I am loathe to put aside a book once I've started it. I am trying desperately to finish a current read, but it is becoming difficult to take.

I am in the middle of A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. I discovered this book while searching for hard copies of US History in the Oxford series in a Bookman's store in Phoenix. I got a copy from Audible without too much research, and it proved to be a bad decision.

The book is horribly biased. Not only does the author argue that the USA was founded as a christian nation, an assertion put forth today by the likes of David Barton and supposed presidential candidate Huckabee, but it also idolizes Andrew Jackson. The book makes very light of the push to rid the States of Indians by Jackson, and although the "Trail of Tears" is not a specific event, it is a scar on historical US policy, and is mentioned only formally in the book as the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Here is a passage that describes Indian removal:

Some whites supported the Cherokee Republic at the time. When Congress, in response to the Georgia petition, decreed that, after January 1, 1830, all state laws applied to Indians, and five months later passed a Removal Bill authorizing the President to drive any eastern Indians still organized tribally across the Mississippi, if necessary by force, a group of missionaries encouraged the Cherokee Republic to challenge the law in the Supreme Court. But in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Marshall Court ruled that the tribe did not constitute a nation within the meaning of the US Constitution and so could not bring suit. The missionaries then counselled resistance and on September 15, 1831 eleven of them were convicted of violating state law and sentenced to four years' hard labor. Nine had their convictions overturned by submitting and swearing an oath of allegiance to Georgia. Two appealed to the Supreme Court and had their convictions overturned. But Georgia, encouraged by President Jackson, defied the Court's ruling. The end came over the next few years, brought about by a combination of force, harassment-stopping of annuities, cancellations of debts-and bribery. The Treaty of New Echota, signed in December 1835 by a greedy minority led by Chief Major Ridge, ceded the last lands in return for $5.6 million, the republic broke up, and the final Cherokee stragglers were herded across the Mississippi by US cavalry three years later.

The following few paragraphs are an attempt at unbiased criticism of the treatment of the American aboriginal. The author ends his description with a quote from a Frenchman that washes over the whole affair.

Under President Jackson, he noted, all was done lawfully and constitutionally. The Indians were deprived of their rights, enjoyed since time immemorial, `with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.' It was, he concluded, impossible to exterminate a race with `more respect for the laws of humanity.’

How an author of history can allow such words describing extermination is beyond me.

In a paragraph discussing Jackson, the author compares Jackson to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and describes instictive convictions as a positive attribute.

Jackson was one of those self-confident, strong-willed people (one thinks of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in our own time) who are not in the least disturbed if the overwhelming majority of `expert opinion,' the `right-thinking,' and the intelligentsia are opposed to their own deep-felt, instinctive convictions. He simply pressed on, justifying his veto by producing a curious constitutional theory of his own: `Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others ... The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.'`,' The fury of the right-thinking was unbounded. Biddle himself described Jackson, in his stupidity and ignorance giving vent to `the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage.' His statement was `a manifesto of anarchy such as Marat or Robespierre might have issued to the mobs.' The Jacksonian press hailed it as a `Second Declaration of Independence' and his organ, the Globe, said, `It is difficult to describe in adequate language the sublimity of the moral spectacle now presented to the American people in the person of Andrew Jackson.'

Jackson, according to the paragraph above, felt that one man's opinion should be allowed to overrule the deliberations of a panel of men formed for the purpose of deliberating such questions. This policy of Jackson's, striking in its variance to what American government is all about, is described as 'curious'.

Not sure if I will finish it, there are so many other things to read it is difficult rationalize going on. But there is the notion of learning things from such material as put forth by Christopher Hitchens. In a speech defending free expression, and opposing a hate speech law in Canada, Hitchens says this;

"...David Irving’s edition of the Goebbel’s diaries for example, out of which I learned more about the Third Reich than I had from studying Hugh and A. J. B. Taylor combined when I was at Oxford."