In 1830, on this day, the president of the United States was Andrew Jackson.
I don’t know much about his boyhood, other than he was born in the Coastal Carolinas. His actual birthplace is unknown, as his father died in a logging accident three weeks before he was born. After his father’s funeral, it is not documented where his mother went. So somewhere down south is where Andrew came into this world. That was a decade before the American Revolutionary War.
Once he grew up a little, Jackson became a lawyer. He served briefly in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate, representing Tennessee.
After resigning, he served as a justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court from 1798 until 1804. It was about, or during that time, when Jackson purchased a property later known as The Hermitage, also located in Tennessee, specifically Nashville. He became a wealthy, slave-owning planter. A slave-owning Supreme Court Justice. I imagine most of them were in Tennessee.
I won’t go on about his whole military career, which happened from that point on, almost until he was elected president, in 1828. He served as president from 1829 – 1837. Two-termer as you can see.
But back to this date in 1830, during his first time around. That is when Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.
The Indian Removal Act. Didn’t anyone notice that they had been here first?
Anyway, this “Act” authorized the Army to force Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes out of the southern states. This set the stage for the Cherokee Trail of Tears. An unspeakably terrible time in our history. All the while, there are slaves, black people, in captivity.
I mention the date of this because of the coincidence of things.
On this same date, 57 years later, in 1887, Jim Thorpe was born. Or shall I say,
James Francis Thorpe, also known as Wa-Tho-Huk, translated as “Bright Path”. He was, as you can see, of Indian descent.
Thorpe grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma. He became one of our nation’s greatest athletes of all time. An Olympic gold medalist.
As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe became the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States. He is considered to be one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports. Those two Olympic gold medals were in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon.
As if that weren’t enough, he played American football (collegiate and professional), professional baseball, and basketball. Despite his great athletic achievements, he faced tremendous challenges of discrimination because of his Indian ethnicity. He was stripped of his Olympic medals, purportedly for playing semi-pro baseball prior to winning the Gold. Most believe his medals were taken for entirely different reasons.
After he left sports, he struggled to make ends meet. He appeared in a few films, briefly, but he also worked as a construction worker, a doorman (bouncer), a security guard, and a ditch digger. Thorpe was a chronic alcoholic during his later life and fell on hard times. He ran out of money sometime in the early 1950s. Thorpe died of poor health in 1953.
Sometimes, the world turns sideways. Fast, it starts spinning a little out of control. Oh, the wobble of it all.
I think a lot of us would get off if we could. You know, take the next bus, “Thanks just the same.” But gravity sticks our feet to this place, so we take our motion-sickness medicine. We put on our seatbelts and ride it out.
I’m learning that while things don’t always make sense to me, I’m only the judge and jury of myself. I don’t know how we go about eliciting change. I’m not sure things have gotten much better. In fact, it seems like the world has taken too many steps in the wrong direction. But I think we should continue to believe in the principles that we think are right. And support those beliefs in any way we can. We should always try to act by example. And not give in to this long-existing hatred.
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The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
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“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
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