“What is history but the obituary of nations?”
— Georgia congressman, 1830, advocating Cherokee removal
“Some of them would die and most of them would turn into human dust and the waste of society…”
— Israeli foreign ministry, circa 1948, advocating the permanent exile of Palestinian refugees
A notable feature of the “ferment of the ’60s,” Noam Chomsky observed, was that it raised the “cultural and moral” awareness of many U.S. citizens. Perhaps the most striking example is current perceptions of the European conquest of the Americas. In marked contrast to even the recent past, few today would find justice, let alone nobility, in that chapter of world history. One may anticipate that Israelis, too, will some day rue what was done to the indigenous population of Palestine. Indeed, the process as well as the rationalizations of conquest were remarkably similar in the two cases.
In his monumental narrative The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt celebrated as “the most striking feature in the world’s history,” and the “most far-reaching in its effects and its importance,” the “spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces.” No “period of race expansion” had ever been “either so broad or so rapid.” Nor, it would seem, so just. The land was virginal; the native population had no substantive legal claim to it. White settlers “had moved into an uninhabited waste[…] [T]he land is really owned by no one[…] The settler ousts no one from the land. The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil.”
Yet in Roosevelt’s interpretation, the wheel of progress, not justice, loomed largest—or, more exactly, progress was the true measure of justice. It was a “shortsighted view” to “speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil.” A “conquest may be fraught with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples.” In the case of North America, the colonists rightfully “claimed the continent as their heritage” and “battled on behalf of the destiny of the race” as they conquered it. “The continent was predestined to be the inheritance of their children and their children’s children.” For “in the interests of mankind” and “civilization,” it was “all-important” that North America be won by such a “masterful people.”
Roosevelt believed that “it is for the good of the world that the English-speaking race in all its branches should hold as much of the world’s surface as possible.” He acknowledged “it mean[t] the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery,” but such was the price of progress:
The world would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years.