Opinion of Shannon County, South Dakota

[memphis]

I drove through just to check it out when I was in the neighborhood, touring the Badlands. It was quite desolate and depressing, like most rural areas. What was notably different was that many Natives were out walking around along the Highway, something no non-Native rural would be caught dead doing in their neck of the woods. FWIW, the tour guide at Rushmore said the gov't has given the tribe a bazillion dollars (precisely) in compensation for screwing them over back in the day regarding the Black Hills. But the Injuns won't take the money, so it just sits in an account somewhere getting bigger day after day. And yet they all live in squalor. Go figure out a Native.

[memphis]

I drove through just to check it out when I was in the neighborhood, touring the Badlands. It was quite desolate and depressing, like most rural areas. What was notably different was that many Natives were out walking around along the Highway, something no non-Native rural would be caught dead doing in their neck of the woods. FWIW, the tour guide at Rushmore said the gov't has given the tribe a bazillion dollars (precisely) in compensation for screwing them over back in the day regarding the Black Hills. But the Injuns won't take the money, so it just sits in an account somewhere getting bigger day after day. And yet they all live in squalor. Go figure out a Native.

Yes, they're hard to understand - having honor and pride and so forth..

I didn't see a lot of honor or pride. I saw a lot of drunk Indians living in squalor with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Dignity wasn't on the menu.

[memphis]

I'm not at all familiar with the workings of their tribal gov't, but I bet many of those people would like some of that money but are being denied by their own tribal leaders. Maybe we just have different perceptions of dignity. I don't see the shame in taking the government's money and making life better for a communty. They're not getting the Black Hills back either way. They may as well take the white man to the cleaners.

[memphis]

no, i'm aware that the republicans began as an abolitionist party.

This is not at all the case. The Republican Party was about free soil. Abolitionism was an extremely marginalized position in the 1850s. The GOP wanted to block merely the expansion of slavery. And by the 1850s, slave labor had little room for expansion anyhow. The only segments of the Lower 48 having not yet acheived statehood was the Great Plains north of Texas, then known as the Great American Desert and the Mountain West. Oddly enough, it was a largely symbolic issue until the secession crisis and even then, Lincoln offered a constitutional amendment to guarantee Southern slavery forever if people in the Southen states would remain loyal. Obviously, it was not to be.

[memphis]

no, i'm aware that the republicans began as an abolitionist party.

This is not at all the case. The Republican Party was about free soil. Abolitionism was an extremely marginalized position in the 1850s. The GOP wanted to block merely the expansion of slavery. And by the 1850s, slave labor had little room for expansion anyhow. The only segments of the Lower 48 having not yet acheived statehood was the Great Plains north of Texas, then known as the Great American Desert and the Mountain West. Oddly enough, it was a largely symbolic issue until the secession crisis and even then, Lincoln offered a constitutional amendment to guarantee Southern slavery forever if people in the Southen states would remain loyal. Obviously, it was not to be.

True, but there was a faction known as the "Radical Republicans" who opposed slavery outright.

In most cases, the RRs were not outright abolitionists though. They railed against Slave Power and the expansion of slavery, but that is not the same thing as demanding the immediate and uncompensated end to the institution altogether. The abolitionist were extremely fringe type people. William Lloyd Garrison famously burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it a "Covenant with Death, an Agreement with Hell." Not the kind of guy the politicians wanted to be associated with. The closest comparison, and it is highly imperfect, would be the contrast between American Left in the 1930s and the unapologetic Communists. Henry Wallace may have had some unconventional ideas but he was no Bolshevik. The abolitionists were perceived as being that radical and dangerous.