Top 10 Things the American Government NEEDS You to Forget About

#10: The Wilmington Coup (1898)

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A violent mob, many of whom were white supremacists, take over the government to overturn an election. Sound familiar? Well, we are of course talking about something that happened in Wilmington, North Carolina. Leading up to the 1898 elections, white supremacists were spun into violence by local newspapers like “The Caucasian.” Economic and racial resentments were blended into a rageful stew that boiled over when the African American middle class exerted its political muscle. The government left Black citizens undefended and, on election day, the white supremacists staged a violent insurrection. Over 2000 Black citizens were purged from the city and sixty were lynched.

#9: How Many Were Killed During Prohibition (circa 1920-33)

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At the turn of the 20th Century, pietism spread through American Protestantism. Emphasizing individual righteousness, adherents proclaimed alcohol a demonic seed of societal ills. The movement spread through the halls of power, leading in 191 to ratification of the 18th Amendment. However, Prohibition didn’t stop the illegal spread of hooch, so the government stepped in. Utilizing federal power to regulate industrial alcohol, in 1926 they forced manufacturers to add contaminants. Highly toxic substances like benzine, mercury, and methanol were added. It had no effect on the use of industrial alcohol in bootlegging. It did, however, result in the deaths of an estimated 10,000 people. Many others suffered other long-term illnesses or permanent blindness.

The ATF has long been the center of right-wing conspiracies about gun confiscation. It was shocking, then, when the debacle of Operation Fast and Furious revealed the agency to be behind a large gun proliferation scheme. The ATF purposely allowed Arizona criminals to illegally buy thousands of guns. They were to then track the weapons to Mexico and follow them to drug cartels. Unfortunately, they lost track of hundreds of weapons, many of which turned up in Texas instead. One of those illegal AK-47s was used to murder a Border Patrol agent in Arizona in 2010. The program was terminated and the agency raked over the media coals. According to Mexico, the guns were used to kill or wound 150 Mexican citizens.

Through the years, many U.S. Administrations have seen it as their duty to interfere with foreign powers. The ‘right’ leadership in another country, they believed, could serve U.S. interests. That often meant using American military, intelligence, and economic might to install dictatorships around the world. The long term effects frequently resulted in enormous suffering, death, and inequality abroad. For example, when the West installed the Shah of Iran to help with oil prices, they didn’t foresee an Islamist revolution against his regime that would turn the region into a tinderbox. Savage dictators on every continent, men like Batista, Somoza, Marcos, Mobutu, and Pinochet, owed their rise to U.S. interference. The reverberations and suffering are still felt today.

Government-sponsored dehumanization is a horrific thing. Few modern examples in the U.S. are as egregious as the forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The CDC and the Public Health Service approached hundreds of Black men in Alabama in 1932. Most of the six hundred were poor sharecroppers, who entered the study without informed consent. Two thirds of the men had syphilis but were never informed. Instead, they were given placebos and monitored for decades, to study the disease’s effects. Hundreds of them died without knowing they were ever sick. Forty transmitted the disease to their wives, nineteen to their babies. It took a whistleblower to reveal and end the program in 1972.

#5: The Sand Creek Massacre (1864)

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Modern-day Colorado evokes images of hippies, legal marijuana, and winter sports. Once, though, it was home to the Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples. In 1864, the Third Colorado Cavalry under the auspices of the U.S. Army attacked a native village at Sand Creek. Led by a racist colonel named John Chivington, these soldiers committed true horrors. They slaughtered hundreds of people. Worse, they desecrated the bodies of the dead, and often kept gory keepsakes. Many of them would later be found as curios being sold in Denver shops. It took more than a century to finally remember Sand Creek for what it was: not a battle won by our valorous army, but a crime against humanity.

By now, the MKUltra program is a fairly well-known blemish on the history of the U.S. government. At the height of the Cold War, the CIA spent two decades illegally experimenting on private citizens without their consent. Both Americans and foreign citizens were subjected to biochemical and psychological experiments. Volunteers, students, and even customers at government-run brothels in San Francisco were dosed with LSD. Heck, the agency even dosed their own employees. Meant to discover new truth serums, interrogation techniques, and sleeper agents, MKUultra destroyed hundreds of lives. Subproject 68 in Canada, for example, saw a doctor forcing medical comas on patients just seeking psychological therapy. The program was so politically toxic by its end that the CIA director ordered most documentation destroyed.

Long-time FBI director J. Edgar Hoover saw the Civil Rights Movement as a Communist-adjascent threat to American power. He created the Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO to empower. FBI agents to surveil civil rights leaders and infiltrate and undermine their organizations. The program was a bipartisan 15-year effort, spanning four presidencies. The program targeted the Black Panthers, in particular, to devastating effect. The FBI aided in the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. They also destroyed the organization’s popular Free Breakfast for Children Program. Thanks to a coordinated disinformation and crackdown campaign by the FBI and local police, the program was destroyed.

American history portrays the U.S. as the great heroic force that took down global fascism in 1945. While that is true, it ignores the dark and secret aftermath of the war. With Operation Paperclip, the U.S. competed with the Soviets to repatriate top Nazi scientists and intelligence officials. Even worse occurred during their occupation and rebuilding of Japan as the U.S. government learned about Japanese atrocities during the war. Japan’s Unit 731, in particular, was a factory of horrors. They conducted many illegal human experiments on Chinese and Russian civilians and POWs. Evidence of their biological and chemical weapons tests were classified by the Americans and perpetrators received pardons by the U.S. government. Thousands of deaths were covered up.

There was a thriving African-American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma called “Black Wall Street” by many. The summer of 1921 saw its demise at the hands of white supremacist terrorism. Mobs of white residents, many of whom were municipal officials, attacked their black neighbors. Black homes and businesses were put to the torch. Firebombs and bullets were dropped from the air. Thirty five square blocks of the Greenwood District were destroyed. Hundreds were injured, many were killed, and many more were displaced. Many Americans had never heard of The Tulsa Race Massacre until HBO’s “The Watchmen,” indicating a severe lapse in the educational system. Recent debates over controversial Florida educational laws have brought a similar incident, the Rosewood Massacre, to the fore. If America is ever going to live up to its ideals, it must confront and learn from dark periods of its past. Do you remember other events the government may want you to forget? Please share in the comments below.