There are no Thanksgiving heroes

American Thanksgiving is typically seen as a celebration of the cooperation between the English who settled the continent and the Natives who helped them grow crops and saved them from starvation. It is a story about how multicultural cooperation and privateproperty incentives, both strong American principles, can boost a harvest.

But as Thanksgiving approaches, I am struck by another lesson: America’s need to come to terms with a history that, as it relates to the treatment of Native Americans, has remarkably few heroes on the side of the white settlers.

For contrast, consider the recent disputes over the New York Times 1619 project, which argues that anti-black racism has been in the DNA of the U.S. since the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619. There has been a lot of pushback to this argument, most recently from the Civil War historian James McPherson. The U.S. also has a redemptive side, he says, as represented by the opponents of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln and the millions of whites who supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s might make you feel slightly better about the American experiment.

But when it comes to Native American history, there is no American president who fills a role remotely comparable to that of Lincoln or even Lyndon Johnson for African Americans. Nor, until the 1960s, is there much history of entertainers, athletes or academics speaking up effectively for Native American rights.

Presidents Grover Cleveland and Franklin Delano Roosevelt did set up and then improve the reservation system. Even if you favor those decisions, the result nonetheless reeks of segregation, of parsimoniousness, of a continued history of poverty and deprivation. The system is at best an unsatisfactory compromise rather than a source of national pride.

Who since then are the white heroes — those who later deregulated casino gambling and mining rights for many reservations? Again, even if those decisions were for the better, it is hard to find much to boast about.

Nor is there any major American political ideology that can sit comfortably with the historical treatment of Native Americans, which has been multipartisan in its awfulness. Many libertarians fail to decry the government coercion involved, since they also wish to invoke the growth of the American republic as a major event in the history of freedom. Even if most libertarians are embarrassed by how much of America’s glory is rooted in land theft and massacres, they do not emphasize land reparations as a solution.

Nor does classical Marxism or communism offer a convenient base for condemnation of this aspect of U.S. history, as those ideologies emphasize the necessity of uprooting earlier modes of production so that economies can progress to capitalism and then socialism.

Even the most optimistic narrative — the convergence of multicultural cooperation and market incentives — is incomplete. Multicultural cooperation breaks down if one side becomes so powerful that it can later simply take from the other side, and that is indeed what happened. So one lesson is that political cooperation usually rests on a delicate balance, with no assurance it will continue over time.

A related lesson of Thanksgiving is that good news can end in bad news, with no real reversal in sight. That, too, is an appropriate reminder for an America that, at least up through the 1990s, was all too willing to congratulate itself as a world historical force for good.

One final Thanksgiving lesson for 2019: A place you love — for me, the United States — can also be a country that in some crucial ways has had very few good guys, at least once you take all of the issues into account. That counsels skepticism about today’s heroes, because it suggests that a near-universal moral failing just might be in our national DNA.

This lack of heroes should also make Americans more reluctant to judge their political opponents so harshly. All of us are part of a system built on longstanding historical crimes, and thus we have more in common with those opponents than we might like to think.

Thanksgiving always has universal lessons. This year they just feel more depressing — and more urgent — than usual.