Propaganda Rock #25: Elbow Room

MAJOR CONTENT WARNING: THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY VERY FUCKED UP IN A WAY THAT COULD BE VERY TRIGGERING FOR SOME READERS. IT USES NAZI IDEOLOGY TO JUSTIFY THE GENOCIDE OF INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHVx4nqgMPQ

Originally Aired: May 22nd, 1976
Written by: Lynn Ahrens
Performed by: Sue Manchester

Shel's Review

Music: 🎵
Animation: 📺📺
Pedagogy: 🎓
Accuracy: 🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬😬😬😬😬😬

This is, no question, the absolute worst Schoolhouse Rock! song. Ever. In history. I haven't watched any of Earth Rock! yet but I can't imagine it could get worse than this. The music is grating to the ears, like the world's worst square dance. The key change at the end sounds so awful. It's absolutely false as to what happened historically. I don't even understand what it's teaching because it's so wrong. Also? It's using the Nazi concept of Lebensraum to justify the genocide and annexation of Indigenous North American nations through a jaunty celebratory tune.

I will give it one singular point in the animation department because it has colored backdrops instead of being newspaper strip characters on a white background. That's the only possible way this could have been worse. At least they put a little effort into drawing their disgusting genocide celebration. But not even that much effort—it's hardly pretty to look at.

Lebensraum

So Lebensraum is the German ideology of settler colonialism. It emerged at first in the 19th century and was heavily inspired by Manifest Destiny. Lebensraum when literally translated means "living space." It refers to the supposed need for Germany to expand its territory in order for the Aryan race to have enough room to grow, especially more rural agricultural land. While it was first conceived in the 19th century, it really took off under the rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, and was used as the justification for the invasion of Poland. Lebensraum argues that it is justified to forcefully, violently, and permanently remove Non-Aryans from their land in order for the Aryans to have more legroom. Time and again, Adolf Hitler cited and pointed to the United States and Manifest Destiny as the justification and prime example of Lebensraum in action as a justifiable and good political move.

Living space. Walking room. Legroom. Elbow Room. It's the exact same ideology as in this song. "We have to expand west because we need more room for us, and it's OK to force people off of their land in order for us to have more land."

Manifest Destiny was the original inspiration for the Holocaust. In fact, the Jewish ghettos were often framed as "reservations" for the Jews. Where do you think they got that word from? It came from the reservations that colonizers forced indigenous people onto with violence. Manifest Destiny was the ideology of what can only be described as a mass continent-wide genocide. Unlike the holocaust, nobody invaded to stop the United States, and the world has never fully reckoned with what happened. Unlike the holocaust, there was no preexisting diaspora on other continents to organize evacuation operations or enlist in an army crossing the ocean to fight the Americans. The Lord Jefferey Amherst was never held accountable for smallpox blankets. Andrew Jackson was never held accountable for the Trail of Tears. This genocide has no well-known catch-all name, and Manifest Destiny is not taught in American schools as a horrific thing to be reckoned with like the holocaust is in Germany.

Manifest Destiny was the precursor to the holocaust, but this song was written after the holocaust. There are no excuses. Every single person involved in making this song should have known better and could have known better. Not a single person raised their voice and said "wait, isn't this the same justification the Germans used for killing as many Slavs and Jews as possible? Are we the bad guys?"

Sacajawea

Lewis & Clark did not "hire' Sacajawea. She was the non-consensual child bride of Toussaint Charbonneau. Charbonneau bought her as a slave when she was only 13 and forced her to marry him and have his children. She had been kidnapped from her people by Hidatsa slave traders. Charbonneau was the one that was hired. The only notable thing we know about him from before the Lewis and Clark expedition is that he was Quebecois and was once caught violently raping an Ojibwe girl, age unknown. For this, he was stabbed by the girl's mother, and even the colonizer recording this incident made a point of saying that Charbonneau deserved it.

She certainly did important things for the expedition, but she did not lead them "all across the countryside." She accompanied them for about half the journey, from what is now North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean—but that's an insane distance and she did not and could not have had knowledge of the way the entire route. She was an important participant, but she wasn't like, the guide who mystically knew how to get to the pacific ocean. She was as much an adventurer as they were—though she didn't have much choice in the matter. Apparently she even had a reunion with her brother along the way but wasn't allowed to leave the expedition and rejoin the Shoshone nation. Even her kids got "adopted" away from her and sent to boarding schools. She died very young.

Also, not mentioned, was their other "guide:" York. York was Clark's slave who he owned since childhood. His childhood slave. Who he forced to go on this journey with him. Apparently, York was pretty damn impressive and instrumental in the success of this whole ordeal. No mention of slavery though. Schoolhouse Rock never mentions slavery.

And The Future is Bleak and Terrifying

It's so creepy how the lyrics keep repeating "In [G—d] We Trust" again and again as they describe violent expansion by force. How just completely face value it's stated that expansion to the west coast was "our manifest destiny." How land is completely deforested and replaced by train tracks followed by highways. The implication that not only has the US killed, but it will kill again so long as more land is needed. The moon landing was very recent when this song was written, but you know what else was quite recent? Hawaiian Statehood which was only 17 years ago and very much fresh in the memory of the adults creating this song. These days, among our generation, "fifty nifty states" is this enshrined notion, that our borders are set and adding or ceding land is unthinkably radical. Even DC and PR statehood movements are out of a desire for equity and not due to a desire to expand US territorial claims. But to Lynn Ahrens, who was 11 years old when suddenly the US now owned a bunch of islands in the pacific, well, why wouldn't the US continue to expand its territory? Let's add the fucking moon to our set of colonies.

This is so cartoonishly evil. This song is evil propaganda for children that you would come up with in a cartoon for children where there is an evil empire that wants to conquer the world. Children watching this learn that the US is the Good Land of Freedom and that the entire world can and should eventually succumb to American Rule as the needs for American Lebensraum grows. Fuck the economical nature of population density and harmony with nature, let's turn the entire fucking planet into endless cul-de-sacs and highways so we can have our "elbow room" and we'll kill fucking anyone who stands in our way.

OK, that's it, I'm done. I could go on forever but that's it. I'm done. I just. I have a lot of sympathetic rage about the American Genocides because the Germans killed 99% of Jews in my great grandmother's home village in Lithuania, and 99% of Jews in my great grandfather's home city in Belarus. The Germans did it in the name of Lebensraum. They got the idea from the United States. They did to my people what the Americans did to all of the indigenous nations of Turtle Island and while we get all this sympathy and memorials for it, where are the memorials for Manifest Destiny? Where are the Museums of American Atrocities? If there was not a Jewish diaspora who campaigned foreign nations to fight the Germans, funded and organized evacuation campaigns, and enlisted in armies to fight the Germans—and afterwards campaigned demanding reparations—would the Germans have been making jaunty children's propaganda cartoons about the wonderful expansion of Germany into the Baltics? Where are the reparations for the indigenous nations of Turtle Island? And yet anyone who questions the mainstream narrative about this genocide is some sort of crazy rabble-rousing radical. It makes my blood boil.

This song makes me want to run through the streets screaming* Death to America* holy fucking damn.

June's Review

Music: 0
Animation: 📺
Pedagogy: 0
Accuracy: 0
Yikes: 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

You know, after building it up as the worst song in all of Schoolhouse Rock! for so long, I'm still pretty shocked by how bad the animation and the music are! It's all the worst parts of No More Kings but cheaper and shittier. Especially coming right after the massively racist but fun to listen to Great American Melting Pot, this is just awful. It's not a good song folks! And the animation is like—aside from 1 or 2 funny gags—just miserable to watch. I was ready for the massively offensive themes, but I wasn't ready for how much the song would just suck!

Ha Ha That Was A Joke I was not prepared for how bad this song was. I had to stop watching when she yells out "manifest destiny" and "the west was just meant to be," because it was so fucking disgusting. Every single thing they say is a miserable lie, there's not a single redeeming element of the song. Shel has gone into detail about all the ideas, but I'd also like to again point out how evil the through-line of the song is. All of the crimes and horror of America reduced to a single stupid Nazi narrative about needing more space. It takes everything from colonization to building railroads to the fucking moon landings and goes "oh, well, it's all the same thing ya know", and then that same thing is NAZI SHIT. I want to puke.

But even that isn't what pushed me to violate our scale and give this a full swathe of 0s across the board. No, what did that was my desire to find something linked to me a long time ago, a remix of the song filled with anger and screaming about how racist it is—a tiny Soundcloud file that I still don't know the origin of¹. I attempted to find it on Youtube.

Instead, I found home video after home video of kids singing this song. I had forgotten, of course, that Schoolhouse Rock! was made into a musical called Schoolhouse Rock Live, and this song is a part of it. Can't you just imagine little Timmy up on stage yelling about manifest destiny? Little Debbie promoting the ideology of Hitler? When we say propaganda rock, we aren't just talking about these videos as a vague idea. These were actively used to teach kids, and still are. Seeing hundreds of videos of grade school children loudly and excitedly singing the Lebensraum song actually broke me. This song wasn't just as bad as everyone said it would be—it was somehow far worse.

Up Next: Actually, you see, when the founding fathers used the phrase "merciless Indian Savages" in the declaration of independence, they meant that in an anti-racist way.

Shel: Is it this?

I think the main reason the US doesn't have a Museum of American Atrocities and it doesn't treat the genocide of the indiginous nations who were already here with the same shame that Germany does the holocaust is that reckoning with the original sins of the USA as we know it legitimately threatens to destroy it. Unlike Germany, which has a history that goes back before the holocaust, the USA didn't exist before some white folks showed up and decided to violently displace the people who were already here. It's foundational. If we accept that the past roughly 400 years of settler colonialism (and slavery but we don't talk about that either) that got us here for the atrocities they were, that strikes at the very heart of the US's national identity and provokes the question of whether the USA as a nation-state and an imperial project is even legitimate (it isn't). It really is too dangerous and radical of an idea to enter the mainstream discourse in a serious way.

Annie D

@ann-arcana

Queen of Burgers 🍔