Palin, p. 108:
“But from what I’ve read, family life at the time of the founding was a lot like family life for Americans today: full of challenges, sure, but also full of simple pleasures.”
For the 1 in 6 Americans who were held as slaves in 1790 – often unable to marry legally, and always liable to be sold and separated from spouses or children – family life was quite a lot different at the time of the founding than it is today.
A would-be president should remember that part of the American story too.
UPDATE: Some commenters ask, in effect, “must we mention slavery every time we talk about the Founders?” I don’t say so at all. I don’t call for national self-flagellation or self-disparagement. Slavery was a blot on the young Republic, but there was much more about the new nation that was unblotted. Lincoln could call America the last best hope of earth in December 1862, even as slavery persisted through much of the national territory.
What I meant to note about Sarah Palin’s stray remark was this:
Unlike the long passage in praise of Booker T. Washington that occurs elsewhere in the book, Palin’s throwaway remark about the Founders and the family has the ring of something the candidate herself dictated or remarked. It takes us inside her head, shows us something of her vision of the nation’s past.
For example: some might look back at the family life of the Founding Era and be more impressed by differences than similarities. What did it do to family life to have very high rates of child mortality? Abraham Lincoln lost his mother at age 9 and lost three of his four children before their 18th birthdays. Those were not unusual experiences. What did they do to people?
But put that all to one side. The point of my little post was just this: Palin’s remark was the remark of somebody who looked back at the 1790s and saw only … white people. But America in 1790 was a country with a black population almost twice as big, relative to overall population, as it is today. In South Carolina, blacks outnumbered whites. Even in the North, blacks were held to slavery: New York for example did not abolish slavery until the 1820s.
Contra to what one reader said, these black people were indeed “Americans.” They lacked the rights of citizenship, but they were tallied by the Census and they counted toward representation in Congress and the Electoral College under the 3/5 clause of the Constitution. Had the presidential election of 1800 been held according to the simple rule of one “citizen,” one vote, John Adams would very likely have crushed Thomas Jefferson in a landslide. Instead Jefferson prevailed in the Electoral College 73-65 because of the slave-inflated clout of the southern states.
I’m not saying that a present-day American must endlessly beat her chest about these ancient historical facts. But I am saying, that if your mental imagination could contain these facts, you would not have written or spoken the sentence I quoted. And the fact that she (apparently) did write or say it, indicates that these facts are absent from her imagination.
And that’s interesting because Palin is a candidate who habitually qualifies some Americans but not others as “real Americans.” That subdivision is a crucial element of her mental architecture, maybe the single most important element of her mental architecture. As I’ve written before, it’s that mental architecture that those who dislike Palin most dislike about her. Often and repeatedly, she writes huge numbers of people out of the American story. In that one throw-away sentence, she did it again.
It’s not a big deal in itself. But it reveals something, and not for the first time or the second time or the third time even. And it’s that something that her words reveal that is a very big deal indeed.
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