November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.
Critics, admirers and the man himself all referred to P.T. Barnum as a “Humbug”. Like many, I first encountered that charming, old-fashioned word in my favorite childhood book and movie, which featured a character based on Barnum, The Wizard of Oz. Author L. Frank Baum was from Chittenango, New York, near Syracuse. Like Barnum, he was a master of escapism. Anyhow, largely inspired by the site of the so-called White City at the Chicago World’s Fair, a.k.a. the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition, Baum gave us the Emerald City of Oz. And that is unavoidably what I thought of when I first visited New York City. If he’s not the literal father of American fantasy fiction he’s damned close. Baum’s work is steeped in America’s peculiar magic, the stuff of state fairs, wild west shows, circuses, medicine shows.
Baum is associated with Kansas because that’s where Dorothy comes from, but his actual long term base was Chicago, and for a number of years he edited a newspaper in Aberdeen in the Dakota Territory. During the 1890s he penned a couple of now notorious editorials wherein he advocated the extermination of the remaining Native Americans. He couched it almost as an act of mercy, but it rings chilling to us in the 21st century. No one hates to hear it more than I do. I am here at all because of my obsession with L. Frank Baum and The Wizard of Oz. Yet on two occasions, the death of Sitting Bull and the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre, Baum advocated, in print, the worst thing anyone could wish on other human beings:
The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.
To bring up his positive legacy in this context would seem like a rationalization for the indefensible, even in the context of his times, so I won’t do it. I’m telling you he said these bad things because you should know. Frankly, I don’t know any historical figure who didn’t do or say some bad, even intolerable things. If you prefer to boycott Baum’s books I fully understand, but I warn you, young people – J.K. Rowling will be a lateral move. Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, maybe people with a lots and lots of imagination but not a lot of grounding in reality should refrain from opining on life and death political matters. Guess that rules me out!