US History according to Doug DeVos

“As we’ve empowered more people, we’ve made America the freest, wealthiest, and most successful nation in human history!”    Doug DeVos

Doug DeVos wrote a short essay recently, which is part of a 50th anniversary edition of his father’s book Believe!. His essay is entitled, Why We Should Always Believe! in America.

Early on in his essay DeVos does acknowledge that the founding fathers were flawed, stating:

They enslaved black people. They restricted the right to vote to landowners and didn’t even consider extending that right to women. None of us should overlook the founders’ sins or try to excuse them.

Unfortunately, Doug DeVos spends the rest of the article talking about how great America is and how it “has undeniably changed the world for the better, lifting up billions of people along the way.” DeVos never substantiates such a claim, but he does continue to use lofty language to celebrate what America is.

Doug DeVos even chastises people who are critical of the history of the US, stating:

But along the way, and especially in the past fifty years, a lot of people have started thinking that all our progress springs from a poisoned seed. They say that the evils of the founding define our country. So America has been evil ever since.

This is an over simplification of what “a lot of people” have been saying. Beginning in the 1960s there was a shift in what was being taught at the university level, where students and faculty began researching and thinking independently about the history of the US. People were waking up to how US history was taught and started looking at history through the lens of African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, through the lived experience of women, of workers and immigrants. Courses were being developed to teach more independent and critical accounts of US history and university departments started include Black studies, feminist studies, etc.

These critical assessments of US history were not limited to, as DeVos states, a poisoned seed, but were rooted in an understanding that systems of power and oppression continued to evolve and morph in ways that perpetually benefitted those with more privilege and power, something that DeVos fails to acknowledge or understand.

What is even more offensive is that DeVos then decides he needs to use someone from history who has been oppressed, but still thinks America is great. Here the aire to the Amway wealth uses the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass to make his point.

“Here DeVos writes: Years later, Frederick Douglass posed a question: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer: The Fourth of July is everything, because America is built on “saving principles.” Douglass implored his fellow Americans of all races and creeds: “Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”

If a former slave like Frederick Douglass could say those words, if he could dedicate his life to making America live by the principles espoused by the founders, surely we can do the same.”

Note that DeVos only quotes Douglass in the words that are in bold, but none of the rest of his speech entitled What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” People should read the entire speech, which you can find here. I am including the following excerpt from Douglass’ speech and would suggest that his analysis of the US would include him in the very company that Doug DeVos dismisses earlier in his essay.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

In addition to his deeply distorted understanding of US history, Doug DeVos fails to address the fact that his existence as a member of DeVos family and being part of the billionaire class means that everything he does contributes to maintaining the privilege and power he and his family has at the expense of the majority of people.

Doug DeVos can say that the US is the greatest country on the planet all he wants, but what he really means is that the economic and political systems in the US are great for him, his family and the class of people he conspires with. Doug DeVos will preach that if you work hard enough and just become an entrepreneur that you too can enjoy the kind of life that he has. Of course this is absurd, since there are always a small percentage of the population that will have the wealth and power that he and his family has, no matter how hard they work.

Equally important is the fact that the DeVos family uses their wealth in ways that perpetuates inequality and tries to diminish the social and political gains made since the 1960s. Here are just a few:

• Doug DeVos primarily uses his wealth to expand the wealth of his family, by expanding business interests and investments.
• Doug DeVos uses his wealth to influence public policy at the federal, state and local level by contributing millions to Republican candidates that want to role back civil rights, deregulate the private sector, privatize parts of the public sector, do away with DEI policies, undermine labor unions, attack those who are trans or queer, and subvert public education in a multifaceted way, which includes dictating a curriculum that teaches history the way that people like the DeVos family view history.
• Doug DeVos hides some of his money in his foundation to prevent it from being taxed, the uses that money to fund right wing agendas and provide smaller amounts to non-profits in order to purchase a public image.

Like all billionaires Doug DeVos is a con man, a hypocrite and a coward because he refuses to acknowledge the harm that he and his family have perpetrated in the US and around the world. Indeed, Doug DeVos would likely agree with Napoleon Bonaparte’s assessment of history – “History is a set of lies agreed upon.”