It is uncomfortable and surprising for many Americans to learn that Abraham Lincoln in the 1830s–50s championed ideas now associated with virulent racist fascists: “improving” America through white supremacy in the name in the name of Jesus. People who believe this today have rallied to Donald Trump. Trump openly welcomes them, and seems quite racist himself. Yet, there was Burns, warning of Trump one minute, and cheerfully lauding young Abraham Lincoln the next.
To be clear, I’m not calling Burns racist. I don’t think he is. And of course his discussion of young Abraham Lincoln wasn’t about the repatriation movement. I’m sure Burns would maintain those views were irrelevant to the point he was making about young Lincoln. And on some level, they are. But on another level, this is the problem. U.S. history (and the history of every other nation, for that matter) is soaked through with racism, sexism, and classism in one form or another. And the only way we can ever truly overcome those plagues is by confronting them. Yet we rarely do that. We erase the racist aspects of Lincoln, for example, and instead hail him as the man who saved the nation (yes) and freed the slaves (actually, Congress, the Northern states, and the slaves themselves did that).
Let’s take another example. During his commencement address, Burns described 1830s Canada and Mexico as “two relatively benign neighbors.” I think I audibly sighed when I heard him say this. It’s a perverse statement, and the kind of nationalistic U.S. mythology Burns often champions from behind the camera.
In this case, “benign” serves as a euphemism for Canada and Mexico being targets of U.S. expansion during the 1830s–40s. In 1846, President James K. Polk and his supporters pushed bold-faced lies to justify the U.S. invasion of Mexico, and the eventual seizure of one-third of that nation. This is how everything from California to New Mexico became part of the United States. There were also U.S. threats to invade Canada. But whereas Mexico was recently independent and vulnerable, Canada was still a British colony and enjoyed the full backing of that mighty empire, which effectively prevented those threats (54-50 or fight!) from materializing into action. Instead, Polk negotiated a treaty with the British that landed the United States Washington and Oregon, with Canada taking British Columbia; the Native peoples who lived there be damned
If it seems like I’m being unfair to Burns, that I’m nitpicking to make a mountain from a mole hill, then ask yourself this. Why, exactly, do Trumpists across the nation want to sanitize U.S. history, and ban children from learning anything meaningful about slavery, Jim Crow segregation, women’s rights movements, LGBT rights movements, Latinx history, and the genocides and dispossessions of Indigenous peoples?