The first Edwin James, of Weybridge, Middlebury College class of 1816, would support Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, as his descendent, Edwin James of Shoreham, does not.
The first James condemned the capitalist greed of whites in their dispossession of Native Americans and became a lifelong defendant of the right of Native Americans to live their lives.
“Is it absolutely necessary that while we invite to our shores and to a participation in all our boasted institutions,” James asks, “we should, at the same time, persist in the determination to root out the last remnants of a face who were the original proprietors of the soil?”
James influenced Henry David Thoreau among others and is part of an American radical tradition that Sanders follows and that the Edwin James of Shoreham does not understand.
Bob Buckeye
East Middlebury
Editor’s note: The writer is responding to a letter by Edwin James of Shoreham that ran in the March 17 edition.