rich and prosperous.” Boorstin and Kelley cannot easily concede even that
much. After devoting a page to the advanced civilizations of the Mayans, Incas,
and Aztecs, Boorstin and Kelley proceed to put them down: “Unlike the
peoples of Europe, they had not built ships to cross the oceans. They had not
reached out to the world. In their isolation they found it hard to learn new
ways. When the Spanish came, it seemed that the Incas, the Mayas and the
Aztecs had ceased to progress. They were ripe for conquest.”
Among other things, that paragraph is simply bad history. In fact, the rate of
change was accelerating in the Western Hemisphere before the Spanish came.
The Incas had taken less than the previous century to assemble their huge
empire. The Aztecs had come to dominate central Mexico by alliance and
force still more recently.
To Boorstin and Kelley, the Natives to the north in what is now the United
States lagged even further behind the “unprogressive” Aztecs, Mayans, and
Incas. Of course, if Boorstin and Kelley had looked around the world in 1392,
they would have seen no such decisive differences between American and
European cultures. This is a secular form of predestination: historians observe
that peoples were conquered and come up with reasons why that was right. In
sociology we call this “blaming the victim.” The authors of The American
Pageant take the same approach:
Unlike the Europeans, who would soon arrive with the
presumption that humans had dominion over the earth and with
the technologies to alter the very face of the land, the Native
Americans had neither the desire nor the means to manipulate
nature aggressively.... They were so thinly spread across the
continent that vast areas were virtually untouched by a human
presence. In the fateful year 1492, probably no more than 4
million Native Americans padded through the whispering,
primeval forests and paddled across the sparkling virgin waters
of North America. They were blissfully unaware that the
historic isolation of the Americas was about to end forever.This passage exemplifies the unfortunate results when publishers try to keep a
legacy text in print forever. These clichés about Native Americans were known
to be false in 1956, when Bailey wrote the first edition of this seemingly
ageless text. Chapter 3 shows what is wrong with this wilderness scenario.
For one thing, the numbers are all wrong. In the central valley of Mexico alone