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USA’s presidents have all been awful humans

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26767213

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USA’s presidents have all been awful humans
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USA’s presidents have all been awful humans
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19 comments

  • The Six Grandfathers looked beautiful before these fuckwits defaced it with their hideous mugs.

    • funded in part by the Ku Klux Klan

      I gotta remember this part to say to unsuspecting liberals who think US patriotism is some kind of internal struggle and triumph over racism, rather than the creation of it.

      Edit: Corrected on the details. It would seem a more accurate way to say it is that Rushmore project was spearheaded by an avid KKK supporter / white supremacist. See: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7163539/6035893

    • Is there a source for that $300 per Native American claim?

      Not that I doubt the US gov would pay for such bounties, of course they did, it's just $300 in 1877 is like... a fuckload. It's hard to exactly calculate due to the gold standard being abandoned and even if you arrive a direct calculation with inflation and everything factored in there it still doesn't tell the whole story. Like $3000/yr in 1960 could provide for a household in NYC. It's only like $30K/yr with inflation and obviously you need like 3-4x that to live comfortably in NYC. So the dollars are sort of irrelevant if you don't factor in every piece of cost of living (something liberals/conservatives do all the time when you bring up wages, but that's too much off on another topic)

      Anyway, apparently $300 in 1877 is equivalent to about $9000 in today's money. That seems like an entire year's salary back then.

      I don't intend this to be callous or insensitive, but I would assume there would be so many bounty hunter assholes bringing in villages of dead natives that it would destroy the US government to pay that much out. Like these settlers were doing a full scale holocaust in the western states at that point with bodies piling up.

      • The snopes article I linked in another post has some stuff on that part as well:

        https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/07/29/kkk-mount-rushmore/

        Here the history got murky. The meme claims that Grant ordered the Army to not protect Native Americans as bounty hunters collected money for each Native American killed. As mentioned above, documentation exists of the Army standing back and letting miners and settlers move into the territory. Whether the Army actively allowed independent bounty hunters to operate was another story.

        While there were indeed accounts of bounties being offered for Native Americans killed, who was paying these bounties and their timing raised questions from historians. We first encountered this claim in a 2002 issue of Cabinet Magazine, a New York-based publication that stated after Grant ordered the Army to not stop prospectors from entering Black Hills, "Bounty hunters began collecting as much as $300 per Native American killed."

        Deloria argued it was likely that neither the federal government nor the territorial government based in Yankton, South Dakota, was paying bounties. George Harwood Phillips, a retired professor of history at the University of Colorado, wrote in a paper for the South Dakota Historical Society:

        ... by 1870 the rush was on in earnest. The first settlers went to Dakota hoping to make their fortunes. They wanted to plat town sites, to organize governments, to build railroads, and to promote immigration. They felt that the presence of the Indians halted progress — and they hated and feared them. To many, the solution was to kill the Indians and dissolve the Indian Bureau. Settlers paid bounties for Indian scalps, fed them poisoned bread, and organized Indian hunting parties.

        Settlers were indeed behind payments to bounty hunters for Native American deaths. But Deloria argued that timing was important to the context. At the beginning of the Dakota rush, when settlers tried to make their fortunes, he said, "You could perhaps make the claim … that the Army stood by and watched, or approved, as bounty hunters chased down Indians." But after the military campaigns of 1877, when the western Lakotas were in bad shape, would have been an easier time for most bounty hunters, Deloria argued: "You'd have to be a pretty brave bounty hunter to head into the Black Hills region looking to kill Indians in the years between 1874 and 1877."

        This is supported by Taliaferro in "Great White Fathers," who documented an instance after the battles of 1877 of a county placing bounties on Native Americans, as miners began staking claims to search for gold across the Black Hills and remnants of the Lakota resisted them:

        The commissioners of newly formed Lawrence County put a bounty of $250 'for the body of each and every Indian, killed or captured, dead or alive.' Setting its own bounty of $50, Deadwood [a town in the county] rationalized that 'killing Indians was conducive to the health of the community.'

        Martinez, who was not aware of cases of civilians being paid bounties by the federal government to kill Native Americans, said, "At the federal level, there really was no reason to pay soldiers bounties for killing Indians. That was their job." And during the 1870s the Lakota were considered "hostile" if they didn't comply with the Army, and in those cases soldiers were ordered to treat them as enemies in the field.

        In summary, we learned that bounty hunters were paid by settlers to kill Native Americans in the earlier part of the decade before military campaigns began, as well as after they concluded. We found little evidence to back the claim implied in the meme that they were paid or actively supported by the government or the Army at the height of tensions from 1874 to 1877, a period when the Army was tacitly allowing miners to come into the territory.

        Like with the other claim, it seems the spirit of it is more or less correct, but the details are wrong.

19 comments