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Hall of Shame

Lyman Frank Baum (1856 - 1919)

American poet, author, playwright and independent filmmaker, best known as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books. As editor of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer he wrote some utterly disgusting racist editorials advocating the total termination of Native Americans during the era of the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre.

I will not be quoting the whole article here but just be highlighting the most racist pieces that from his editorials.

"Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatues from the face of the earth"

The following piece was written 5 days after the murder of Sitting Bull:

"Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history is dead. He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven form their possessions: forced to give up their hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? The proud spirit or the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With this fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in latter ages of the glory of these grand kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroise."

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