Lately I’ve been reading a history of Chicago, _Chicago: Crossroads of American Enterprise_1. It’s a popular history, published in 1944, and it follows the style and approach that you’d expect of a book of that vintage. The prose tends towards a purplish hue at times, and “man” is used as a synonym for “people.” But it’s giving me a good overview of the city’s past, filling in some blanks, and it recently provided a passage which seemed particularly appropriate to today. These two paragraphs come as the author reflects over the final departure of the local Indian tribes from the Chicago area after the defeat of Black Hawk:
We Americans are a freedom-loving people. We’ll fight and die for freedom lest we lose it. We’ve proved that in the past. We’re proving it again. But loving freedom when it is your freedom that’s at stake is pretty common with people all over the world. We may say that some men have got a way of thinking that makes them more independent, more aware of individuality, than others, and, along with some other democratic nations who believe in the individual, we can lay claim to that. We don’t like the regimentation and the mass-thinking–or lack of thinking–that some people fall for, and I don’t believe we could be made to like it, no, not even in that thousand years that Hitler once was talking of. And, as history sets out the record, we haven’t done too badly, lined up with the rest of the world. We’ve respected freedom sometimes even when it wasn’t our freedom that was at stake, as in the case of the Phillipines. But where the Indians were concerned–
All right, that was a long while back, and people had a different way of looking at it then, and recently our government has gone way, way ahead in doing right by the Indians alive today. Still, let it be written down that freedom, not ours, but somebody else’s, suffered in this country. It’s worth writing down. it should be written down all over the world in every country where some other people’s freedom suffered–and that would mean a lot of writing down. But maybe it would help to keep it clear to us what freedom-loving ought to mean. Freedom-respecting might be a better phrase. We’ll need to be remembering that in the long, long years to come, getting along with the rest of the world.
The word “freedom” gets tossed around a lot these days, mostly to describe something that the US brings to other people. We do this because, after all, this is a free country, the leader of the free world, so who would know more about freedom than we do? But freedom often gets expanded for one group at the expense of another, as was the case for the Indians, and since the publication of this book, the US has had a tendency to pursue our own freedoms a little too diligently. It’s a long road, especially for a country like ours, to go from freedom-loving to freedom-respecting, and we’re not there yet.
1No longer in print, but, interestingly, available in a scanned and OCR’d version online at the Internet Archive.