There has been way too much shrill, screechy, hysterical
chatter from right-wing talking heads and politicos over the debut during the
Superbowl of the very well done Coca-Cola commercial “America is
Beautiful”.
The commercial in question featured scenes from across the
country to the tune of the first stanza of “America the Beautiful” sung in
eight different languages. Almost as if
in answer to the combined hopes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, The Young
Turks, and the folks at The Onion, figures such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh,
and Allen West quickly jumped to condemn it.
The objections of most of the commentators centered around
the stanza being sung in seven languages in addition to English and that
America the Beautiful is a “Christian” song.
Of course, many also pointed out and objected most strenuously to a
family in the commercial of which a same-sex couple was head. Their overall claims seem to be that “America
the Beautiful” is for white (with certain exceptions like ex-Rep. West), English-speaking,
native-born, fundamentalist Christian, heterosexual Americans of the extreme
conservative variety and for none other.
In truth, each language used in the commercial belongs to a
group with a lengthy history in the land that is now the United States of
America, some longer than the English.
There were eight in all: English,
Senegalese French, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Keres, and Tagalog.
Katherine Lee Bates, author of the song’s lyrics as well as
the person who made Mrs. Santa Claus more than a shadow figure, lived for 25
years in conjugal bliss with another woman, Katharine Coman, professor of
history and political economy (founder of the college’s economics department)
at Wellesley College, where Bates was professor of English Literature.
Ms. Bates, a Republican until 1924, did not write “America
the Beautiful” to promote the kind of ethnic and national chauvinism advocated
by the detractors of the Coca-Cola commercial and which was rising in the
country at the time (1893). Rather,
inspired by the view from the top of Pike’s Peak, the purpose of the song was
an invitation and inclusion as a contrast to the jingoist trends of the 1890’s,
in the same vein in which Christian socialist Francis Bellamy first composed
the Pledge of Allegiance.
To refresh your memory or enlighten your unawareness, let me
share Bellamy’s original text as he first wrote it in 1892: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the
Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty, equality,
fraternity, and justice for all”.
Italians actually forged the way for European exploration
into (some might instead say “invasion of”) the West. The three most important milestones in the
earliest stages were performed by pilot-cartographer-navigators from three
different Italian maritime merchant republics.
In 1492, Cristoforo Colombo (aka Christopher Columbus) of
the Republic of Genoa, sailing under a patent from King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabela of Spain, landed at an island in the Caribbean Sea. Even after four voyages to the Caribbean,
some of which included landfall in Central and South America, he remained
convinced this was merely the extreme east of Asia.
In 1497, Zuan Chabotto (aka John Cabot) of the Republic of
Venice, sailing under a patent from King Henry VII of England, made landfall in
North America, most often identified as being at Newfoundland though no sure
evidence of the exact location is known.
In 1502, Amerigo Vespucci of the Republic of Florence,
serving as navigator in a fleet from Portugal, sailed far enough down the coast
of South America and charted enough stars to determine that the landmass to his
starboard (right) was completely separate from the Afro-Eurasian landmass. A New World, as it were.
Of course, all of these were preceded five centuries, half a
millennium, by the Norse who established colonies in Greenland, part of North
America, as early as the late 10th century. These Norse had outposts and camps on the
mainland in the vicinity of Newfoundland, which the Norse knew as Vinland. When first discovered, Vinland became a
permanent colony that lasted for an entire decade, but afterwards became nothing
more than a port of call.
The Greenland settlements of the Norse, and therefore their
mainland outposts, died out with the population around 1400 due to starvation because
their agriculture failed and they were too proud and “too Christian” to accept
advice and help from their “heathen” Inuit neighbors.
Now back to the commercial.
Let’s start with the most recently arrived language and work backwards
in order by which they were spoken by permanent settlers.
Tagalog is the “youngest” of the languages in the video in
relation to the U.S.A.
Tagalog is the language in the Philippines native to the
Southern Tagalog region on Luzon and the basis for the national language,
Filipino. Filipinos did not have to
immigrate to America, America advanced its western borders to take in the
Philippines in 1898, though it did so without granting the country’s residents
U.S. citizenship.
From that year until 1946, the Philippines Islands, along
with Guam, were territory of the U.S.A., though its residents were not exactly
citizens of the country. Their money,
however, clearly gave the name of their country as United States of America,
including 1946, like the quarter from that year that my former mother-in-law
gave me as a wedding present.
Mandarin is the next most recent arrival.
The Chinese began appearing in Alta California in the
1820’s, when it was still part of New Spain.
The first major wave, however, began in 1849 with the California Gold
Rush. After the Civil War, another wave
built the railroads of the West, most notably the transcontinental line of
which the final spike was driven in 1869.
These Chinese laborers were the Western counterpart of the
Irish who built much of the railway system east of the Mississippi, like the
laborers who completed the lines of the Western & Atlantic and the East Tennessee
and Georgia into Chattanooga in the 1850’s, at least one of whom was an
ancestor of mine.
The language used in the Coca-Cola commercial next most
recent in arrival is Hindi.
East Indians, meaning those from the Asian subcontinent,
were recorded in the English settlement of Jamestown in the Colony of Virginia
as early as 1634.
Speakers of Hebrew, at least as a religious language, first
settled in large numbers in the later U.S.A. in the late 16th
century,
Marranos, as they were called, formed the largest number of
settlers in the newly founded New Spain province of Santa Fe de Nuevo
Mexico. Many of colonists in New Mexico descended
from Jewish converts to Catholicism during the Reconquista of the Iberian
peninsula, suspected the penalty for being found out (burning at the stake),
one can hardly blame the discretion.
Some 1500 Hispanic families currently in New Mexico are descended from
original Marrano settlers.
In the English colonies, the center for Jewish settlement
was Charlestown, capital of the Colony of Carolina and later of South
Carolina. In its founding charter in
1663, Carolina guaranteed religious freedom to all, including “Jews, heathens,
and dissidents”. It was by far the most
liberal law on freedom of religion in the colonies. Charlestown remained the center of Jewish
life in the later U.S.A. through the 1830’s.
Arabic arrived in the later Contiguous 48 with slaves
brought over by the Spanish to Florida from West Africa, between ten and twenty
percent of whom were Muslims.
However, daily speakers of Arabic did not settle until
1586. In that year, the privateer
Francis Drake sailed to the Caribbean with a large fleet after raiding the Cape
Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa, where he captured and razed the
Spanish settlements at Cartagena, Colombia, and San Agustin in Florida. In addition to these attacks, his forces
fought sea battles and destroyed a number of Spanish galleys at sea, taking
aboard the surviving galley slaves.
To these he added the African slaves taken from the vicinity
of San Agustin. Partners with Walter
Raleigh, he then proceeded to Roanoke with the freed slaves whom he identified
in his records as “Turks, Moors, Greeks, Frenchmen, and Negroes”.
Various accounts give their number as being from 200 to
1200; most likely the figure was 600-800.
These disembarked at Roanoke in order to bolster the personnel at the
base there. No record exists of what
became of them, but some speculate that it was these may have become the basis
of the Lumbee and Melungeon peoples.
English is the sixth-most recent of the eight languages used
in the stanza of “America the Beautiful” used in the Coca-Cola commercial.
By comparison to Spain, and France, the English were
Johnny-come-latelys. Though Zuan Chabotto’s
1497 expedition was English-patented, it only made a temporary landfall. The first permanent settlement was the base
at Roanoke Island in 1585, established for privateers raiding the Spanish
Caribbean trade. The first venture
failed the next year, followed by the second in the same location in 1587,
which became the famous Lost Colony whose members went to live with the Croatan
Indians.
The first lasting settlement by the English in what became
the U.S.A., of course, was at Jamestown in modern Virginia. The Colony of Virginia embraced, or at least
claimed, the modern states of Virginia, West Virginia (until the Civil War),
the Carolinas (until these were detaches as a separate colony), and Bermuda,
plus adjacent lands. Founded in 1607 by
profit-seeking adventurers, its main export became the drug nicotine in the
form of tobacco.
French was the second European language spoken by permanent
settlers in the later United States, represented in the song by the
Senegalese-French dialect.
Though the Spanish mounted several expeditions into the
interior of the Southeast and made two attempts at colonization, they were not
moved to re-establish a permanent presence until the French did so first at
Charlesfort on Parris Island and Fort Carolina near Jacksonville, Florida, in
1562. The French named their colony
Carolina after their king, Charles IX.
Three years afterwards, the Spanish destroyed the French
colony’s settlements, later building Santa Elena on Parris Island and San Mateo
where Fort Carolina had been in addition to the new settlement at San
Agustin.
Interestingly, though the whole was named La Florida, the
Spanish kept the name Carolina for the northern region in honor of Charles
V. When its southern territory was
detached from Virginia for a new colony in 1663, it was named Carolina for
Charles II of England.
There are, by the way, four major dialects of French native
to the Continental U.S.: New England French, Missouri French, and Louisiana
French, of which there are two major subdivisions, Louisiana Creole and Cajun
French. New England French is related to Quebecois; Missouri French was once
spoken across Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri; Louisiana Creole developed in
the south of French Louisiana; Cajun French derives from Acadian French and
arrived with refugees fleeing the Grand Derangement in 1755.
The arrival of French in North America predates that of
English by three-quarters of a century, and as for the Senegalese dialect
represented in the commercial, no one can argue that Africans were not part of
the American fabric from earliest days.
Spanish in the Contiguous 48 as a language spoken by
permanent settlers dates from a quarter of a century before the French. In 1526, Luca Vazquez de Ayllon established
the colony of San Miguel de Gualdape at or near Sapelo Island, Georgia, with
600 settlers. However, hardships
including a harsh winter and trouble with natives led to the effort being deserted after three months. They did, however, bequeath a lasting legacy
in that they were the first to name the region Carolina, for Charles I & V
of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.
A hundred of these settlers were slaves brought from Africa to help build the colony. One of the main reasons for the colony’s failure was the first slave revolt in American history, by its first African slaves. Victorious, the slave faded into the forest and from history. There is no record of what became of them, but those that survived are the first non-native Americans in the later United States.
A hundred of these settlers were slaves brought from Africa to help build the colony. One of the main reasons for the colony’s failure was the first slave revolt in American history, by its first African slaves. Victorious, the slave faded into the forest and from history. There is no record of what became of them, but those that survived are the first non-native Americans in the later United States.
Three years before the French established their colony of
Carolina, another expedition, this time by Tristan de Luna, landed in Pensacola
Bay and travelled up the Alabama River to establish the colony of Santa Cruz at
the former native town of Nanipacana. This
one lasted over a year before abandonment.
Spanish Florida occupied Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, and
parts of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Before the foundation of the
English colonies and their subsequent expansion, Carolina and Ajacan (Virginia)
were also part of Florida. In fact, the
original capital of Florida was at Santa Elena on Parris Island, which had
satellite forts well into the interior, as far as East Tennessee (San Pablo).
In the West, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, of which Florida
was part, and later Republic of Mexico provinces of Alta California, Nuevo
Mexico, and Tejas took in what are now California, Arizona, New Mexico,
Oklahoma, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and Texas, as well as parts of the later U.S.
states of Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska.
New Spain also took in the Spanish East Indies, the
Philippine and Marianas Islands in the Western Pacific, both of which were lost
to the U.S.A. in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Republic of the Philippines gained its
independence in 1946; the Marianas Islands, which include the Northern Marianas
and Guam, remain U.S. territory and their residents now citizens of the U.S.A.
The Spanish West Indies, also part of New Spain, included
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and other islands and
archipelagoes. Of these, Puerto Rico had
remained U.S. territory since 1898, its residents U.S. citizens,
Spanish-speaking as their ancestors were.
Keres, a Native American language whose roots date back to
the almost mythical Anasazi of the Southwest, has been spoken there for over
two millennia. Today the Keres are a
nation of Pueblo Indians living in northern New Mexico.
Except for Native Americans/American Indians (contrary to
the politically-correct enforcement brigade, the 500 Nations themselves use
both), we are all creoles. The word
“creole” is the French version of the Spanish “criollo, a person of non-native
ethnicity born in the “colony” rather than in the homeland of his or her
ancestors.
1 comment:
Well done, as always, Chuck. You have the history right. And, it is true that the politically correct crowd decided--without consulting any of us--that we should be called "Native Americans." Some of us have mixed feelings about that, but it has been accepted. This video might be interesting to some:
http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/01/the_one_thing_native_americans_dont_call_themselves.html
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