Everybody Needs Some Elbow Room!
A memory of pop culture and its linkage to broader myths about America.
My tab-clearing reference to a Time piece on colonial expansion in the Americas sparked a mini conversation in the comment thread that made me think of the above piece from Schoolhouse Rock. For anyone unfamiliar, Schoolhouse Rock was a series of education cartoons that ran between Saturday morning cartoons on ABC in the 1970s and into the 1980s. They famously included such bits as I’m Just a Bill about the legislative process and Conjunction Junction with its lessons on grammar, and so forth. I still remember the song that goes along with the preamble of the US Constitution and recall that when I had the assignment in the 8th grade to memorize it that I didn’t have to actually do any work because the words were already in my brain.
At any rate, the conversation about how the clash between European settlers and the native people of the Americas and how history is written by the winners made me think of Elbow Room. The piece strikes me as a perfect distillation of the dominant myth that residents of the United States, in particular, tell themselves: that the continent was largely empty, that we were destined to control it, and that we got it by hard work and ingenuity (not to mention God’s blessings). And, we needed the space, by golly.
I highlight the United States because it is impossible, for a variety of reasons, for Latin American countries to pretend like the space they occupy was once empty.
Of the things that are pretty amazing viewing this as an adult with some level of education include:
- The way the Louisiana Purchase seamlessly includes all of the western United States (we can gloss over the Mexican-American War, for example).
- There were some “fights over land rights” which includes an arrow shot at folks in the “Oregon or Bust” wagon (~1:40), but that is the only reference to the indigenous population.
- How political slogans of the nineteenth century (i.e., “manifest destiny”) resonated well into the twentieth.
While I know there is some discussion of indigenous persons and Western expansion in American schools, and in broader American culture, it seems to me, at least, that the dominant myth is that the space was just sitting here waiting for us to show up and tame. (I will say that my experience in public schools in both Texas and California was there was a good deal of focus on native culture, but a lot less on what the US government did to those cultures).
At any rate, I have nothing more to add than to share these observations as inspired by the previous conversation. If anything, this might stir some nostalgia for Saturday morning cartoons back in the day, or provide an amusing example of 1970s pop culture.
Well, the space WAS empty but for a half-million-plus Native Americans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. (down from ~3 million in the 15th century)
Cracker and I have had several interesting conversations following on that post, and this coincides with my memories of primary education in the 60s and early 70s. Comparison with what/how daughter was taught in the 90s and aughts was eye-opening.
Topics and musings such as these are one of many delights of OTB. Many thanks to our hosts and commentariat.
@daryl and his brother darryl: On the one hand, sure. On the other, the western US is still largely empty now, but that doesn’t mean it is up for grabs.
I think the notion of the space being empty still undercuts what colonization and western expansion meant for native populations.
For that matter, the idea that the colonists in 1803 needed elbow room is a bit absurd, yes?
Manifest Destiny. In Slouching Towards Utopia Brad DeLong quotes Mein Kampf
Toward which goal he basically destroyed his own country. And the rebuilt nation doesn’t seem to suffer greatly under shortage of land or food.
@daryl and his brother darryl: Don’t forget all those bison.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Hey, hold up there, Professor. I believe you may have stumbled accidentally upon a useful thought. (Which I suspect is how all academics work) I believe we have established historical precedent for a finding that underpopulated areas should be invaded by, well, anyone who’s available. We could and clearly should, do a version of the Oklahoma Land Rush.
We line up, let’s say, Californians, on the border of Wyoming. I see a solid line of sheepish Tesla drivers, people in odd EV’s (Looking at you, @EddieInCA) and owners of fine Fine German Engineering (Still, somehow looking at Eddie), and upon a text notification, they would all race to pre-determined GPS co-ordinates, and plant their digital flags.
Californians could sell their LA and SF homes (average price: $9.3 million, IIRC) and massively improve the 10 or 20 square miles of dirt they’d acquire. The first Peet’s would be up within weeks. The Chugwater, WY Trader Joe’s would follow inevitably.
I got a DVD of the complete Schoolhouse Rock for my kids when they were young, and it struck me when looking at the history ones how hard they tried to stay away from anything controversial by the standards of the period they were shown, so this one, one about inventions during the Industrial Revolution and the one about women getting the right to vote were the only ones which dealt with events after 1800.
It is impossible for me to see the words “We, the people…” and not have that catchy, clever song kick off in my brain.
My brain wakes up and chimes in “in order to form a more perfect union” immediately. I have no control about that. It just happens. Some things get lodged so deep in your neurons they are impossible to escape. They just spit out reflexively.
Same deal with hearing “Conjunction Junction” immediately begets “what’s your function?”
That call and response part of our brains is really fascinating. It can be a good as in being able to recall large chunks of the Preamble to the Constitution verbatim on demand. It can be bad when you recall childhood traumas from a trigger.
While I know there is some discussion of indigenous persons and Western expansion in American schools, and in broader American culture, it seems to me, at least, that the dominant myth is that the space was just sitting here waiting for us to show up and tame. (I will say that my experience in public schools in both Texas and California was there was a good deal of focus on native culture, but a lot less on what the US government did to those cultures).
I guess it depends on when you were born and what you were you exposed to and how much you believed in what you learned in school or in Schoolhouse Rock. By the 80s, I think you would have to be pretty sheltered to believe in ‘Elbow Room’. And while I’m sure there are people walking around who, if exposed to a work like Blood Meridian would be outraged, but who exactly are they?
@Moosebreath:
As I remember history in HS, one might have gotten the impression that the end of history was at the close of the civil war. Maybe a chapter or two on WWI and WWII.
The German word for “elbow space” is lebensraum, literally “living space”. The Nazis co-opted the word and made it practically taboo for modern polite usage.
Akin to “Manifest Destiny”. The US definitely committed genocide on purpose in order to expand westward.
European settlers saw the native indigenous people as an impediment. In many cases as less than human. Almost as vermin.
@Sleeping Dog:
My little high school had an entire semester class on WWII, and US History went all the way up to Vietnam (which ended only ~10 years prior).
However, the only reference to WWI was a single line in the Russian History” “Russia withdrew from WWI to fight a the revolution”.
My mother, before she died, shared an interesting tidbit with me, about me when I was very young.
Apparently, I was a remarkably exceptional mimic when I was a toddler. If I heard something and was paying attention I could repeat it back, albeit with some odd toddler approximation of some of the words. Didn’t understand most of the words or the concepts or the context. I just spat it back out like a mynah bird. Apparently, I would just follow her around a store when she was shopping and repeat out loud conversations I’d overheard. Which sometimes was super embarrassing to her.
@de stijl:
Ahhh… thank you.
That completely explains why Mel Brooks YELLED out that word LOUDLY while dressed as an
Indianindigenous american in Blazing Saddles.Both funny and deeply troubling at the same time.
But that is how it is, right? As Steve Martin said: “Comedy is not pretty”.
@de stijl: Funny. Whenever I hear “in order to form a more perfect union” this is the song that comes to mind for me. Must be the age difference.
@Sleeping Dog: I Washington State, where I grew up, we’re required to take US history 3 times–Grade 5, Grade 8, and Grade 10–IIRC. I think we got to WWI once and only got to WWII by skipping WWI the time we made it that far. When I got to my teacher training classes, the school I went to had 3 or 4 US history classes to make the sequence complete and US History II, only covered to 1945. I took an “after 1945” class and I think there was one “contemporary US history” class beyond that, because we didn’t do the civil rights movement and beyond. A lot to cover, though.
@Mu Yixiao: Of course, when Sleeping and I went to school, Vietnam wasn’t history yet. We did discuss it in my “Contempory World Problems” class my senior year, though. Fun times.
*Fun note about CWP: It was a two-semester class. One component was a course covering civics, along with logic and argument. The second component was study and discussion of important contemporary issues–civil rights, Vietnam War, Cold War, and so on. Every senior took the two sections from two different teachers even though all 3 or 4 teachers taught both parts and in the same sequence. The explanation I was given (of course I why–that’s who I am) was that the school wanted the students to have a better chance at having experienced both conservative and liberal thought during the year. Our faculty included a classic liberal, a classic conservative (who it turned out was both gay and a labor unionist in the early days of the Seattle Teachers’ Union, ironically enough), a man who had fought in the Resistance (as a young person/early teen, no less) and emigrated to the US post war, and what we could best be described as an objectivist libertarian corporatist. Very fun times.
@Sleeping Dog:
This was my experience in 8th grade in Texas and 11th grade in California. (I graduated HS in 1986).
@Steven L. Taylor: My experience was that the schedule for history kept slipping a bit each week until the teacher tried to cover WWII onwards up to the modern day in the last week.
It wasn’t a very in-depth explanation, for obvious reasons.
It’s troubling for sure. I think the most troubling aspect of this is that “right of conquest” was a recognized thing among pretty much everyone on the planet in 1800. And most of them in 1900.
We moved off that idea with the Atlantic Charter and the “right of self-determination”. If we keep seeing challenges to that idea in our current world, it’s because we’re fighting against maybe 100,000 years of human history.
Let me be clear. I think it’s a good fight. I support the right of self-determination of peoples. I just like knowing what I’m up against.
@Mu Yixiao:
Very, very different perspectives on WW1 between US and Europe.
US was a belligerent for about a year and a half, with around 53,000 dead.
Which was less than half the British losses in a single battle at Arras in 1917.
Even after WW2 people in Britain often referred to 1914-18 as “The Great War” and there was never any doubt which one they meant by that name.
There are only 53 “Thankful Villages” in Britain; that is civil parishes where all the men survived WW1.
In France there is only one single village.
Interesting bit of US History I learned recently: do you know why Oklahoma has that little extraneous strip of land sticking out on the west side of the state?
It was originally part of Texas, but because of the Missouri compromise, Texas had to give it up to join the union as a slave state (the southern edge of that strip turns out to be exactly in line with the southern straight edge of Missouri). Oklahoma was the last state to be created in that part of the country and ended up with all the territory that wasn’t already part of another state, including that strip.
@Liberal Capitalist:
Lebensraum.
If you were a German citizen during that era, you knew what that meant, what that implied. Doesn’t matter who you voted for in the last election, you were told this was the policy and comply or die. Clap now!
We are going to invade Poland and exterminate all of the filthy Slavs who live there and repopulate the land with good German colonists. It wasn’t even subtly implied. It was stated quite boldly. Genocide was the solution. It wasn’t hidden!
We need and deserve living space.
Same deal with “Manifest Destiny”. We said out loud to the world we are going to kill the natives and steal their land.
Because we can. Because we want to. Because we covet. Because our weapons are better. Because we think you are subhuman.
In my central Illinois civics class in the late ‘70s, we read Custer Died for Your Sins and Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (this written by a local author). I need to thank that teacher, Fred Schooley (and his mom who taught me in grade school and his family for being “those people” in my educational life) and my high school’s social studies teachers as a group for moving us along. I guess they “woke” us early.
@Steven L. Taylor:
For me NH, in the late 1960’s. At that time the state was extremely conservative and the school curriculum’s reflected that. Not talking about recent history, or history that continued to be reflected in the then, contemporary society, was safe.
And as @Just nutha ignint cracker: mentioned, Viet Nam was a your for it or against it topic.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Seriously? JEEbus!!! Class of ’78 here.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Ah , yes, the happy days when Mr. D was explaining to the inner city lads what a real ghetto was. I remember laughing as I walked past the door to the teachers lounge and hearing 2 or more of them ‘discussing’ various topics – loudly and often profanely
@JohnSF: Just so. I have a friend who grew up in the hamlet of Grafton Underwood, Northants. Two of her great-uncles were killed in The Great War.
@Liberal Capitalist:
Me too.
These young’ns. Sheesh.