CHRIS BRAY: Stupidification: The Atlantic Effect.
I was baffled, because that’s not how any of this worked: locals trying to steal land from native people, the kind and gentle federal government trying to stop them. As I wrote yesterday, describing (among other things) the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and Andrew Jackson’s consistent policy of removal, “Flatly, the federal government was invariably the principal agent of American Indian dispossession.” But Jefferson Cowie is about as highly regarded in academia as it’s possible for a historian to be, with a long series of awards and honors and an endowed chair at a major research university. How could a well-respected historian also be someone who thinks that the federal government was trying to prevent Indian dispossession in the 1830s?
Today, with Cowie’s book on white resistance to federal authority in my hands, I can answer that question: he doesn’t. The Jefferson Cowie who appeared on a podcast with Anne Applebaum isn’t quite the Jefferson Cowie who writes books. In the discussion with Applebaum, the benevolent federal government tries to protect the Creeks against dispossession by mean local whites; in the book, federal objections to white settlement on treaty-protected Creek lands are a temporary effort by President Andrew Jackson to sustain an orderly but inevitable removal. . . .
The “he” in that sentence is the President of the United States, so if he was “dead set on Indian removal,” how does that prove the claim that the federal government was trying to protect Creek land rights against “white settlers” who were fighting the federal government to preserve their local “freedom to steal land?” The federal government was doing the stealing — a little more slowly than the settlers wanted. The claim in the book isn’t the claim in the podcast.
Okay then.
Plus: “The subtext underneath all of this discussion screams so loudly that it barely counts as subtext. A book about stupid, backward white people cruelly resisting the wisdom and benevolence of the wonderful federal government appeared in 2022 because Orange Man Bad. Read the reviews: they’re about how Jefferson Cowie’s history of Creek Indian removal in the 1830s shows how mean Donald Trump is.”