This week’s edition of Newsweek has a thought-provoking article on Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.  Author Malcolm Jones points out an interesting historical fact, that both men were born on the same day, February 12, 1809, and both had an extraordinary impact on history.  This celebratory article is likely to be the opening of the literary floodgates, as we get closer to the 200th anniversary of their birth.

Newsweek ponders this question:  which of the two mattered the most?  To Jones its Lincoln, though Darwin is given his due.  I contend, however, that while both are highly relevant, both were also failures, giving us problems that we should rightfully be seeking to correct.

Both men had remarkably similar life experiences, according to Jones.  “Both lost their mothers in early childhood.  Both suffered from depression and both wrestled with religious doubt.  Each had a strained relationship with his father, and each of them lost children to early death.  Both spent the better part of their 20s trying to settle on a career, and neither man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle age:  Darwin published ‘The Origin of Species’ when he was 50, and Lincoln won the presidency a year later.  Both men were private and guarded.”

These are very interesting facts but Jones failed to point out two additional similarities, namely that Lincoln and Darwin were both racists, especially by today’s standards, and their legacies have also been quite destructive. 

Let’s start with Abraham Lincoln, thought by many to be the greatest president in American history, but only when the story is carefully crafted.

So much of what is taught about Lincoln in schools across the nation, from grade school to the doctoral level, is pure myth and outright lies.  He is hailed as the Great Emancipator and “Father Abraham,” a “great friend of the Negro.”  But this is nowhere near the truth.

During the fourth debate with Stephen Douglas at Charleston, Illinois on September 18, 1858 Lincoln gave his personal opinion about blacks: 

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

These thoughts were very well known at the time.  So much so that William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist, did not support Lincoln and called him the “slave hound from Illinois” who has “not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.” 

In fact, slavery was not on Lincoln’s mind when he decided to prevent the Southern States from determining their own future, as the American colonies had done in 1776.  In a letter to Horace Greeley, on August 22, 1862, Lincoln set forth his rationale behind the war:  “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” 

And it must be noted that Lincoln wrote this letter at a time when he had already decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed no slaves at all.  It was nothing more than an executive order that only freed slaves in areas that the Confederacy controlled, areas that Lincoln had no control over.  So, simply put, he had no power to free anyone.  The four slaves states remaining in the Union were not covered under this proclamation, nor were areas of the Confederacy that the Union army occupied.

And what of those slaves who were free, before or during the war?  For all of his life Lincoln favored the colonization of freed blacks in the West Indies, Central America, and Africa.  As president he backed a plan to pay masters to free their slaves then send them out of the United States.  Its obvious, given his statement in the debate with Douglas, that Lincoln did not want blacks in North America.

In addition to being a racist, let’s also point out that Lincoln destroyed the fundamental concept of the Constitution, that of a voluntary association of free states with a federal government of limited powers.  When the war ended, America had ceased to be a federal republic and began the journey toward a national centralized state.  A great pillar of Western Civilization, republican government, was not defended, as he claimed in the Gettysburg Address, but assaulted with intent to destroy.

And for those that condemn George W. Bush for trampling American civil liberties should take a look at Lincoln, who imprisoned 14,000 citizens without trial or charges, seized telegraph offices, waged war without congressional approval, and committed war crimes against Southern civilians.

Not quite the legacy of a man who is deserving of a massive monument in the nation’s capital.

Now let’s turn to Charles Darwin, whose theories led to an on-going assault on another pillar of Western Civilizations – Christianity.

Darwin was a naturalist, a scientist of sorts.  After his famed voyage on the Beagle, he stewed over his ideas of evolution and natural selection for nearly two decades, mainly because he feared they would be viciously attacked.  When it was discovered that other scientists were working on similar theories, and were about to publish them, Darwin rushed his thesis to print in 1859.

Now most everyone knows a little something about Darwin’s thesis, that species evolve, or change, over time and through the process of natural selection weaker species, or weaker members of a given species, will eventually die out.  It is also known by the term, “survival of the fittest,” a term Darwin did not use.  But that accurately describes the process Darwin crafted.

It has been said by many of his defenders, mostly in the academic fields, that Darwin did not have humans in mind when he wrote Origin of the Species.  And, upon reading the text, he does not mention mankind.  He feared the inclusion of humans might lead to further hostility.

But it is clear that humans were implied.  Take a look at the full title of Darwin’s most famous work:  On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  Sound a lot like he is implying humanity to me, not to mention the fact that it is quite racist.  Who could be a “favoured race”?

Darwin’s career was not done, however.  A few years later he published a second book, one which college professors rarely mention.  The second book brings humans into the equation of natural selection.  In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin wrote, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races….” 

Scientists today, like Dr. James Watson, are fired and blackballed for saying much less!

Also in The Descent of Man Darwin puts humans at the top of the evolutionary chain and, within the human race itself, ranks Caucasians at the top.  At the very bottom we find “the negro and the Australian [Aborigines]” ranked just above the ape.

According to Benjamin Wiker, author of 10 Books That Screwed Up The World, And Five Others That Didn‘t Help, “Having read The Descent of Man, we can no longer claim that Darwin didn’t intend the biological theory of evolution outlined in the Origin of Species to be applied to human beings.”

Darwin’s theories have had disastrous consequences.  It led to the present assault on Christianity, on-going these last 150 years.  Darwin’s theories gave the atheist intellectual ammunition to show that God did not create the universe or mankind.  Scientists now can claim that man was “not planned” and a “mere accident,” to quote a few.

It has also led to the advent of Nazism and the Holocaust.  Academic professors in our government university system will always argue, unsurprisingly, that Hitler took Darwinism and perverted it into what they term “Social Darwinism.”  But this, given what we have just read, is not the case.  A large portion of Nazi philosophy is draw directly from Charles Darwin.

Richard Weikart, a professor of history at California State University at Stanislaus, in his book From Darwin to Hitler:  Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, writes that Darwinism gave Hitler and the Nazis the “necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world’s greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.”

So ask yourself who mattered most, Lincoln or Darwin?  Both were racists and both led assaults against important pillars of Western Civilization.  In my book, both are equally destructive and equally worthy of our condemnation, not our praise.

Where George W. Bush will land on any future historian’s list of presidential ranking is anyone’s guess.  Since academia is 85 to 90 percent Democrat, and since Democrats have an intense hatred of Bush, it stands to reason he will not fair very well among university professors.  Yet Bush has angered a good many true conservatives as well, so he is unlikely to find any relief from that group either.

President Bush may take a literary beating for what could very well turn out to be a serious economic downturn, for a policy of fiscal irresponsibility, and a possible quagmire in Iraq but one area he should not take too serious of a hit would be his handling of internal security, in which he has taken a delicate approach with new laws to go after our enemies and prevented any further attacks on the American homeland. 

Though his actions in regard to war policy and civil liberties has been quite tame, historically-speaking, Bush has made many true conservatives, myself included, nervous to say the least.  The serious concern for civil libertarians is this:  what happens when a true tyrant takes office with laws the Bush administration enacted and chooses not to use caution but to use the laws for political advantage and go after its enemies?  Such laws, if absolutely necessary, should always include a “sunset” provision and never be made permanent, as Congress has done with the USA PATRIOT Act.  This was a monumental mistake.

The rights and freedoms of American citizens should never be under threat during wartime or peacetime and the federal government, regardless of who holds the White House, should maintain a constant vigil over them.

But how does Bush compare with Abraham Lincoln, another wartime president with an internal security problem?  Liberals, as well as many moderates and conservatives, praise Lincoln for saving the Union and freeing the slaves, while ignoring his often-times brutal methods.  But those same “scholars” bash Bush for violating the civil liberties of the American people during a war with a dangerous and elusive enemy who uses our free society to operate among us, planning new and more deadly attacks on the homeland.

In short, no president violated the Constitution and trampled the civil liberties of the American people more than Abraham Lincoln.  So let us look briefly at a comparison of the two wartime presidents.

Bush gained authorization from Congress to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the appropriations to carry out the war.  Lincoln raised an army and waged war without congressional consent, refusing to call Congress into session until the conflict has been ongoing for several months.

Bush ordered warrant-less wire taps on overseas calls to suspected Al-Qaeda operatives who might be planning terrorist strikes in the United States, which were approved by Congress.  Lincoln seized and censored Northern telegraph offices unilaterally.  This would be akin to Bush taking over AT&T and listening to every call made each and every day throughout the country without any warrants, congressional approval or oversight, or any court participation. 

The president has not laid a finger on the media but he does oppose a new “shield law,” recommended by some in Congress to protect journalists from having to reveal confidential sources for stories, because just such a law would make it more difficult for the government to catch “leakers.”  Lincoln, by contrast, censored and shut down hundreds of newspapers throughout the North critical of his policies.  Just imagine for a second Bush sending in troops to take over the New York Times!  This very thing Lincoln did on more than one occasion.  A few editors were even arrested and imprisoned.

Bush detains enemy combatants, those persons fighting against American forces on foreign battlefields, and houses them in a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they are treated better than they lived at home, even though they are not protected by the Geneva Convention.  Lincoln arrested and imprisoned, without trial, some 14,000 American citizens, according to historian Mark Neely, many of whom simply disagreed with the administration and became critical of war policy.  He even had a former congressman, Clement Vallandingham, arrested by Union troops in the dead of night and banished to the Confederacy.  Vallandingham was in the midst of a campaign for governor of Ohio in which he was relentless in both his criticism of Lincoln and in his desire to end the war.  President Lincoln was able to carry out these actions by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which the president is not allowed to do under the Constitution.  Anyone advocating peace was considered an enemy and Lincoln would not tolerate it.  Cindy Sheehan would never have been heard from again!

President Bush did not use the military to disrupt the electoral process and assure his re-election in 2004.  Lincoln used Union troops to intimidate Democrats from going to the polls in 1864, and with hostile newspapers silenced, he won a second term, but still with only 55 percent of the vote.  In 1861 he ordered secessionist-leaning members of the Maryland state legislature seized by military force to prevent that state from joining the Confederacy.  In addition he interfered with Maryland’s electoral process to make sure new legislators were in lock-step with preserving the Union.  Self-determination was all but destroyed in the state of Maryland by President Lincoln.

Bush has made no attempt to interfere with the federal court system, even when rulings, such as Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, did not completely go his way.  He has not even invoked the Andrew Jackson policy of ignoring the Supreme Court.  Lincoln not only ignored the Court but even threatened to have Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney arrested for issuing an opinion where he admonished the president for overstepping his constitutional authority in suspending the writ of habeas corpus.  Despite liberal efforts to suppress this story, according to Lincoln critic Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s excellent research in his book Lincoln Unmasked, there was, in fact, an arrest warrant issued by the president intended for the chief justice but never carried out by law enforcement.

The Pentagon has been extremely careful, even to the detriment of our own troops, to keep civilian casualties as low as possible.  No specific actions have ever been taken against civilians in any theater of operations, despite the rantings of Murtha and others.  But our troops have faced trial for acting in self-defense in a war zone, as in the Haditha case, and some have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for putting underwear on the heads of detainees in Iraq.  Mr. Lincoln’s army faced no court martial and acted without regard to any established rules of war.  War crimes specifically directed against Southern civilians were commonplace throughout the conflict, as has been well documented, including Sherman’s brutal march through Georgia and South Carolina and Sheridan’s complete destruction of the Shenandoah Valley, a campaign in which he boasted that a crow flying over the area would be forced to carry rations!

By contrast it must be noted that Confederate armies operating in the North were forbidden by President Jefferson Davis, as well as General Robert E. Lee, from retaliating against the Northern people.  Many Southern soldiers who committed war crimes were hanged.

Bush has received perhaps his harshest criticism over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which even John McCain vows to close.  Yet Gitmo has provided for prisoners better than they deserve, with free prayer rugs, copies of the Koran, and five prayer sessions a day as required by Islam.  And the meal menu looks like something out of Tavern-on-the-Green. 

Lincoln, however, treated Confederate prisoners of war in the most merciless fashion.  The North had ample supplies throughout the war but made no effort care for Confederate soldiers.  One notorious Northern prison was located in Elmira, New York.  It was so bad that Southern troops housed there referred to it as “Hellmira.”  Many froze to death without so much as a blanket in the cold winter months, as others suffered from disease and malnutrition.  Nearly 3,000 died at Elmira, a rate of 25 percent.

The infamous prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia receives all the attention, mainly because the Confederacy lost the war and we all know winners write the history, but how could the South possibly be expected to feed enemy soldiers when they were having trouble feeding their own troops as well as their own civilian population.  And don’t forget Mr. Lincoln instituted an illegal blockage against Southern ports to help starve the Confederacy.

The fact is once a system of prisoner exchange was worked out by both sides in 1862 most of the early prisons were emptied and remained so for two years.  However, that system was ended in 1864 by General Grant to deprive the Confederacy of much-needed troops as he instituted a new campaign to strangle the South.  Yet this is almost never pointed out.  In Ken Burns propaganda piece about the war he blames the ending of the prisoner exchange plan on President Davis and General Lee because of racism for supposedly refusing to exchange Union black troops in Southern custody, preferring to send them back into slavery.  An outrageously untrue claim!

So as you can see, Bush’s policies, though troubling, do not begin to compare with Lincoln, a man who is nearly worshipped by most politicians, Democrat and Republican, and almost all of academia.  Whatever his faults, President Bush has maintained a watch over the liberties of the American people and is not the tyrant in which he is often portrayed by the Left.  The most distressing Bush policy would be the permanency of new security laws, which should be repealed.  But the next time you feel compelled to trash Bush for being the worst tyrant in American history, or hear a member of the Left doing so, think of “Honest” Abe.  There’s no comparison at all.

This week’s issue of U.S. News & World Report is dedicated to America’s Worst Presidents, which is taken from an average of five recent major polls. Presidential rankings, both good and bad, have been around since 1948, when Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. first conducted a survey for Life magazine of academic historians specializing in American history. Such polls, depending on the leanings of the group being surveyed, can differ widely. So, as an up and coming historian, I decided to study the U.S. News poll in depth and construct my own rankings.

The list provided by U.S. News & World Report is as follows: 1. James Buchanan  2. Warren G. Harding  3. Andrew Johnson  4. Franklin Pierce  5. Millard Fillmore  6. John Tyler  7. Ulysses S. Grant  8. William Henry Harrison  9. (tie) Herbert Hoover  9. (tie) Richard Nixon  10. Zachary Taylor.

My rankings, the Walters List, is as follows: 1. Abraham Lincoln  2. Jimmy Carter  3. Woodrow Wilson  4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt  5. Lyndon Baines Johnson  6. Ulysses S. Grant  7. Herbert Hoover  8. Bill Clinton  9. Richard Nixon  10. Gerald Ford.

Both the Walters list and the U.S. News list have just three duplications – Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon, so I will not take the time or space to list the reasons why these are considered failed presidencies. For some the reasons should be obvious. As for the ones that differ, some might come as a shock but I will offer my explanations here in some detail. However, please note that I point out a few of the major weaknesses and faults of these presidents from my vantage point but that is not to say that they did not have some positive accomplishments, for most of them did.

At the top of my list is Abraham Lincoln, who would probably not occupy the list of any professional historian. Lincoln stretched the Constitution past its bounds, trampled the rights of the Southern states, and made a mockery of the cherished American principle of self-determination. The Left, who praises Lincoln, scolds Bush for violating the civil liberties of the American people but let’s consider “Honest” Abe’s actions. He waged war without congressional consent, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, imprisoned thousands of American citizens without charges or trial, seized and censored telegraph offices, shut down hundreds of newspapers while arresting and imprisoning editors, attacked civilians, interfered with the electoral process, and destroyed the voluntary Union of our Founders to replace it with a centralized state. How could anyone praise these actions is beyond me!

Also missing the cut for the U.S. News poll, but ranked second on my list, is Jimmy Carter. Let’s be honest with ourselves here – just what did this man get right? How he stayed off the U.S. News list is beyond me. As I often like to joke about Carter, it’s really not fair to criticize him because he only had two failures during his presidency – foreign policy and domestic policy. But seriously this is not too far from the truth. When Carter left the White House in 1981, the United States was not only considerably weaker on the world stage, but downright humiliated. With a U.S. embassy seized and hostages held in Tehran, Carter looked as inept, incompetent and as pathetically weak as he actually was. There was no facade to cover his yellow streak. And we paid the price for it, and according to some, are still paying it. The economy was in shambles as well, with inflation, unemployment, and interest rates all in double-digits; the country nearly fell into a depression, and viewing the situation in the everyday lives of the American people, we were in one. And as one scholar has noted, Jimmy Carter proved that the presidency is not the place for on-the-job training. There are some, however, who would point to Carter’s negotiation of the Camp David Accords in 1978, but, it must be noted that the foundation of this agreement was laid in the Nixon Administration, as Carter simply picked up the pieces from what Kissinger had begun but had not been able to complete. And given the fact that both Israel and Egypt are the two largest recipients of American foreign aid, isn’t it highly probable that we are actually paying them not to fight?

Woodrow Wilson receives my third ranking. Though this might be a bit of a surprise to some, particularly those left of center, Wilson did cause irreparable damage to our republic in my opinion, and according to one scholar, brought on World War II. Wilson was a Progressive, and he, like FDR later, sought to change the nation’s fundamental institutions. During this Progressive Era, two new amendments were added to the Constitution that radically altered it, as much as did the Fourteenth. The first, though passed before Wilson entered office but with his support, was the Sixteenth, which gave the federal government the right to impose and collect direct taxes on the people without those taxes being apportioned. This simply means the government could levy an income tax. This tax was only supposed to be imposed on the rich and on corporations, but as with all other government promises, it too was broken. By the time Wilson left office the top rate skyrocketed from two percent in 1913 to seventy percent in 1921. The Seventeenth Amendment also met Wilson’s approval and is much more damaging than many people realize. This amendment took away the representatives of the states – United States Senators. We now popularly elect our senators, but this is not what the Founders intended. And with the states losing proper representation in Washington, state’s rights and state sovereignty endured a crippling blow.

Wilson’s other faults: He created the Federal Reserve System, which is a private entity for which Congress has no direct control that runs our banking system and much of our economy, and he, like FDR, lied us into World War I, a war we easily could have stayed out of. Cato senior fellow Jim Powell theorizes that had we stayed out of World War I, then the result would have been much different, with no rise of any Nazi State in Germany and no World War II.

The biggest shocker of all, and holder of my fourth spot, is FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This president set out to deliberately change the nation’s fundamental economic system of capitalism to a more socialist-based economy. FDR made repeated statements that the Great Depression was caused by a failure of capitalism and the free enterprise system, and needed to be overhauled. This was the greatest expansion and power grab in our history. And as scholar Jim Powell has pointed out, the New Deal failed miserably as an economic recovery program and actually made the Depression worse. With FDR, the nature of our federal government was altered permanently, as now more and more of our citizens look to Washington for help and solutions, rather than looking to ourselves as individuals. FDR began what LBJ finished. Among FDR’s other shortcomings: He lied us into World War II, rather than lead us, and, using the phrase “concentration camp,” imprisoned, by executive order and without trial, thousands of American citizens solely based on their race. And this is the man we built a multi-million dollar monument to in Washington, D.C. A few of the typical “worst presidents” never would have done anything so abhorrent to constitutional government.

Only one word needs to be uttered to describe the disastrous presidency of the next member of my list – Vietnam. Lyndon Baines Johnson generally receives a middle-of-the-road rating because his domestic policy was good, according to the left, but his foreign policy was a disaster. The latter I buy and I don’t believe there are any serious scholars who would disagree but the former is another story. Beginning with domestic policy, LBJ’s Great Society was a monstrous addition to the New Deal. But, where the New Deal at least required work, in the form of works projects, to receive aid, the Great Society took from the American worker and gave to the non-worker, making direct cash payments to those who will not do a thing, and are not required to. Johnson believed poverty could be wiped out by spending $10 billion, but now we have roughly the same percentage of poor people as we did in 1964, when the “war on poverty” was announced, and the population is much larger now than it was then, so in real terms there’s a lot more poverty today. As for public expenditures, the last numbers I saw, in welfare and welfare-related spending since 1964, was over $6 trillion! I believe we can chalk this one up as a failure and the greatest robbery of American taxpayers in our history. As for foreign policy, I will let it speak for itself. Vietnam taught us how not to fight a war. I wonder if we have really learned from this lesson?

To be fair, unlike the many liberal scholars today, I did not include, or even consider, George W. Bush in this list, for it is simply much too early to give him a final grade, although at this point I would not rank him very high. But I did include Bill Clinton, who bumbled and fumbled his way through a mostly “do-nothing” presidency. But Clinton’s failures were numerous and disastrous. Aside from a sex scandal in which he lied under oath and was impeached, some of Clinton’s policies could very well be construed as treasonous. He illegally raised foreign funds for his re-election campaign in 1996, exchanging cash for technology to the Communist Chinese, which boosted their ballistic missile program by decades, putting America at greater risk to Chinese nuclear attack. Clinton further weakened the United States by cutting the U.S. military in half, then failed to capture Osama Bin Laden when he was offered by the Sudanese. He also demonstrated to Al Qaeda American impotence by not responding to persistent terror attacks against the World Trade Center in 1993, the Kobar Towers in 1996, U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000, for which he did absolutely nothing! No wonder Bin Laden believed he could launch the 9/11 attack in 2001. September 11, 2001 can be laid at the feet of President William Jefferson Clinton!

Gerald Ford rounds out my list simply because he, like Carter, was way out of his league in the Oval Office. He pardoned Nixon before he was even indicted for crimes he may have committed (and probably did commit) during the Watergate Scandal, rather than let justice take its course. His foreign policy was utterly incompetent, as he allowed North Vietnam to overrun the South, thereby instantly transferring more than 58,000 American deaths in Southeast Asia to the category of “Died in Vain.” In a debate with Carter in 1976 he infamously stated that the Soviets did not dominate Eastern Europe! I’m sure the Pols would have agreed with that one! And finally he appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, causing Pat Buchanan to bolt to Reagan.

Let me also say a few words about a president who makes every list without fail but did not make mine, Warren G. Harding, who, along with Calvin Coolidge, will be the subject of a future book of mine. Harding, in my opinion, has been treated unfairly by historians. His presidency, though well below average in some respects, should receive enough credit in other areas to get him out of the historical gutter. So let us compare scholarly treatment of Harding and Clinton.

Clinton receives ratings as high as he does (usually somewhere in the middle) for his handling of the economy and maintaining a peaceful nation, while his many scandals are pushed to the rear. Historians generally cite the fact that he was never really implicated in any scandal as the reason he is given somewhat of a pass. But Harding falls into exactly the same category – his administration pulled the nation out of its worse recession and led it into the most robust economic growth in American history, a rate of more than seven percent a year during the Roaring ‘20s. Harding’s many scandals also stayed away from him personally, and the worst ones, such as Teapot Dome, were not revealed until after his death and many of his contemporaries believe history would judge him well. The nation was also at peace under Harding, a “return to normalcy.” The Washington Naval Conference was held during his administration, an attempt to reduce the most fearsome weapon system of the day.

Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, who generally makes most lists, was conspicuously absent from the U.S. News rankings, and rightfully so. Coolidge successfully managed the Harding-Mellon economic turnaround, continuing a program that saw four major tax cuts, a reduction of the national debt by one-third, a budget surplus every year he was in office, and a drop in unemployment from 12 percent to just 3 percent in 1929! Why such a record does not rank in the top 10 or 15 is a travesty of judgment in my opinion.

 

If you have been watching the mass protests by Hispanic groups across the nation on any other network than Fox News, you would probably come to the conclusion that it is simply a demonstration by patriotic citizens and immigrants angry over the possibility of new restrictions imposed by Congress. Though there have been some who have waved American flags, as we see on those other networks, most of the demonstrators have held high the banner of Mexico and signs that I would consider treasonous. With chants of “Mexico!” “Mexico!” the protesters held many anti-American signs, some of which stated that the American Southwest belongs to them and that we stole it from Mexico. These people need a quick lesson in the history of their own country.

In the early 19th century Texas was a Northern province of Mexico, then under the thumb of Spain. Stephen F. Austin began leading settlers into Texas in 1821 with the intent on starting a colony there. Mexico, however, gained its independence from Spain that very year. As thousands of Americans poured into Texas, many seeking a new start for themselves, Mexico began to clamp down on the migration and eventually began to pass measures that many Americans thought to be severe restrictions on their freedoms, one of which was a ban on slavery. Texas was soon in a state of revolt by the mid-1830’s and formally declared its independence from Mexico in 1836.

 Seeking to put down the rebellion, General Santa Anna, also Mexico’s president (actually he was more like a dictator), led his army into Texas, in what historian Richard Bruce Winders has called a “war of extermination.” He crushed the Texans, who had gained the support of many American volunteers, at the Alamo, then won again at Goliad, where he ordered more than 300 prisoners executed. Yet this did little to discourage the Texas army under Sam Houston, who trapped Santa Anna at San Jacinto and nearly destroyed his army.

Santa Anna was captured the next day and given a choice: be executed or give up all claims to Texas. And, being the head of state, he signed a treaty that recognized the independence of Texas. The Treaty of Velasco, signed in the presence of both the president and vice president of the Republic of Texas, stated that the southern boundary of Texas, its border with Mexico, would be the Rio Grande River, and all Mexican forces had to retreat south of that boundary. The Mexican government would later claim that the true boundary was the Nueces River, near Corpus Christi. However, a new government in Mexico City, in effect, removed Santa Anna from office and declared the treaty to be null and void. This is where the arguments center.

The Mexican government did not, and would not, recognize the Republic of Texas, and President Andrew Jackson, because of domestic political considerations, did not do so until his final day in office, March 4, 1837.

The Republic of Texas maintained its independence for a few years but there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that it would eventually end up in the United States. That was accomplished, despite Mexican threats and a break in diplomatic relations, as a new, young president was taking office. James K. Polk became the 11th president of the United States in 1845 and was full of the spirit of Manifest Destiny that was pervading the nation. President Polk sought to make America a continental power and was eyeing other Mexican territories, namely California.

The Mexican government was crying for war as Texas became the 28th state in the Union. But President Polk did not want war and sought to avoid conflict in his quest for more Mexican land. He offered to buy New Mexico for $5 million, to negotiate a price for California, and for the U.S. to assume all of Mexico’s debt of $4.5 million in exchange for a recognition of the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of the United States. The Mexican government refused. Knowing that there was a dispute over the boundary of Texas, Polk sent an army under General Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande in the hopes that such an action would provoke the Mexican army to attack. It worked.

The Mexican War lasted from April 1846 until September 1847, when American forces under General Winfield Scott captured Mexico City. Officially concluding the war, the Mexican government agreed to the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which granted the U.S. the rights to California, New Mexico, and all of the present-day U.S. southwest, from Sante Fe to San Francisco. And out of the goodness of our hearts, the United States also paid Mexico $15 million dollars for the land we had just gained with our blood, sweat, tears, and treasure.

Now that all seems fairly simple to me and any other reasonable American – we won and they lost, and to lose is to pay a price, but the Mexicans don’t see it quite that way. They feel that all of the American Southwest still belongs to them, because we “stole” it somehow, so to cross over the border into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, or California is not really illegal because it’s theirs anyway. A poll recently conducted in Mexico found that an astonishing 60 percent of the population of Mexico agreed with that position. This is both a result of ignorance and Mexican propaganda.

Fanning the flames on this side of the border are several prominent, radical Latino organizations, such as MEChA, that hope to reclaim this area under Mexican sovereignty or a new Mexican nation, a movement known as the Reconquista. Some have already designated Los Angeles as the capital of what is known as Aztlan, the seven states of the American southwest. The idea is to get millions of Mexican immigrants to flood the Southwest, many of which would obviously be illegal, wait for another blanket amnesty, like some in Washington are proposing, and hopefully gain enough voters to break the southwest off via a legal referendum. Don’t think it’s serious? We might just wake up to that reality one day. What would be our response? How could we deny it since we are in the process of spreading democracy around the globe? We would look mighty hypocritical if we moved in to stop it!

In addition to radical organizations, there are several prominent Hispanics in this country, on the taxpayer payroll, who are advocating a splintering of our country. One of which is political science Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, who teaches as the University of Texas in Austin. He recently made David Horowitz’s list of the 101 most dangerous academics in America. Professor Gutierrez, according to Horowitz, once advocated killing Americans if that is what was necessary to accomplish Aztlan. In 2004 he boasted that Hispanics were “the future of America. Unlike any prior generation, we now have the critical mass. We’re going to Latinize this country.” He is also the author of a lovely book entitled A Chicano Manual on How to Handle Gringos.  Friends, this used to be called treason!

So ask yourself, my fellow citizens, is this acceptable to you? Some might argue that the right of self-determination, or secession, is a natural right. That may be so but for foreigners to come into this country, most being illegal and prodded by their own governments, and try to take part of it away does not fall under any category of rights. We, as a nation, do possess the right of self-determination and self-preservation. We have a right to determine for ourselves who can come here and who can’t. I just hope and pray that we, as Americans, will protect the nation of our fathers, our culture, our heritage, and our history, and pass it on, better than we left it, to our future generations.