The Dougout

Kurt Anderson has recently had a novel "Heyday" published that is purported to be about America in the 1840's. I haven't read it yet, and probably never will. The main reason for my disinclination to read Anderson's new book are the attitudes towards American westward expansion evinced in an article he wrote "1848: When America Came of Age" that is available at Time online. Here is how Anderson characterizes the Mexican-American War:

And the President has tapped into patriotic rage to invade a poor desert country, having dubiously claimed that the enemy nation represents a clear and present military danger to America...Nine days later, a treaty was signed ending the U.S. war with Mexico--our first elective war, first imperial war--in one stroke extending the U.S. from the Texas border to the Pacific.

Pioneers are described by Anderson thus:

Back in the U.S., it took only a year after the discovery of gold to turn the sleepy little town of San Francisco into a boisterous city, the largest place west of Chicago. Modern California was born. More important, the Gold Rush was a ratification of the most fantastical version of the American Dream, the yearning for instant fortune and easy prosperity, for extreme liberty and land free for the taking from the natives. When they heard the news out of California, Marx and Engels understood that this bizarre phenomenon was another way in which the U.S. might not conform to their view of economic history inevitably unfolding. Engels wrote to Marx that the discovery of gold was a case "not provided for in the Manifesto: the creation of large new markets out of nothing."

That Marx, and Commies in general, don't "get" America is hardly news. Anderson does note the huge number of technical advances during the period that created whole new industries. These include: the railroad, high speed rotary presses, the telegraph, photography, departments stores and advertising agencies. Anderson, and Marx, stated that the wealth created by these inventions and by the gold and silver extracted from the mines of California and Nevada was: "made overnight, out of nothing, by plucky nobodies."

Anderson writes of all the research he did for his novel and some of it shows in his article. However, when he confuses the Forty-Niners of the gold rush with the pioneers who settled in Washington, Oregon and California to build farms, towns, and the American West by their heroic long-term efforts, one must question his understanding.

It gets tiresome to have to refute the endless lies about the Mexican-American War that are repeated by people who ought to know better. At The Dougout I have discussed this on several posts. In "7 July 1846: American Flag Over California" I noted:

Regarding California, it should be pointed out that up until 1821, it was a province of Spain. California became a nominal province of Mexico after its independence. I write "nominal" because Mexico City never actually governed the place. What with Russians building forts along the north coast, adventurers creating private empires in the Central Valley and endless fighting with locals whenever Mexico sent troops north a general state of anarchy existed.

It is one thing for a corrupt government to claim a territory, it is another thing entirely for that state to actually govern it.

In another post from over a year ago I quoted Bernard DeVoto's masterful Year of Decision: 1846:

Furthermore, the portions of Mexico with which we are concerned, Texas, New Mexico and California, were precisely the portions where Spain's imperial energy had faltered and run down. To this frontier Great Spain had come and here it could go no farther, here it began to ebb back. ... Stephen W. Kearny and Alexander Doniphan brought more safety, stability, and hope to the New Mexicans in two months than Spain had found for them in two centuries, or Mexico after Spain. The annexation of Texas was a tragedy to some Mexicans but it was not a tragedy for Mexico. It was the last episode in the erosion of an empire.

Of course, in the winter of 1846-7 the Donner Party was trapped in the Sierras. Also from Year of Decision, DeVoto describes what the pioneers had to go through in order to make their fortunes "overnight, out of nothing:"

He refused to die. One Indian was still helping him and they met another one whose help could be bought by a promise of tobacco. Supported on their shoulders, [William] Eddy left bloody footprints across six miles of rough ground and came, an hour before sunset, to a little shack on the edge of Johnson's Ranch, the first outpost of settlement, at the eastern wall of the Sacramento Valley. The shack belonged to M.D. Ritchie, an emigrant of '46, one of a number who had settled near Johnson's for the winter. Young Harriet Ritchie came to the door and Eddy asked her for bread.

Just getting to California was a bit more than an overnight excursion. Either by sea or overland the trip from the east to the west coast took six months and many died along the way.