories explaining America’s Super Powers that rely on five or ten or twenty randomly thrown-together ingredients miss the simple, plainly obvious ingredient that is by far the most logical answer: liberty for the individual.
Lots of countries have had access to lots of natural resources. Lots of countries have had protective geographical zones. Lots of places have access to two or more oceans, have rivers that cross the continent, have oil, have white people, have protection from enemies by way of space or distance.
But all those other countries didn’t have a group of guys who got together and said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Just, wow. But wait, there’s more!
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
For those of you who still think “rights” are granted to us by the government, think through the sequencing here: Man has rights, and to secure those rights, we institute government. Rights first, then government to protect those rights. See, the whole reason a government exists at all is to secure rights that we have by nature, before the government existed!
That—had—NEVER—been—said—before! And neither had this:
“That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. . . . It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
Drops mic . . . spikes football . . . does the moonwalk.
You want to know what made America GREAT in the first place? Why we came to dominate the world so easily? Why we’ve enjoyed more success, more invention, more improvement, more wealth than any other nation in the history of the world? That’s it. That’s the big secret that nobody told you in school (because God forbid we teach our history anymore). That is
the key to American greatness, the wealth and success and dominance of our people, our nation, and our culture across the world.
The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are our unum! The thing that takes us from the many of “e pluribus” to the one of “unum.” The thing that binds us, that makes us a nation, a unique country in world history. That is the thing that can and should bring us back to the table.
And for those of you who have never made the connection, here is why this system of government works: it is aligned with our nature as a species.
Human beings are pretty interesting creatures. We have these still-evolving apelike brains that somewhere along the line picked up self-awareness and free will. We’re inquisitive, inventive, and, because of the whole self-awareness thing (I am me and you are you), we have an ego. And by our nature, that ego needs to be developed and nurtured and fed. What feeds it?
Achievement. Setting goals and accomplishing them. Yep.
Wow. Interesting, Glenn. Tell me more.
We don’t have thick fur, so we need to invent things to stay warm. We can’t digest most plants, so we need to grow those plants that we can digest. We don’t have wings to fly and don’t run that fast, so we need to invent things to get from place to place. We don’t have gills or fins, so we aren’t the best swimmers, but we can invent boats, oars, sails. We don’t have sharp claws or teeth, but we can invent pointy-stabby-cutty things to take care of all the rending of flesh we need to do to survive.
Getting the picture here?
To thrive, man needs to invent. To invent, man needs freedom. More freedom equals more invention. More freedom equals more trade equals more invention . . . you’re getting the idea.