The Vietnam War was something different, going from small units to all-out invasion, a half million U.S. servicemen on the ground, yet it too became a brutal savage war that targeted civilians. Following the 1954 defeat and withdrawal of French occupation forces, the Eisenhower administration, already aiding the French efforts to prevent Vietnam’s independence, took over the counterinsurgency; this morphed into full military invasion and occupation of the South of the country in 1965, continuing another decade until the United States was also defeated and fled.
The narratives of the U.S. anti-war movement’s success often give the impression that there was widespread dissent against the Vietnam War, but this was not the case until the late 1960s, with bitter divisions, the majority of both the elite and the organized labor movement (still mostly white and male) strongly favoring the war; the majority who then turned against the war believed it could not be won. The burgeoning right-wing movement made significant gains during the war, with anticommunism a major bludgeon. With the humiliating U.S. military defeat and the war-induced economic depression that followed as well as intense government repression against the Civil Rights movement, which had gone national during the 1960s the right wing had by the late 1970s built an infrastructure of media, think tanks, and organized electoral constituencies that have been increasingly dominant ever since. No apologies or reparations have been offered by any subsequent administration, and the war, even at its fiftieth anniversary, was officially deemed a failed effort but a “noble cause” by the Obama administration.24 Even the date that the U.S. government uses as the historical start of its war against Vietnam, March 1965, ignores the fact that U.S. military operations there began a decade earlier.25 Perhaps the event that will shape the future narrative of the war is Ken Burns’s 18-hour patriotic documentary The Vietnam War, which premiered on PBS in September 2017.26
The populist frontier ideology has served the U.S. ruling class well for its entire history and once again found tremendous resonance in the Vietnam War as another Indian war. A key to John F. Kennedy’s political success was that he revived the “frontier” as a trope of populist imperialism, speaking of the “settling” of the continent and “taming” a different sort of “wilderness.” In Kennedy’s acceptance speech in Los Angeles at the 1960 Democratic Convention, he said: “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West… . We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.” The metaphor described Kennedy’s plan for employing political power to make the world the new frontier of the United States. Central to this vision was the Cold War, what Richard Slotkin calls “a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’ against communism,” to which the nation was summoned by Kennedy in his inaugural address. Soon after he took office, that struggle took the form of the counterinsurgency program in Vietnam and his creation of the Green Beret Special Forces. “Seven years after Kennedy’s nomination,” Slotkin reminds us, “American troops would be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian Country’ and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’; and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn.’”27
On January 2, 2016, armed men arrived at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and began an occupation of the headquarters and surrounding territory for the next forty days.28 In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt had carved out and appropriated most of Northern Paiute territory in Oregon, territory guaranteed by treaty; this then became the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. It was a part of Roosevelt’s “wilderness” conservation project that annexed dozens of Indigenous sacred sites, such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon, calling the federal theft “national parks.” Most Native land in the West was seized without the agreement of Native nations as “public domain,” and ever since has been leased at minimal cost to corporations and individuals for private ranching, and to corporations for commercial mining, oil drilling and pipelines, and timber cutting. The private exploitation of public lands is in addition to the vast privately owned ranch lands grabbed by settler-ranchers under federal homesteading measures in the wake of the ethnic cleansing of Native communities by the U.S. Army of the West.29
Wealthy cattle ranchers like those who seized Malheur have long been lobbying and clamoring for the federal public lands to be transferred to the states, which, unlike the federal government, can sell off land and privatize all of it. In light of Native peoples’ demands for restitution of sacred sites and all federal-and state-held lands that were taken without treaties or agreements, this is a continuation of the Indian wars, fronted by ranching and fossil-fuel resource interests, but made possible by the continuing U.S. system of colonialism and a public blinded to its history. All these sacred sites and “public” lands must be returned to the stewardship of the Native nations from which they were illegally seized; none should be privatized. Malheur was indeed a “skirmish among colonizers.”30
Rapper Ice-T, in an interview in London soon after the Aurora, Colorado, movie house slaughter, was asked his opinion of guns in the U.S. and the gun-control effort. He replied “Well, that’s not going to change anything in the United States, no. United States is based on guns. Like KRS says, you’ll never have justice on stolen land.”31
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m honored to be among the estimable authors who have published timely books in the Open Media Series of City Lights Publishers. I thank the founder and editor of the Open Media Series, Greg Ruggiero, for seeing potential for a different kind of book on the much debated Second Amendment. Thanks also to the wonderful City Lights Publishing and Marketing Director Stacey Lewis, and City Lights Publisher Elaine Katzenberger. I’m forever grateful to Lawrence Ferlinghetti for founding City Lights Bookstore and Publishing and keeping it going for more than six decades, thriving now more than ever.
This book would not have been possible without the rich literature on the Second Amendment, mass shootings, gun rights, and gun control that has been produced already in the 21st century. Although my interpretation of the history of the Second Amendment and the distinctive U.S. American culture that finds itself unique among countries in private gun ownership with minimal laws controlling ownership and use, differs considerably from previous works, I appreciate the dedicated research and writing that has gone into the many books and articles that I cite in this text.
Some of the historical material and interpretations in Loaded are drawn from my book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, published by Beacon Press in 2014. I want to acknowledge my remarkable editors there, Gayatri Patnaik and Rachael Marks.
I also want to thank Johanna Fernández for her close reading and suggestions, as well as Steve Hiatt, who read an early draft chapter on Missouri Confederate guerrillas, offering supportive comments and encouragement.
Finally, I wish to thank many friends and relatives who tolerated my incessant talk about guns in United States history these past two years.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. “Firearms Numbers in the United States 1945–2012,” Gun Watch, June 28, 2015. Accessed July 29, 2017: http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2015/06/firearms-numbers-in-united-states-1945.html
2. Evan Osnos, “Making a Killing: The business and politics of selling guns,” The New Yorker, June 27, 2016. The kinds of weapons include 110 million handguns and the same number of rifles, plus 86 million shotguns.
3. Richard Hofstadter, Harper’s Magazine, November 1964. Accessed July 31, 2017: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
4. Ibid.
5. Senator Barack Obama, while campaigning for the presidency in 2008, was recorded saying
to a private donors’ gathering in San Francisco that disaffected white people “cling to their guns and religion.” Ed Pilkington, “Obama Angers Midwest Voters with Guns and Religion Remark, The Guardian, April 14, 2008.
6. Warren E. Burger, “The Right to Bear Arms,” Parade, January 14, 1990, p. 4.
7. “Open Carry,” Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Accessed July 29, 2017: http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/firearms-in-public-places/open-carrying/
8. Jiaquan Xu, M.D.; Sherry L. Murphy, B.S.; Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A.; and Brigham A. Bastian, “Deaths: Final Data for 2013, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 64, No. 2; p. 84, table 18. Accessed June 19, 2017: www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
9. Sharon LaFraniere, Sarah Cohen and Richard A. Oppel Jr., “How Often Do Mass Shootings Occur? On Average, Every Day, Records Show,” New York Times, December 2, 2015. Accessed June 13, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/how-often-do-mass-shootings-occur-on-average-every-day-records-show.html?smid=tw-share
10. Eyder Peralta, “Study: Most Gun Deaths Happen Outside of Mass Shootings,” the two-way, National Public Radio, February 1, 2013. Accessed June 19, 2017: www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/02/01/170872321/study-most-gun-deaths-happenoutside-of-mass-shootings
11. Nate Silver, “Did Democrats Give Up in the Gun Control Debate?” New York Times, January 11, 2011.
12. David Cole, “The Terror of Our Guns,” New York Review of Books, July 14, 2016.
13. Ibid., referring to the claim made in one of the books reviewed by Cole on the history of the gun industry, with the Winchester Rifle Company the central case study: Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, New York: Basic Books, 2916. The other two books Cole reviews are: Robert J. Spitzer, Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; and Firmin DeBrabander, Do Guns Make Us Free? Democracy and the Armed Society, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Spitzer argues that the regulation of guns from the time they were invented, including throughout U.S. history, is not a contradiction to the Second Amendment or to the Heller decision as individual rights. See also: Mark Anthony Frassetto, Firearms and Weapons Legislation up to the Early 20th Century. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Law Center, 2013). This history ends in 1935, but many of the laws are still in effect.
14. Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Waldman is president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. See also on the Second Amendment: William Briggs, How America Got Its Guns: A History of the Gun Violence Crisis. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017, pp. 75–108.
15. The Congress shall have Power To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress… .
16. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016, pp. 7–39.
17. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815−1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 9.
CHAPTER ONE
1. For the central role of George Washington as a land speculator and colonial militia leader in the French and Indian War, see: William Hogeland, Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, pp. 3–80.
2. John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 147.
3. Joseph Doddridge, Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania from 1763 to 1783, Inclusive, Together with a Review of the State of Society and Manners of the First Settlers of the West Country. Clearfield, PA: Clearfield: reprint edition, 2012, pp. 109–110.
4. James Lindgren, “Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal,” Yale Law Journal (June 2002), Vol. 111, p. 2204.
5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 23.
6. Robert J. Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism: A Comparative Analysis,” in “Symposium of International Law in Indigenous Affairs: The Doctrine of Discovery, the United Nations, and the Organization of Americans States,” special issue, Lewis and Clark Law Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 847–922. See also Vine Deloria Jr., Of Utmost Good Faith. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971, pp. 6–39; Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008.
7. Domestication of plants took place around the globe in seven locales during approximately the same period, around 8500 BC. Three of the seven were in the Americas, all based on corn: the Valley of Mexico and Central America (Mesoamerica); the South-Central Andes in South America; and eastern North America. The other original agricultural centers were the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River systems, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Yellow River of northern China, and the Yangtze River of southern China.
8. Hogeland, Autumn of the Black Snake, pp. 19–44.
9. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013, p. 32.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Sherman Alexie, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. New York: Little Brown, 2017, p. 297.
2. John Grenier, The First Way of War, 1607-1814. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 10.
3. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800−1890. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994, p. 53.
4. Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 5, 10.
5. Ibid., p. 1.
6. Bernard Bailyn, Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600−1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
7. Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 29–34, 36–37, 39.
8. Ibid., pp. 192–93.
9. Ibid., pp. 40–41, 205.
10. Barbara Cutter, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth-Century Feminization of American Violence,” The Journal of Women’s History, 2008, Vol. 20: No. 2.
11. Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 221–22.
12. Ibid., pp. 4–5, 7.
13. Ibid., p. 12.
14. Ibid., pp. 223–24.
15. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
16. Grenier, First Way of War, p. 14.
17. Ronald T. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown, 1993, pp. 85–86
18. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum Macmillan, 1992, pp. 455−457.
19. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820−1875. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
20. Kaplan, Robert D. Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. New York: Random House, 2005, pp. 8–10.
21. Dexter Filkins, “James Mattis, A Warrior in Washington,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2017.
22. Grenier, First Way of War, p. 222.
CHAPTER THREE
1. See: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2011.
2. Mumia Abu-Jamal, To Protect and Serve Who? San Francisco: City Lights/Open Media Series, 2015.
3. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 2.
4. See: Gerald Horne, T
he Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York: NYU Press, 2014, pp. 23–42.
5. Hadden, Slave Patrols, pp. 11–12, 15, 24.
6. Ibid., pp. 25–28.
7. Ibid., pp. 32–35.
8. Ibid., pp. 39−40.
9. From Edward Cantwell’s 1860 judicial hornbook The Practice at Law in North Carolina: Hadden, Slave Patrols, p. 105.
10. The assumption that poor white men dominate gun ownership and violence remains current, when, in fact, those who make less than $25,000 a year are much less likely to own guns. See: Lois Beckett, “Gun Inequality: US study charts rise of hardcore super owners,” The Guardian, September 19, 2016. Accessed July 29, 2017: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/19/us-gun-ownership-survey
11. Hadden, Slave Patrols, pp. 71–72, 102–103.
12. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 222–223.
13. Ibid., pp. 234–35
14. Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2015, p. 133, quoting Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 177.
15. See: Pamela D. Bridgewater, “Un/Re/Dis Covering Slave Breeding in the Thirteenth Amendment Jurisprudence,” Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2001: pp. 12–44. Accessed July 27, 2017: http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1099&context=crsj
16. Sublette and Sublette, The American Slave Coast, p. 312.
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