building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Unfortunately, it is common knowledge that for numerous reasons things turned
out differently. As the historian, Maldwyn Jones, has correctly observed, the origin
of these contrasts was not due to practical questions, but to ideologically different
approaches to life. “The whites did not have any understanding or patience for a
polytheistic culture (and therefore to them "heathen") which considered not only
foreign, but even repugnant the concept of private ownership of the land" 86 .
Howard Zinn goes a step further as regards this policy, which was to result in, and
was to be celebrated by the “transfer” of the American Indians (Indian Removal Act
of 1830), an act the consequences of which are difficult to calculate precisely in
terms of human lives:
And so, “Indian Removal”, as it has been politely called, cleared the land
for white occupancy between the Appalachians and the Mississippi,
cleared it for cotton in the South and grain in the North, for expansion,
immigration, canals, railroads, new cities, and the building of a huge
continental empire clear across to the Pacific Ocean. […] When Jefferson
doubled the size of the nation by purchasing the Louisiana territory from
France in 1803 […] he proposed to Congress that Indians should be
encouraged to settle down on smaller tracts and do farming;
Jefferson's talk of agriculture, manufactures, civilization is crucial. Indian
removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to
agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to money, to the development of
the modern capitalist economy. 87
The result was, that whoever opposed it was exterminated in a few decades, and
the pacific tribes, who did not oppose the invasion of their territories and had tried
to move from hunting to agriculture, could never match the modern land cultivation
and exploitation techniques adopted by the whites and soon faced their ruin and
decay.
86 JONES, A., Maldwyn, The Limits of Liberty American History 1607‐1992, London, Oxford University
Press, 1995 [first ed. 1983], p. 3 [translation by the editor from Italian (tr. it. Storia degli Stati Uniti
d’America. Dalle prime colonie inglesi ai giorni nostri, Milano, Bompiani 2011, p. 9)
87 ZINN, Howard, A people’s History of the United States, New York, Harper&Row, 1980 [translation
by the editor from Italian (it. tr. di Erica Mannucci, Storia del popolo americano, dal 1492 a oggi,
Milano, il Saggiatore, 2010, pp. 92‐93)
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