'Something there is that doesn’t love a wall'
The most erudite graffiti I ever saw came on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor in the late 1960s. On a plywood wall around a construction site someone had scrawled the opening and closing lines of Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” and had jokingly attributed each to a famous figure in Chinese history, one who had built China’s Great Wall and the other who had breached it.
The closing line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” was attributed to Qin Shi Huangdi, China’s First Qin Emperor who unified the country in 221 BC and built the Great Wall along the country’s northern and western borders. The poem's opening line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” was attributed to Genghis Khan, the great Mongol leader who created the largest land empire the world has ever seen, which included the Mongol conquest of China in 1279.
Robert Frost nicely captured the justification both for building walls and for tearing them down. I’ve been reminded of Frost’s poem and that graffiti amidst President Trump’s promise to build a new great wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Ironically, President Trump is not the first American president to contemplate building a wall to enforce the law of the land. Colin Calloway, in his recent book, "The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation," argues that the American declaration of independence was not only because of an idealistic longing for freedom, but also because Britain was trying to protect Native American rights by limiting American settler encroachment on Indian lands.
As President, George Washington negotiated several “peace treaties” with Indian confederations, setting firm and clear boundaries between Indian territories and lands open to American settlers. Every single promise Washington made to the Indian leaders was promptly broken by the rush of white settlers onto Indian lands.
In 1796, Washington become so disillusioned by settler violations of these treaties that he wrote in frustration to his Secretary of War, “I believe nothing short of a Chinese Wall, or a line of Troops will restrain land Jobbers, and the encroachment of Settlers, upon the Indian territory.” Of course, no Chinese Wall was ever built to protect Native Americans against the theft of their homelands by American settlers. So, most Native Americans have ended up on poverty-ridden reservations located on relatively barren land.
In the Mexican-American war of 1846 to 1848, Mexico lost 55 percent of its territory to the more powerful United States, so any wall today on the U.S.-Mexico border would go through the middle of what was once Mexican territory. Abraham Lincoln called the Mexican-American War immoral, pro-slavery and a threat to the nation’s republican values. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes in protesting the war, and wrote his famous essay, Civil Disobedience, in response to the war.
China’s Great Wall was always more important as a symbol than as a military barrier. It marked the geographical division between the settled agricultural lands of Chinese farmers and the dry steppe grasslands on China’s northern and western borders, fit only for the mobile grazing patterns of nomadic tribes.
The Great Wall, 20 to 30 feet high on average, also served as a road (wide enough for four horses in tandem) and as housing for troops in its watch towers. But the wall was expensive to maintain and to garrison, and it could always be breached with a bribe to a corrupt commander. Over the centuries the wall fell into disrepair at various times and places. In the 15th century China’s Ming dynasty rulers rebuilt the Great Wall for 5500 miles along China’s northern and western borders.
In 1644, as Beijing fell to peasant rebels, a Ming general, Wu Sangui, invited powerful Manchu troops to enter China through the Wall at Shanhai Guan (the pass where the mountains meet the sea). The Manchus proceeded to conquer China, and in the next 150 years, to double the size of the Qing Empire.
Because of that dramatic expansion of China’s borders, the Great Wall today is entirely within the boundaries of the People’s Republic of China, another indication that it never worked as a military barrier. It didn’t protect the Chinese from the nomads nor the nomads from other nomads.
Today the Great Wall is nothing more than a tourist attraction, though perhaps the most successful tourist attraction in the world. In the first week of October in 2014, a holiday week, the restored parts of the wall north of Beijing drew 16 million visitors, according to Chinese press accounts.
In the age of drones, airplanes and instantaneous electronic communication, walls are increasingly relics of a bygone era. “Good fences make good neighbors” in small livestock-raising farm communities, but not between equal sovereign nations. Whether separating the U.S. and Mexico or Israelis and Palestinians, walls today are signs of inequality, fear, hatred and oppression. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” rings truer than ever.