#BeforeWeWereWhite – Before We Were White

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Taking Stock: A Reminder of the BWWW Mission

5 March 2025/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Southern Appalachian mountain family

4 years, 20 episodes, and 163 essays

In which we reintroduce ourselves…

In such challenging, and yes, scary times, all of us look for voices of sanity.

Not ranting, not polemics, just good old-fashioned sober analysis of what is going down.

Investigative journalism is being gutted by the takeover of mainstream media by a coterie of billionaires.

The people behind Project 2025 would like to push an agenda in which our children are only allowed to learn and read things aligning with a White Christian Nationalist outlook.

People interested in learning the truth about anything – current affairs, history, science, corruption – are now forced to fight through a daily firehose of bots, misinformation, disinformation, lies, and AI-generated slop and propaganda.

Who can we trust?

For a start, we should deal with verifiably real people who are up front about their education and the source of their claimed expertise.

Here is a mini-bio so you know a bit about the person behind Before We Were White – Podcast.

My name is Brian Halpin. I was born 60+ years ago in Kansas City, Missouri.

I left home and school at 15 but managed to work my way through college, eventually picking-up a degree in archeology (specializing in the prehistory of the British Isles and underwater archeology).

Completing a degree meant less to me than the effort it took to become a competent ironworker/blacksmith somewhat later.

Far more than my work or education, I am most proud of managing to raise (along with my partner) a good kid who understands right and wrong.

My personal passions have always been nature, music, history, art, science, writing, and handmade things – both artistic and practical – which speak of human creativity reaching for something more than mere profit.

A couple of decades ago, a restless mind (probably sprinkled with the dust of obsessiveness) caused me to wonder why my deceased grandfather had looked so…brown.

Genealogical investigations soon morphed into general historical investigations, and within a few years, I had compiled a database with well over a million records.

This database very possibly represents one of the most comprehensive examinations and collations of information about the ethnic background of frontier-era Americans in existence.

This database is the foundation of my “expertise”, and the basis upon which I feel qualified to offer certain opinions.

So when I write an essay saying that the earliest settling and colonizing of the American frontier was done by mixed-ethnic people, it is because I have viewed the 1820 census form showing that Daniel Boone‘s daughter married into a family including free people of color from Maryland, for example.

When I critique religion in the USA, I can draw on innumerable papers and historical records showing the high levels of illiteracy among frontier era preachers, or the numbers of preachers who came from a partly non-European background.

When my opinions run counter to received wisdom – such as the widespread belief that only wealthy southern planters were slaveholders – I can point to thousands upon thousands of historical records telling a different story.

This sort of in-depth research and investigation soon leads one to the realization that the average American’s perception of American history is deeply flawed and often downright wrong.

This is often not through any fault of their own, but is due to centuries of historical teaching being curated by people with an agenda.

*****

I eventually felt compelled to share this information in the face of ever-increasing right-wing ideological attacks on people teaching real history – that is to say, people who prize truth over mythology and propaganda.

And so was born the Before We Were White podcast during the Covid-19 lockdown days of 2020.

My primary goal was the deconstruction of the American belief in, and obsession with “race”, and in particular, the concept of “racial superiority”.

Why “race”?

Because the USA is founded on a combination of myths concerning “race” and “American exceptionalism”.

Without the myth of “racial differences” and “racial superiority” being invented by the greedy in order to justify the enslavement of others, our entire history and present would look completely different.

There would have been no Andrew Jackson, no Andrew Johnson. No Civil War. There would have been no KKK. No “Mississippi Goddamn“, no Rosa Parks, no Central Park Five, no George Floyd, no BLM.

There would be no Donald Trump, no Elon Musk, no Peter Thiel, no J. D. Vance.

Why? Because all of the above coup instigators are themselves racists of one stripe or another, and the sooner we say it constantly and out loud, the better.

They were only able to give their long-planned power grab an air of legitimacy by directing the outcome of an election with shocking amounts of money and laser-focussed propaganda emanating from the newspapers, TV channels, and social media platforms owned by these selfsame billionaires and unscrupulous technocrats.

Most of the propaganda involved not-so-subtle forms of racist messaging directed at the post-Reagan, Fox News-viewing GOP base of “White Christian Evangelicals”.

Remember those dog and cat-eating Haitians? Mexican rapists? Venezuelan gangs taking-over entire towns?

And while quite literally weaponizing hatred in order to gain office, these same people endlessly claim that the USA is more virtuous, fair, moral, and democratic than other countries.

This tactic is as old as civilization itself. People will always vote for the person confirming their “specialness”.

After 400 years of living under tyrannical emperors (after Julius Caesar trashed the Roman Republic), most Roman citizens still lived in a virtuous republic in their heads, where just being born Roman was enough to satisfy their need to feel “special”.

Roman emperors and senators and patricians understood that for the mob, “freedom” is a state of mind, disconnected from reality.

J. D. Vance has already stated as much, explicitly. He has said that it is time for the USA to move into a “post-Republic” era.

All hail the new, improved, all-American Caesars!

The Romans could be cruel, chauvinistic and prejudiced. But at least they weren’t so stupid as to be racists.

Now do your best Roman/Nazi salute…

*****

If a nation is to remain cohesive primarily through a belief in its own exceptional virtue, then anything suggesting otherwise must be suppressed, stamped-out.

“White” America, like Pontius Pilate, wants to wash its hands of all responsibility for the trans-generational social, emotional, mental, and economic damage caused by 300+ years of “white” supremacy and rapacious capitalism.

“White” America and corporate America do want to hear or talk about the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the theft of indigenous homes and lands, slavery, slave rape, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, school segregation, red-lining – or how the current president of the USA and his father made a fortune in real estate through racist rental practices.

Even worse, “white” America wants to cast all worthy American achievements as “white achievements”, even though everything which is both good and quintessentially “American” ALWAYS has people of all ethnic backgrounds at its root.

Before We Were White decided to go straight for the jugular in this respect.

The history of colonial America and the early USA is not an exclusively “white story”, however hard Hollywood, TV, and politicians haved tried for decades to make it appear so.

When we say that the history of colonial America and the early USA is not just a “white story”, do not take this to mean we simply replace the “white story” with a “tri-racial” story shared between “white”, “Black”, and “indigenous” peoples.

We are going much further, and saying that in an American context, the very concept of “white people” in a profoundly mixed-ethnic population is a ridiculous and arbitrary construction.

Humans are not able to be categorized into three or four distinct “colors” or “races”. Especially not in the USA.

AMERICANS WITH DEEP ROOTS IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY TIMES ARE ALL RELATED, WHATEVER THEIR PERCEIVED “RACE”.

Don’t get me wrong. If a person is SEEN as being a certain “race”, TREATED as being a certain “race”, IDENTIFIES as a certain “race”, then “race” is all too real in a certain respect.

It would be just the same if there were no such thing as God, but millions of people still acted as if God existed.

This would mean that religion, just like racism, would affect how everyone experiences life – especially non-believers.

Before We Were White digs at the foundations of the deep-seated American belief in “whiteness”, and the belief in certain quarters that this “whiteness” is under attack, and in need of protection.

MOST OF THE UNDERCLASSES WHO SETTLED THE AMERICAN FRONTIER(S) WERE OF MIXED-ETHNICITY. EVEN THE ONES CALLING THEMSELVES “WHITE”.

And the historical record – census records, slave records, marriage records, wills, land transfers, letters – backs-up this contention.

To be a racist in America, more often than not, means to despise many of one’s own ancestors.

Fact.

*****

As I said at the beginning of this screed, current events – an ongoing fascist coup – have caused decent people everywhere to seek out reliable sources of information.

It is no coincidence that the current triumvirate tearing-down US democracy – Trump, Musk, Vance – are racists and white supremacists.

This is not a thing I say flippantly. The evidence is overwhelming.

Before We Were White finds itself in a place where its subject matter meets the current moment.

This has led to an embarrassing backlog of emails on my website as I write.

Good people. Worried people. Generous people who have donated money to the Before We Were White project.

Everything has come so fast this year that I find myself caught between two stools, as the saying goes.

With thousands of “legacy” readers and listeners on other platforms, and new readers and listeners now arriving via Substack, a demand for more blogs and podcasts clearly exists, but there is more work and more correspondence than can be managed by one person still needing to do other work to keep food on the table.

A small number of deeply generous and loyal subscribers and patrons have kept this boat afloat up to now, but we’ll definitely need to grow this subscriber and patron list in order to kick-on and hire more crew to make this boat sail more quickly and smoothly.

Which is a long-winded way to say “sorry” for the correspondence backlog, but until we can afford to take on the extra hands which would allow us to answer all emails in a timely fashion while also writing and producing regular blogs and podcasts, “we are where we are”.

Meanwhile, away from the writing desk, life’s other realities eat up the hours.

Photo: Working outdoors this week, still clearing storm damage from January with helper named Layla. We are definitely not an AI-generated presence.

Thank you to everyone who supports this project in any way. I’ve no doubt we’ll get there eventually.

And yes, the truth WILL set us free.

Before We Were White is a reader-supported publication.

Please consider becoming a donor or paid subscriber.

Revenge of the Weird* Kids

3 September 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Revenge of the nerds?

Why is J. D. Vance misrepresenting his ethnic background?

1) Because he’s a man with limited knowledge of his own family?

or is it because:

2) If he admitted his ancestors were once “not quite white” Appalachians, he would have to confront the real historical reasons for transgenerational poverty there?

or maybe:

3) By claiming to be “Scots-Irish”, he gets to claim a White Christian Nationalist identity which goes down well with a certain bloc of voters?

4) Or is Vance and his entire bootstrapping “Hillbilly” persona a construction crafted by shadowy multi-billionaire Libertarian puppet-masters who have been

grooming him for power?

The answer is probably “all of the above”.

*****

Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal, has had a profound influence on Vance’s fast track political career, seeding him millions of dollars to launch “Narya”, before funding a successful campaign to win his US Senate seat in 2022. No one in American history has occupied the office of vice president with less political experience.

Vance is also being cheered-on by Elon Musk of X and Tesla, and Jacob Helberg of “Palantir”. “Palantir” is a Big Data mining and analytics company founded by the above-mentioned Thiel which services Big Business and governments – a powerful tool for politicians hoping to micro-target voters, identify points of dissent, and keep tabs on “enemies”.

These people are Libertarian in outlook, which essentially means they support complete deregulation of Big Tech and other mega businesses.

It is fascinating and simultaneously terrifying just how many of these Silicon Valley techno-feudalists have framed their outlook within fantasy worlds like Tolkien‘s “Lord of the Rings”, or on role-playing games like “Dungeons and Dragons”.

Over the past 50 years, any teenager prone to pondering “Big Ideas” eventually landed on Libertarianism as their pet political ideology for a while. Most teenagers with even an iota of humility or social empathy eventually outgrow Ayn Rand and dumb Libertarian ideas, realising that it is nothing more than a fluffed-up, right wing version of anarchism – minus any social conscience.

Men like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are essentially teenage boys who became rich enough to live out their adolescent fantasies well beyond puberty:

“My own sovereign territory on Mars!”

“Being cryogenically preserved in the name of immortality!”

“Controlling the fates of nations!”

“I bet Susan back in high school wishes she had gone to the prom with me instead of Josh!”

By funding and grooming a man like Vance – an underclass kid desperate to outrun his class origins – these creepily weird teenage-brained boy-men are within a whisker of being inside The Oval Office.

Think of Putin and his inner circle of oligarchs and you begin to see where the US under Trump, Vance, and the Tech-Bros would be heading.

As Vance himself stated while sucking-up to Trump earlier this year, a new administration would like to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people”.

He would be happy to deny election results if they don’t turn out well for the GOP this November. He is also on record as saying he would not have certified the results of the 2020 election – at least not until various swing states had been allowed to submit “alternative” slates of presidential electors.

He’s also willing to fall into line with Trump’s plan to cut taxes for the already hyper-rich.

He has advised Trump to defy the Supreme Court if it rules him as acting unlawfully in firing executive branch officials.

He’s ready to take away from women the right to a safe and legal abortion – even in cases of rape and incest. He has even toyed with the idea of blocking interstate movement of women suspected of seeking abortions in places where such care is still legal. Just begin to imagine the levels of surveillance and invasive scrutiny required to enforce such a regime…

As for international politics, try this from a 2022 interview with populist rabble-rouser Steve Bannon:

“I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another”.

Even if we set aside the lack of humanity in allowing a democratic nation to fall to an autocrat, Vance shows a profound ignorance of the danger of allowing Putin to gain control of a country which acts as a bread basket to much of the world. Or maybe Vance’s “handlers” are happy to divide the world into zones controlled by autocratic regimes (as aspiring autocrats themselves)?

*****

Social media is by nature a place for short-form articles, so we’ll just leave these names for your later investigation:

Ajay Royan, Marc Andreessen, Steve Case, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Vivek Ramaswamy, Colin Greenspon, Scott Dorsey, Ben Horowitz.

All of these big money players (along with Donald Trump, Jr., Tucker Carlson, and of course the aforementioned Peter Thiel) have had a role of some kind or another in the rise of James Donald Vance [Bowman].

The only massive tech businesses which Vance has expressed a negative opinion of are those he accuses of “censoring” conservative voices.

“We are in a late republican period…If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

That’s right, fake hillbilly. Even a lot of conservatives are still uncomfortable with the idea of the USA as a dictatorship.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be dropped like a hot potato by Trump. He’s starting to think maybe you’re not smart enough for the game he’s playing.

Oh well. Maybe you could get back to your real roots, J. D.

Before your soul shrivels-up and blows away.

*bad weird, not good weird

The Forgotten History of the Oregon Trail

15 November 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Multi-ethnic family including Kalapuya, Oregon, circa late 1800s

Perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of America’s past is the history of westward migration.

Who exactly rode west in those wagons?

There was almost no colonisation effort on the western American frontier which didn’t begin with squatters and “outsiders”.

Squatting was a tricky game – people had to squat lands not yet formally claimed or controlled by the British (and later USA) establishment, but these same lands had to lie in borderlands and contested areas where indigenous control had been sufficiently weakened to make successful attacks on squatters and intruders less likely.

By “outsiders”, we might mean people who actively wanted to remove themselves from mainstream society or traditional political structures of government.

Such outsiders were often part of non-mainstream religious communities such as the Moravians, “Dunkards“, Primitive Baptists, Quakers, Mormons. and many others.

Such religious groups sometimes had money, sometimes not, depending on the particular situation. Sometimes they purchased land, sometimes they squatted land.

Sometimes they married amongst their own, sometimes they took partners from other ethnic groups.

Another more common category of “outsiders” were those people not driven by religion, but families and groups simply too poor to purchase officially surveyed or officially “claimed” land, people who saw land-squatting as a way to improve their lot in life. These people had not always rejected “respectable” or “elite” society – more usually, it had rejected them.

This mostly impoverished group of outsiders often included various free but “non-white” communities who felt unsafe as color-based slavery began to be enforced under the law in more developed areas with functioning judicial systems.

The borderlands, badlands, swamps, forests, mountains, and hollers of the frontier became the province of these people, along with sundry renegades, former Tories, outlaws, runaway servants and slaves.

These “free people of color” have traditionally been construed by American historians and anthropologists as “bi-racial” or “tri-racial” groups, because slavery based on “race” or skin color demanded that people should slot into one of just three or four legal categories of “color” or “race”.

American historians and anthropologists have thus been co-opted into playing along with the intrinsic absurdity of clear racial categories. If a term is widely used for long enough – especially in law and legalese – people act as if a “white race” or “black race” actually exists in reality.

But what did people call a brown person with a half-Scottish, half-Cherokee father, and a half-Jewish, half African-American mother?

Were they “bi-racial”? “tri-racial”? or even “quadri-racial”?

And how did they fit into America’s mostly binary legal system? Were they “white” or “black”?

This is not some random imaginary scenario – such complex intermarriages were common on the early American frontier.

A single “outsider” family in a place like Hawkins County, Tennessee, or Cumberland County, Kentucky in the 1790s might have ancestors from five continents, of ten or more ethnicities. Children in this one family might range from red-haired and blue-eyed, to black-haired and black-eyed, with a range of skin tones.

Spare a thought for the child born into such a family, who took-after the “wrong” grandparent…

*****

But there are another couple of “outsider” groups who squatted and colonised the leading edge of the American frontier – and they are almost never mentioned.

These two groups were:

1) Dispossessed Eastern Indians, and

2) Old communities of Métis – groups formed by centuries of interaction between Spanish, French, German, Jewish, Romani, African, and Scottish/Irish/Welsh/English frontier trappers, prospectors, traders, miners, longhunters, and indigenous Americans from Canada to Mexico.

Many eastern tribes had been on the move west (and to points north and south) ever since the first colonisers arrived in the 1500s and 1600s. These migrations were too many and too complicated to go into here, but some were large enough to have a real impact on the demographic make-up of entire regions. Many of the earliest “pioneers” of the Ozark Mountains of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas were in fact Lenape (Delaware Indian) families from back east.

As for Métis communities, I would highly recommend that readers search the internet for the terms “Métis” and “Half-Breed Tracts“, in order to understand just how common these mixed-ethnic communities actually were.

Anyone who listened to our recent podcast episode “Sun Bonnets and Bootstraps“ will have learned a little about these groups, and their interaction with Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s family in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

In a way, these so-called “half-breeds” and Métis were really just a specific, but related branch of the free people of color already discussed above.

Which brings us finally to the point of this post – The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which was intended to open-up the Oregon Territory for settlement, and led directly to the famed “Oregon Trail” which started-off in Missouri.

“Settlement” is a more slippery word than “colonisation”, because it allows the user to sidestep the implications of colonialism – the violent dispossession of land from its rightful inhabitants.

The earliest “American” settlers in Oregon arrived mainly as squatter “outsiders” in advance of the Distribution – Preemption Act of 1841. This was followed by the Organic Act and Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which was the most generous “homesteading” act in American history, running for five years from 1850 to 1855. At its inception, earlier squatter and claimant families which included a man and a wife were entitled to claim and gain legal title to a full square mile of surveyed land – a claim equivalating to 640 acres. Even women and widows were allowed to become registered land owners in those otherwise patriarchal times – and in their own name! Individuals were entitled to claim half this amount of land – 320 acres.

There can be little doubt that this federal “generosity” was intended to encourage a land rush which would overwhelm the local indigenous population, essentially sparing the US government the need for direct (and expensive) military intervention.

As always in America’s past, the land-hungry underclasses would be used as “shock troops” in frontier regions, and a blind eye would be turned to wholesale massacres by well-armed (but not well-regulated) local militias.

I invite anyone to read about the Willamette Valley and The Rogue River Wars – if you can stomach stories of outright depravity against innocent men, women and children.

Only once the underclasses had done the “dirty work” and cleared the land of natives, did the bigshots arrive from back east – the lumber and land speculators, with the non-indigenous population of Oregon Territory increasing by around 10,000 each year between 1850 and 1855.

Fidgeters and sceptics might at this point be wondering what land grants in Oregon have to do with non-white “outsider” communities farther east?

Let’s read the eligibility requirements for the actual Donation Land Claim Act of 1850:

[each claim be] “granted to every white settler or occupant of the public lands, American half-breed Indians included, above the age of 18 years, being a citizen of the United States, or having made a declaration according to law of his intention to become a citizen.”

Let that sink in. “American half-breed Indians included…”

Such a clear legal provision can mean only a few things:

1) Loads of American “pioneers” in Oregon arriving from Appalachian, Southern, and Midwestern states during the 1830s and 1840s were not seen as “white”.

2) The American government was trying to encourage its undesirable and “expendable” multi-ethnic underclasses to remove to points farther west, weakening tribal structures by incorporating them into the landholding, tax-paying mainstream “white citizenry”.

3) The American government was letting its less desirable and more “expendable” multi-ethnic underclasses do the dirty work of ethnic cleansing in the name of Manifest Destiny.

There will of course be people who argue that this was a case of the American government becoming “progressive” and color-blind in its land acquisition and distribution policies.

Yeah, right.

Tell that to the ethnic groups explicitly excluded from availing of 19th century Oregon land grants, such as free (but clearly African) people, or Hawaiians.

Most of all, tell that to people such as the Kalapuya of Oregon.

Never heard of them?

Of course we never heard about them.

People ban certain kinds of history books from American schools.

And that is exactly how Truth, “Bad Things”, and the story of entire peoples are made to disappear into the distant fog of our silence or ignorance.

And our own conjured reality remains safe, for a time…

#BeforeWeWereWhite #OregonHistory #Métis #Kalapuya

Blonde Bombshells and “Damaged Goods”

4 November 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

A young Marilyn Monroe

Legendary film star Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926 to a mother who was first married aged only 14.

We can only speculate what role, if any, this child marriage played in the later mental health issues which would plague Gladys Pearl Monroe.

Gladys was actually born in Mexico to railway worker Otis Monroe and his wife Della Mae Hogan, with the family moving to California around the year 1900.

Her marriage at 14 to Jasper Baker was “stormy”, with many later accounts accusing Baker of extreme domestic violence. Gladys appears to have already been pregnant at the time of her first marriage, giving birth to their first child, a son named Robert Baker, at the tender age of 15.

Gladys Monroe managed to extricate herself from this marriage at the age of 20, already a mother of two children, but her children were taken away by Jasper Baker.

Gladys Monroe married again in Los Angeles at the age of 22, this time to a man called Martin Mortenson.

The exact hows and whys are unclear, but this marriage also broke down, and Gladys became pregnant by a work colleague (and married man) named Charles Gifford in 1926.

The child of this tryst, Norma Jeane, took the surname of her mother’s still legal husband, and was officially born as “Norma Jeane Mortenson” on paper.

Norma Jeane had what can only be called a desperate and difficult childhood, with “home” a constant rotation between intermittent spells with her birth mother, and time spent with foster parents, work colleagues of her erratic mother, and in orphanages.

Norma Jeane’s mother would spend her first spell in an asylum for the insane when Norma Jeane was only nine years old, after suffering what was then called “a nervous breakdown”. Gladys Monroe would later be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia…

Norma Jeane would take various quasi-paternal surnames before settling on her mother’s maiden name – the name by which she would become famous.

While guessing ethnicity from photos is a fool’s game of phenotype analysis, I am still posting this series of photos because I have some familiarity with the Hogan and Nance families behind Marilyn Monroe‘s mother, and her mother before her.

Marilyn Monroe’s direct maternal line

They are my own distant relations (Norma Jeane is an 8th cousin). Lest this seem like a wish for fame by association, I will point out that Charles Manson is a closer 7th cousin…

We would find that we are all cousins in one way or another if we cared to dig deeply enough.

Both the Nance and Hogan families of Marilyn Monroe‘s maternal lineage are mixed-ethnic, “Old Mix American” people, and it is hard to ignore the possibility that the tragic lives of Norma Jeane and her mother were at least partially the result of trans-generational trauma.

The extremely low social status of most Black and mixed-ethnic women throughout American history made the formation and development of confident, ambitious young girls from such backgrounds the exception, rather than the rule – at least until more recent times.

Monroe was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose in the summer of 1962, after suffering years of anxiety, bouts of depression, and low self-esteem coupled with the type of substance abuse we would now call “self-medication”.

The sheer charisma and comic genius this oft-times lost little girl managed to give the world in her 36 short years – despite her desperate family background and ruthless exploitation by various men and a deeply sexist film industry – was a miracle of human, and especially female, resilience.

Paint Me A Picture

30 October 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Cigano (Portuguese Romani) Slave Traders, 19th century Brazil [painting by Debret]

Painters, not unlike musicians or actors, need patrons or a paying audience.

This might seem obvious, but it has a direct bearing on how we view history.

English society has been notoriously class-conscious since the first Norman warlords began erecting their stone fortresses – aka castles – among the peoples of England after 1066.

These Normans/Northmen (of Normandy in France) were really just “Frenchified” Vikings with a serious superiority complex after spending a few generations away from their Northern homelands.

Their “Viking French” became the language of the ruling classes in Britain, and this legacy survives right down to the present day, even in American English.

When we want to sound educated, we tend to use words evolved from the French language.

When we want plain talk, we tend to use words evolved mostly from Saxon English.

Think of the difference between saying “an illuminated chamber”, or “a well-lit room”.

But I digress (or “wander off-path”, if we avoid French usages here).

Our deeply-ingrained sense of social class, for much of history, dictated what was deemed worthy of recording.

In the age before affordable photography, only very few people could afford to pay a trained artist for a portrait or painting.

The peasantry, the underclasses, and the poor were only rarely subjects for the artist’s brush – they simply couldn’t pay for such a service.

So art as a paid occupation – in the age before social realism – was generally concerned with portraiture of the ruling classes, landscapes, religious themes, and the documentation of “great events” – with only a few noteworthy exceptions.

*****

I invite any reader here to fire-up a search engine, and attempt to locate contemporary images of the American working classes and underclasses from any time before the mid-19th century.

Paintings, etchings, drawings, anything.

You will find precious little.

What is more, by the time American painters DID decide to paint scenes from the lives of frontierspeople and common people, America as a whole was already actively, aggressively engaged in curating its own myth.

Think of George Caleb Bingham‘s 1852 painting of Daniel Boone leading “white settlers” through the Cumberland Gap – a painting made over 80 years after the events it sought to portray.

Yet even before Daniel Boone had crossed the mountains into “Ken-te-ke“, people of mixed ethnicity from the Virginia and Carolina backcountry had been hunting and trading among the Indians in both Kentucky and Tennessee.

Later generations would refer to this mixed crew as “Melungeons“, and begin to construct a dubious mythology around them, as if the existence of free “brown people” were a mysterious affront to the natural order.

Yet there was little mystery to it. Since the time of first European contact, the underclasses in North America had been intermixing with one another.

Spaniards, Portuguese, Portuguese Jews, Romani, Irish, Scots, Welshmen, Finns, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Dutchmen and Frenchmen.

Intermixing with Malagasy, Africans, Caribbeans, South Asians, Arabs or “Moors”, Yuchi, Catawba, Lenape, Pamunkey, Cherokee, Shawnee – you name it, they were all there in the first melting pot.

Yet we see none of these mixed or “brown” families represented in the story of the “American frontier”, and they are almost never represented in art.

This is where it gets a little ticklish and complex, because there ARE early American drawings of “non-white” people in scenes such as slave markets and slave auctions, or indigenous peoples shown in obsequious postures of “the vanquished”, or in romanticized portrayals of “noble savages”.

Yet the presence of these people in contemporary art was almost incidental, with the indigenous and enslaved treated more like props than human subjects.

This is because America was happy to portray “The Three Americas” which underpinned the racial caste system – Black, White, Indian – but only if the use of “non-white props” served a supremacist narrative.

Anyone who was not “Black” (and thus unfree), anyone who was not “Red” (and thus savage), became by default and by design, “White” – and thus free.

White, Savage, or Slave. With very few exceptions, when speaking of freeborn citizens, “Brown” was simply not an option.

*****

As we’ve already suggested, most artists in 16th and 17th century class-conscious colonial America painted what they deemed to be “worthy” subjects – or at least subjects who could afford to pay them.

In other words, the “white” merchant classes, religious leaders and elites.

So decades and centuries of art mostly portrayed only three groups of people at best – well-to-do “whites”, enslaved “blacks”, or “Indians”.

Needless to say, the brown and impoverished underclasses rarely sat for painters who worked mostly in large coastal towns and cities.

For their own futures and safety, the mixed-ethnic brown underclasses were usually pressing ever westward, or keeping to the hills and hollers, swamps and backwoods…

In the post-Revolutionary years, (as many American artists began to turn their faces away from “elite” subjects and to the historical men and women who were deemed worthy of remembrance as nation builders), painters could no longer conceive that the American frontier was actually settled in large part by “brown people”.

Yet it was.

And we can prove it by examining early camera lucida drawings and photographs, reading court and census documents, and cross-referencing folklore and DNA.

*****

The paintings shown here were made by a French gentleman in early 1800s Brazil, a man named Debret. An unusual man with an early, almost anthropological fascination with the “non-white” peoples of Brazil.

The one above shows the house of Portuguese Cigano “Gypsy” slave traders in Rio de Janeiro. The one below shows what are probably “Genizaro” or mixed-ethnic slave traders marching Guarani captives to market.

Slave Traders in 19th Century Brazil, possibly Genizaros [painting by Debret]

What does this have to do with Anglo-American history?

SIMILAR SCENES WERE OCCURRING FROM MAINE TO SOUTH CAROLINA TO LOUISIANA TO TEXAS TO CALIFORNIA, even if we are not lucky enough to have had a painter like Debret working in such places.

Catholic Spanish and Portuguese America saw people of mixed ethnicity as existing on a spectrum of “casto”.

Protestant Anglo-America, perhaps due to a more simplistic Manichean view of things, tried desperately to reduce much of the world into binaries. Good/evil. Black/white.

Artificial binaries were good for defining real humans versus “property”. Free versus unfree.

But humans refuse to slot into ridiculous and arbitrary categories.

American “folk heroes” like Jim Bowie were trading with mixed-ethnic pirates for slaves among the mixed-ethnic communities of the Gulf Coast before Texan “independence” from Mexico. “Gulf of America”, indeed…

Jewish slave merchants operated out of Maryland, Rhode Island, and Charleston, with households often comprised of “free people of color”.

Many indigenous American tribes had become drawn deeply into this sordid trade, and many people of African origin became absorbed into tribal communities like the Seminole, Cherokee, and Choctaw.

Métis communities and mixed-ethnic “prairie bandits” lived for decades on the lands which would only later become the Louisiana Purchase.

And all of these people (who were often brown to begin with) “co-mingled” endlessly, thus creating an even larger brown American underclass – an unsung and largely forgotten part of America – some of whom would spend decades, centuries, attempting to cross the color bar into “whiteness”.

Dressing-up as a Princess

7 August 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Daniel Keith with wife Amelia Hayes and children, Clay County, KY circa early 1900s

We all have things we hate.

I don’t mean things like “which way to hang toilet paper”.

Real hates. Because “hate” is, after all, a strong word. Or at least it should be, used to be.

We’ll leave aside war and violence for now. Those are pretty much universally acknowledged as things worthy of hatred.

Harming or belittling of children, the wanton abuse of animals – these things, too, should be universally agreed as things worth hating.

But it is the liminal things between naivety, thoughtlessness, selfishness, and wilful ignorance which often lead me to say “God, I hate that”.

Stuff like able-bodied people using the parking place reserved for the elderly or disabled people.

Stuff like half-drunk jet-skiers destroying the peace of a blue and remote mountain lake.

Fast food bags thrown out of a car window along a country road.

But then, if you suffer from “busy head” like me, with too many random thoughts jostling for space, you might get irritated or annoyed at less obvious things.

Anyone else here notice the way so many people tend to select a “preferred reality” at some point in their 20s or 30s, and then stick to that “reality”, whatever new information might cross their path over the subsequent years?

Whether religion, politics, or taste in music?

Why do the things we like, the beliefs we hold, often become fixed for good in our 20s?

Are we lacking in curiosity? Are we mentally lazy?

If you’re like me, always walking a tightrope between admiration for humans and borderline misanthropy, a frustration with this widespread human mental inertia can distill into anger.

And if we’re not careful, anger can metastasise into hate.

Hate is not good for a person, nor is it wise or saintly. But hey. A person can’t jump over their own shadow, can they?

*****

As a writer interested in the history of colonialist violence, I find myself confronting daily the immovable monoliths of a heavily abridged “official” American history, and a pop culture and national identity mediated through a corporate-owned mass media.

I see the fetishization of militarism, the ROTC and recruiting sergeants in high schools, and the constant, pervasive insistance that people in uniform are “protecting our freedom”.

These young men and women sent to the four corners of the world, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, are lauded in small town America, always greeted with a “thank you for your service”.

The USA spent roughly 20 years in Vietnam, and another 20+ in Afghanistan. Roughly nine years in Iraq. People remember these conflicts because of their relative recentness.

But a large section of Americans do not know, for example, why Iran hates their country. The 1950s, and the UK/USA-engineered overthrow of a sovereign, freely elected government in Iran, is largely forgotten or ignored.

“They hate our freedom” is one of the more inane reasons offered for the decades-long poor relations between the USA and Iran.

Ask these people in uniform about The Barbary Wars. The annexation of Mexican territory in 1848. The occupation of Haiti in 1915. The 1899 Moro War in the Philippines.

All of this and more is the reason that no substantive analysis- and enquiry-based history is taught in American primary and secondary schools.

Foundational myths are far more powerful than facts at binding people into a shared identity, collectively willing to sanction and support government policy.

*****

On a more local or micro level, distilled frustration also wells up and overflows whenever this writer sees the terms “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” used to describe someone’s remote ancestor of indigenous American ethnicity.

Such terminology is intended to disguise certain truths, in order to place a romantic gloss on older, darker aspects of American history.

Using the words “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” suggests some bygone age of intercultural amity, in which a woman of equal social standing was “courted” by a “white” outsider to her community – see the various incarnations of the Captain Smith and Pocahontas myth.

These words are meant to imply a 1950s-style of courtship, in which a love-besotted man approaches the family or tribe of said “maiden”, seeking her hand in marriage from her father, who is of course always a “Chief”.

The words “maiden” or “princess” are also intended to elevate the woman in question – a way to skate over the fact that, for most of American history, indigenous peoples were in fact treated much the same way as African-Americans.

Indigenous peoples were enslaved. They were sold. They were rounded-up in concentration camps and marched at gunpoint to dry and dusty places hundreds of miles from their rightful homelands.

And of course, they were killed in wars and slaughtered during massacres.

Their children were removed and placed into industrial schools, where they were abused physically and sexually, or beaten for speaking their native tongues.

And in a patriarchal society, no one was farther down the social ladder than indigenous women/women of color.

In the violent rough and tumble of Manifest Destiny, “non-white” women were often seen as little more than a labor resource, or a sexual commodity.

Almost everyone accepts that the disease, warfare, and land grabbing of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s saw the deaths of innumerable indigenous men.

What almost no one ever mentions is the countless number of indigenous women and children left to fend for themselves in the wake of these communal disasters, or the sheer number of children removed from their communities and sent to Indian boarding schools to be “assimilated” by force into “white” culture.

Not all indigenous women ended-up on reservations – perhaps not even the majority. Many were forced into a life of back-breaking manual labor or menial drudgery as farm hands or washerwomen. Some were forced into prostitution. The “luckier” ones might become wife or “consort” to a frontier trapper, miner, or settler, enduring a hard life of endless childbearing, cooking, sewing, washing, spinning, weaving, cleaning, etc.

This writer has in fact read first-hand accounts in which men were quite open about bringing their Indian consorts (yes, that’s plural) west, making them walk alongside an ox-wagon for days, their feet tied with rope to the woman ahead or behind them…

This is not ancient history, lost in the mists of time. Much of the foregoing (such as the Indian Boarding Schools) was still occurring in my own lifetime, and very much during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents.

*****

Everything was not horror. Some inter-ethnic pairings and marriages were based on mutually agreed trade-offs, even affection.

Many indigenous women came to be held in high regard by their wider communities, often because of their expertise and skills in pottery-making, basketry, herbal medicine and midwifery.

Anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America has one of these women in their family tree somewhere.

Modern DNA testing will rarely show it, because the DNA of one or two indigenous women during the late 1700s or early 1800s will usually have been “shuffled-out” by now.

But these woman WERE there, they were real, and they were almost never an “Indian princess”.

Please note that the use of this photo is for showing a typical Old Mix American family. It is NOT intended to imply any particular family’s direct link to the issues discussed in the above blog post.

Ghosts of The Waltons

21 May 2021/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Will Geer as Grandpa Walton

America’s Underground River: Case 1, Will Geer, actor

As a child growing-up in small-town Missouri, weekends spent “out in the country” visiting grandparents were special treats.

Saturdays were spent fishing, climbing cherry trees, chasing grasshoppers and lightning bugs, or just sitting on an old rail fence beside the smokehouse, talking to “Bessie”, the ancient, blind, retired milk cow.

Sundays always began with a giant breakfast of bacon and pancakes before church, after which us kids were free to run wild again until Sunday dinner was served on the long wooden tables under the shade tree on the front lawn beside the dirt road.

After dinner, kids were sent away from the eating tables, so the older folks could talk in peace.

Once or twice a year, grandma would stand up at length from the dinner table and announce something which never failed to scare the bejeezus out of the younger kids.

They were bringing “The Table” down from the attic into the living room. Anyone interested in doing a “table rising” should head indoors now…

*****

It might seem strange to say so, but the life of Queen Victoria cast a shadow reaching deep into the heartlands of 1970s rural America.

There has always been a weird tension at the heart of American identity, with the nation founded on a rejection of class and nobility, while nursing a well-hidden sense of class insecurity.

This is why the American working-class insists on calling itself “middle class”.

It is also probably the reason for America’s lingering, pervasive inability to put racism behind itself once and for all. A damn good argument could be made that when Americans threw-off the yoke of aristocracy and privilege, they merely stepped into the newly available position, making themselves the “new nobility”, while lording over an indentured or enslaved underclass.

But again, behind it all, a sort of “national impostor syndrome” lay constantly lurking behind the noisy bravado.

It is why 19th century English writers like Charles Dickens could tour the USA, and be celebrated like any modern superstar.

It is why British royalty is an ongoing obsession, and “royals” like Prince Harry, and Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson (from the preceding generation), can leverage the happenstance of their birth into a fine living on the USA media circuit.

But I digress from the first point. No British royal ever left a deeper impression on America than Queen Victoria.

Almost everything used to signify social class other than money – worldliness, education, or “quality” – in 20th century America was a clumsy aping of Victorian manners, fashions, and attitudes to everything from table manners to sex.

This social and class anxiety is also why children of my generation were scolded for having our elbows on the table at eating times. It is why we were told that “ain’t” isn’t a word. It is why working-class people bought cutlery sets with special fish knives, thinking them a sign of refined gentility.

Queen Victoria’s taste (or her German husband Albert’s) is why we have Christmas trees indoors to this day.

A Victorian Anglo-Irish clergyman invented the “Rapture” idea still embraced by millions of evangelical Christian Americans today.

The Victorian obsession with spiritualism – communication with the dead – would have normally been seen as The Devil’s Work by American evangelical Christians.

But once it was embraced by Queen Victoria herself, the American desire to be in tune with upper-class trends outweighed any religious reservations.

And this is why the oldest folks in southern Missouri were still holding séances and “table knockings” in the 1960s and 1970s.

*****

Once “The Table” had revealed its secrets from The Other Side, it was put away for another few months, and the old folks would drag every chair available to a place near the sofa and TV. Children would sprawl on their bellies, chin-in-hands-elbows-on-the-floor at the feet of the grown-ups.

Time for the Sunday episode of The Waltons.

For those born later than the 1960s or 1970s, it is almost impossible to overstate the cultural significance of this TV show, which was set during The Great Depression and WWII- era rural Virginia.

The Waltons spoke to a rapidly suburbanising working-class and lower middle-class America whose parents had come from mostly rural backgrounds. The stress of The Cold War, and the strife of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the rise of feminism and the “hippy movement” had left this first truly suburban generation dreaming of a return to some simpler, mythical past.

Parents watched The Waltons to vicariously re-live what they believed had been lost, and they made their children watch it, in order that the new generation might absorb some “old timey” values and morals.

But like fish knives and table-risings, much of what we believe about our past and ourselves is shown through a lens of our own longings.

We believe what we want to believe.

It was with all of this in mind, at a remove of 50 years, that I was unsure whether to burst out laughing, crying, or cheering this week while researching the ethnic origins of the real-life family upon which The Waltons was based (the Hamner family), as well as some of the actors who portrayed the fictional Walton family.

The much-beloved Grandpa of the series was played by the late Will Geer, a gentleman of mostly German ancestry, with the usual “people of color” joining his melting-pot along the way via the Rippey family (a prize for anyone who can locate the source of that surname…?)

At this stage, I am more surprised when Americans DON’T have a family of color in their ancestry – so no particularly big deal there.

What surprised me more was that our 1970s Sunday morality hour at grandma and grandpa’s house was being performed – at least in part – courtesy of a man who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy Era for his communist leanings.

And there was even more to “Grandpa Walton” than his decades-long commitment to the American Labor Movement and other left-wing causes.

For many long years prior to marrying his eventual wife, Mr. Geer had a much-loved boyfriend.

If my folks had known, I suspect “The Table” would have ended-up in the TV screen.