Columns

The debate (at least one of them) about James Knox Polk, the eleventh, and seemingly very efficient, president, has to do with his pro-slavery inclinations mixed with his eagerness for a “war of choice” – rather than one of necessity.  Most Polk enthusiasts tend to ignore the fact that he was both a good friend of Sam Houston and a long-time slave master.  And though he privately declared he would free his slaves (when the economic moment was right), one of the last things he did as he was dying of cholera in 1849 was to order the purchase, in secret, of six more young slaves.

Into this season of welcome and instructive Lincoln-mania comes an evidently political-dividing history of a war that Abraham Lincoln opposed when he was still a congressman.  Using the words of Ulysses S. Grant, who termed  the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, a “wicked war,” for her title, historian Amy S. Greenberg’s, “A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico,” brings our attention to an often ignored aspect of an early United States “war of choice.”  Mexicans called it then, and call it now, “The American Invasion.”

This article is being started on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday.  It registers comments by U.S. readers uneasy with recent columns about America’s Civil War (1861-1865).   All nations, and sections of nations, live in some part on a past of legends of bravery in the face of great odds – and on sorrow, too.  All regions possess such myths, cherish them and commemorate them.  Some are fiercely local, some even familial.  And despite this time when the lazy habit of dismissing history is popular, people still live with and by myth.  Nowhere is that more true than Mexico, despite the “modern” inclination to display fashionable historical indifference. 

Mexico celebrated the creation of its 1917 revolutionary and “activist” constitution this past Monday, February 4.  It is easy to assume that the adjective “activist” issues from the fact that, as constitutional specialist Professor Miguel Carbonell has noted, it has been amended some 600 times. 

Abraham Lincoln’s birth date, February 12, by government decree has been folded in with George Washington’s birth date, February 18, to constitute something called President’s Day.   Living in the 1960s in a society that some said had too many national holidays, prompted the view that the United States could trivialize (and commercialize) anything.  Anthropologists had suggested this concept much earlier.

In solemn and (presumed) circumstance, before an enthralled public and the politicians proud of the spectacle they were offering the citizenry, “the bones of the heroes who gave (Mexico) its fatherland,” passed through the streets of the city of Mexico September 30, 2010, in ostentatious parades commemorating the bicentennial of Independence, wrote a journalist from the Mexico City daily La Jornada.  Crowds applauded Morelos and Hidalgo, the most popular founders of an independent Mexico.