Latest news with #JamesPolk
National Post
02-08-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Terry Glavin: Is Trump's lionization of James Polk an ominous sign of things to come?
Shortly after his January inauguration, U.S. President Donald Trump made the peculiar decision to remove a portrait of the great Thomas Jefferson from the Oval Office and replace it with a portrait of James Polk. Article content Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third American president. Polk, the eleventh president, launched the Mexican-American War and expanded the reach of American sovereignty from what is now Texas to Washington State, and from Wyoming to California. Article content Article content Article content This history is directly relevant to the origins of British Columbia's August holiday weekend, which uniquely intertwines the August 1 celebration of Emancipation Day, commemorating the end of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, and the establishment of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, on August 2, 1858. Article content Article content The story is about how Canada very nearly lost the opportunity to extend its dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. It was a very close call, and it's an instructive lesson in the radical differences between Canada and the United States — differences that tend to get completely papered over by the current fashion for historical revisionism and the stupidity of the 'settler colonialism' paradigm. Article content The thing about Trump is that, in his persistent expressions of territorial covetousness — most exuberantly in his public meditations on taking Greenland by military force and annexing Canada as the 51st state by economic coercion — you never really know if he's being serious or if he's just being a jackass. Article content Article content In determining Trump's preference for Polk over Jefferson, for instance, there are a couple of explanations. Article content Article content The first is his admiration for Polk as 'sort of a real estate guy,' and his esteem for Polk because ' he got a lot of land.' It could also be because he found the frame around Polk's portrait more pleasing than the frame around Jefferson's. 'I'm a frame person,' Trump told a cabinet meeting in early July. 'Sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures.' Article content It has become commonplace to frame British Columbia's colonial origin as an unwelcome intrusion of a foreign power to force the displacement of Indigenous peoples in a process of ongoing, systemic genocide. This is an interpretive paradigm that has the disadvantage of being untrue, masochistic, and fatally corrosive to the persistence of distinctly Canadian comprehensions of sovereignty and nationhood. It also deliberately elides the profound differences between Canada's westward expansion and the way Americans behaved themselves south of the 49th parallel. Article content How British Columbia comes into this story is in Polk's covetousness of the Pacific Northwest, which was known then as the Columbia Territory. Article content An ardent disciple of the American notion of 'manifest destiny,' Polk had campaigned on the slogan ' 54-40 or Fight,' which declared an intention to displace British sovereignty West of the Rockies as far North as the Russian possessions in Alaska, at 54 degrees, forty minutes of latitude. Article content Polk very nearly succeeded. Coupled with American encroachment into the British fur trade realms of what is now Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, Polk's belligerence induced the British colonial office to capitulate with the Oregon Treaty of 1846. The treaty sliced the old Columbia Territory in half by extending the 49th parallel from the Rockies to the Pacific. Article content The treaty forced the Northward migration of thousands of settlers, traders and adventurers under British dominion. They were Orkney Islanders, Scotsmen and Englishmen, Iroquois freemen, Quebecois voltigeurs, 'King George Indians' from a variety of western tribes, and Kanakas, as the Hudson's Bay Company's Hawaiian workers were then known. They would go on to become the first British Columbians. Article content Article content Led by the HBC's James Douglas, who would end up the governor of both the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, a new and thriving multicultural society sprung up around Fort Camosun, now Victoria, where they'd been welcomed by the local Saanich ad Songhees tribes. Article content Below the 49th parallel, the British and Canadian exodus opened the gates to genocide and anarchy: The Cayuse War, the Klamath War, the Salmon River War, the Yakima War and the Nisqually War. Article content Absolutely nothing remotely like this occurred in the settlement of the Canadian West. For all the injustices and travesties of marginalization, and taking into account the Red River Rebellion and the Northwest Rebellion, it was mostly a collaborative affair between Euro-Canadians, Métis and Indigenous people. Article content The Vancouver Island colony bore absolutely no resemblance to the settlements in the American West. Douglas was a West Indian, as the HBC called him, or an 'octoroon' owing to his mixed Scots and Creole ancestry. His wife, Amelia, was the daughter of a Cree woman and the Irish HBC official William Connolly. South of the 49th parallel, Black people were denied American citizenship. Douglas invited hundreds of Black people North. Article content Meanwhile, wholeheartedly supported by the American slave states, Polk decided to take by force all the Mexican territories North of the Rio Grande in a war that unfolded in unspeakable cruelty. The abolitionist Abraham Lincoln was against the war, and General Ulysses S. Grant, who would go on to succeed the assassinated Lincoln, said he was ashamed of his role as a young soldier on the Mexican frontier. 'I had not moral courage enough to resign,' he once confessed. Article content Two years after the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, which ended the Mexican war, ushered in the same ghastly progression of mass murders and shooting sprees: The Yavapai slaughter, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Mendocino War, the Yuki genocide, the Snake River War, the Colorado War, and on and on. It was a tidal wave of hideous crimes against humanity that lasted decades. That's how the American West was 'won.' It's also how the territory that came to be called British Columbia was very nearly lost. Article content By the late 1850s, American miners were streaming North across the 49th parallel, headed to the Fraser Canyon in a mania for gold. Upon arriving by ship at Victoria, they were greeted by the First African Rifles — a regiment of armed Black men. In Victoria, Emancipation Day was already a civic holiday, although it was more than a century before either B.C. or Canada formally celebrated it. Article content In the Fraser Canyon, the Americans had formed themselves into militias, and scores of dead began to pile up in their encounters with local Indigenous miners. So, Douglas took matters into his own hands, and at Fort Langley, on August 2, 1858, Douglas unilaterally declared the establishment of the Crown Colony of British Columbia. Article content The following year, 1859, an American insurrection very nearly broke out in Yale, in the Canyon, when a Black man filed assault charges against an American. Governor Douglas put down the revolt, but was immediately seized of another crisis, on San Juan Island. Article content In a petty dispute over the shooting of a pig, American troops commanded by the notorious General William Harney invaded the island and settled in for a siege, awaiting orders. Harney was one of the worst war criminals in the US military at the time. His instructions to his troops as they were exterminating the Lipan and Caddo tribes were to 'exterminate all the men and make the women and children prisoners.' Their villages were to be looted and burned. Article content Fortunately, however, by 1859, the presidency had gone to James Buchanan, who was preoccupied by tensions that would soon erupt in the war to free the slaves. The dispute on San Juan Island, ostensibly about the trajectory of the border between the islands, was given over to arbitration. Article content
Times
09-07-2025
- Business
- Times
Trump: These are the presidents I like
Not many history books would describe James Polk, America's 11th president, as a 'real-estate guy'. But that was how President Trump remembered his predecessor during an impromptu lecture on American history. Trump gave a runthrough of the achievements of past presidents at the end of a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, explaining why he had chosen certain portraits to decorate the White House. 'I actually spent time in the vaults,' he said. 'The vaults are where we have a lot of great pictures and artwork. And I picked it all myself.' From Dwight Eisenhower to Abraham Lincoln, Trump hinted at comparisons between himself and the various presidents as he pointed out pictures around the cabinet room. Although he liked the art, he clarified that he was primarily a 'frame person … Sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures.' Franklin Delano Roosevelt 'was not a Republican, to put it mildly', Trump said, pointing to a painting of the 32nd president. 'But he was, you know, a four-termer.' As architect of the New Deal, the policy of widespread public investment to rescue the US economy from the Great Depression in the 1930s, Roosevelt is widely regarded as one of the country's greatest leaders. He responded to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 by taking the US into the Second World War. Trump said that Roosevelt, who was paralysed from the waist down after contracting polio, was responsible for 'a lot of ramps' outside the White House. 'People say, 'It's an unusual place for a ramp.' It was because of him. He was wheelchair-bound. But he was an amazing man,' he said. • Netanyahu nominates Trump for Nobel peace prize Trump said it was appropriate to hang a picture of 'Honest Abe Lincoln', who ended slavery and won the Civil War, in the cabinet room since 'this is where wars are ended' — an apparent reference to his desire to see himself as a peacemaker in Ukraine and the Middle East. Trump also appeared to compare himself to Eisenhower, 'a very underrated president'. Alluding to his own recent softening of restrictions on migrant farmworkers, Trump said Eisenhower showed that some presidents can be 'too strong' on immigration. 'He was strong at the borders and, during a certain period of time … so strong that almost every farmer in California went bankrupt,' he said. 'And we have to remember that.' Trump reserved his greatest praise for William McKinley, the 'tariff president'. Having repeatedly compared McKinley's protectionist economic agenda to his own, Trump ordered that Mount McKinley, the highest peak in the US, be returned to its original name earlier this year after Barack Obama renamed it Denali, its Alaskan name. 'McKinley was a great president who never got credit,' Trump said. 'He believed that other countries should pay for the privilege of coming into our country and taking our jobs and taking our treasure … and he built a tremendous fortune.'
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Imperial Fantasy: To Be Polk, McKinley, and Putin—All at Once
Donald Trump has never been known for originality, but his latest act is his most dangerous yet—a desperate imitation of history's most aggressive land-grabbers and strongmen. From James Polk's expansionist conquest to William McKinley's imperialist scheming to Vladimir Putin's authoritarian crackdowns, Trump isn't just following in their footsteps—he's trying to outdo them all. During his first term, Trump admired 'Indian killer' Andrew Jackson, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, but today's speculation centers around three other national leaders: James Polk, William McKinley, and Vladimir Putin. According to recent reporting in The Wall Street Journal, Trump got House Speaker Mike Johnson to give him the painting of President James Polk (1845–1849) to hang in the Oval Office. Polk basically doubled the size of the United States by acquiring Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin, along with territories including what eventually became Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Oregon. He took the southwestern territories by forcing a war against Mexico, a brutal conflict that's romanticized in stories of the Alamo but was loudly and angrily opposed in Congress, where the leader of that opposition was Congressman Abraham Lincoln. Polk was also a Democrat, back in the day when that was the party of slavery and segregation; he was a protégé of populist President Andrew Jackson and owned a plantation in Mississippi that was farmed by enslaved Africans he had purchased. Then there's William McKinley, the presidency after which Karl Rove often said he'd modeled the George W. Bush presidency. McKinley lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in the Philippines and Cuba, leading to our seizure of both island nations, and tried to impose a massive tariff on the Canadian territory to force them to become an American state. As Mark-William Palen writes for Time magazine: Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%. To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs. The problem for McKinley was that the tariff threat backfired; instead of servility, it evoked widespread nationalist sentiment north of the border, pushing Canadians to strengthen their relationship to Mother England and eventually form a full-fledged nation. The third option for a Trump role model is Vladimir Putin during the late 1990s and early 2000s as he was rising to absolute power in Russia. By 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev's radical reforms of the Soviet state laid the foundations for a truly democratic nation. He introduced multicandidate elections in 1989; over 300 reformists had won seats in the Congress of People's Deputies, Russia's first directly elected legislative body. With his glasnost (transparency) policy, he introduced governmental reforms that opened up the media to dissenting voices, exposed systemic corruption, and enabled grassroots political movements. When Putin came into power, however, he quickly dismantled Gorbachev's federalism by replacing elected regional governors with Kremlin appointees solely loyal to himself. He established the Duma as a rubber-stamp and largely powerless Parliament, initially requiring opposition parties to register, which subjected them to costs and harassment. He then took control of the nation's election systems, stuffing ballot boxes and requiring politicians to 'prove nationwide support,' thus effectively banning candidates not aligned with his own United Russia Party. Next, he went after the media: Independent outlets like Dozhd and Novaya Gazeta were shut down or co-opted, and critical journalists were first sued into bankruptcy for libel and later imprisoned. Putin's Constitutional Court (like our Supreme Court) gave him lifetime immunity from prosecution for any crime, a position echoed for Trump last year by six corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court. He passed over 50 'anti-extremism' laws, arresting protesters and criminalizing dissent. Non-Russian, non-Caucasian residents were deported en masse. With the help of several morbidly rich oligarchs, he essentially took the democratic aspects of the Russian government apart, stripping or crippling many of the agencies that helped average Russians while seizing full control of the state's police and judicial agencies through toady appointees. Then he and his oligarch buddies re-nationalized many of the previously privatized former state assets, forcing multiple oligarchs who controlled major businesses or industries to either swear fealty to him or surrender their companies. Putin's final step was—like Polk and McKinley—to begin the expansion of the Russian state, conquering Chechnya, annexing parts of Ukraine (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson), maintaining de facto military control over territories in Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) and Moldova (Transnistria). So who is Trump trying to pattern his presidency after? I'd argue that he's taking pieces from all three of the above national leaders. Combined, they explain his fixation with Canada becoming the fifty-first state, his threats to NATO about Greenland, and his order to the Pentagon—reported yesterday—to prepare for a military seizure of the Panama Canal. Also appealing to him would be the reality that American democracy was extremely limited during the presidencies of Polk and McKinley: Racial minorities, women, and often poor people were expressly forbidden from voting, a situation the GOP appears committed to re-creating through the SAVE Act and the red-state voter suppression campaigns that put Trump back into office last November. And then there's Trump's love of Putin. Understanding Trump's motivations and role models may well help American patriots formulate appropriate opposition and messaging. And should have guided Chuck Schumer's ability to rally Senate Democrats to create a united opposition to today's continuing resolution that further empowers Musk's dismantling of our government. Trump's imperial fantasy isn't just about power—it's about dismantling democracy itself. Like Polk, he dreams of annexation; like McKinley, he thrives on manufactured conflict; and like Putin, he seeks absolute control. If America doesn't wake up, his fantasy will become our nightmare.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
On This Day, Feb. 14: YouTube founded
Feb. 14 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1779, British navigator and explorer James Cook, first known European to reach the Hawaiian Islands, was stabbed to death by island natives while investigating the theft of a boat. In 1849, James Polk became the first U.S. president to be photographed while in office. The photographer was Mathew Brady, who is famous for his Civil War pictures. In 1859, Oregon was admitted as the 33rd member of the United States. In 1903, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law creating the Department of Commerce and Labor. In 1912, Arizona was admitted as the 48th member of the United States. In 1920, the League of Women Voters was formed in Chicago. In 1929, in what became known as the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre," gunmen believed to be working for Prohibition-era crime boss Al Capone killed seven members of the rival George "Bugs" Moran gang in a Chicago garage. In 1949, Israel's legislature, the Knesset, convened for the first time. In 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, offended by The Satanic Verses, called on Muslims to kill its author, Salman Rushdie. He offered a $1 million reward for Rushdie's death, sending the writer into hiding. Iran rescinded the death sentence in 1998. In 1990, 90 people were killed and 56 injured in the crash of an Indian Airlines Airbus 320, about 50 yards short of a runway in Bangalore, India. In 1994, a convicted serial killer who admitted killing 55 people -- Andrei Chikatilo -- was executed by a firing squad in a Russian prison. In 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated. Twenty-one others died with him. In 2005, video-sharing website YouTube was founded by former PayPal employees. The company was purchased by Google a year and a half later for $1.65 billion. In 2011, Chevron was ordered to pay $8.6 billion to clean up oil pollution in a rain forest area in northeastern Ecuador. In 2018, a 19-year-old who had been expelled for discipline problems walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and fatally shot 17 people, including 14 students. In 2022, scientists determined that a megadrought that had gripped the southwestern North America for more than two decades was the driest such event in the region in at least 1,200 years. In 2024, one person was killed and more than 20 injured after gunmen opened fire on partygoers near the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl victory parade.
