What is the US's greatest tragedy?

I’d say the wholesale slaughter of the natives.

The Dust Bowl and Black Blizzard in the 1930’s.

There’s not one that is worse. It’s all of them that make the whole system bad.

When I first heard about the Japanese internment camps, I thought I saw a typo and assumed they were rounding up suspects. Uh, nope, lol. I guess we should’ve just gathered up every single Muslim and arab after 9/11.

Each was the greatest tragedy of their time. Each person living through that tragedy at their time in life was devastated. I can’t say that 9/11 was the worst only because I lived it.

Institutionalized slavery, followed by Manifest Destiny.

For me the question is – who is it a tragedy for? The US is a rather vague entity. I think my answer would be different depending on the “victims” here. Are we talking about for African Americans, Native Americans, the working class, the wealthy, foreign victims of US foreign policy?

What is your measuring stick? Number of lives? Each person can only die once. So logically a thousand deaths are no more significant than one death.
And death itself is not really a tragedy.
So then what? Human suffering? How does one quantify that?
There can really be no “worst”.

I think it is the assumption on the part of the American government that the United States can police the entire world.

Manifest destiny, the invention of nuclear weapons (which may one-day end the human race), slavery, Jim crow and institutionalized racism.

@Trillian “So logically a thousand deaths are no more significant than one death.”

I am not following your logic.

Pick your poison, impossible. Multiple wrongs never make a right and there is no way to choose any one tragic event and declare it the worst.
This is like asking what’s the worst way to die.

1.) Shark attack, being conscious of being chewed to death while simultaneously drowning.
2.) Burning alive slowly
3.) Being suffocated by a 300 lb. sexual predator sitting on your face

Go ahead…choose! lol

Then consider; Each life is full of myriad complexities. Hopes, dreams, accomplishments, wonders, failures, pettiness and greatness. When the light of an individual is extinguished, whether of not there is an after-life, the time on this world is gone. No more sunrises, no more rainbows, no more beautiful starry nights. Everything this person wanted to do is ended. For this one person, the Universe as we know it is gone. This is true whether the person dies alone, in a car crash, or in a collapsing tower.
One light has been extinguished.
Is it any more or less tragic if the light is extinguished at the same time in the same place as a thousand others? If that light had been extinguished half an hour later or earlier?
For each individual, the light was snuffed out, and to each individual, it does not signify that others are being snuffed at the same time. Each individual can only die alone, whether or not he/she is surrounded by others who are also busy dying or not.
A single life is no less precious, significant, or insignificant than a thousand.

The 2 acts of nuclear terrorism against Japanese civilians.

Loss of the American Dream and Frontier

That Charles Ingalls never had a stormy passionate affair with Olivia Walton.
Man, they’d have made sweet, sweet love together….shame.

Not all of those are tragedies. It is a tragedy when a small child dies of cancer.
9/11 was wanton murder, not a tragedy.
Most of the others were the end result of previous poor choices.
Katrina was indeed a tragedy since the weather is beyond our control.

As others have pointed out, how do you measure these with one another? I like @chyna‘s answer best; it was a momentous event/tragedy/turning point at the time. The Civil War was an event impressed into the memories of those who lived it, and the following generations, but today we commemorate it not with solemn observances, banquets, cemetery visits, etc., but with re-enactments by history buffs. Pearl Harbor shocked everyone in December 1941, but ten years later, it was not remembered with the same intensity that September 11 was last year, on the tenth anniversary.

Additionally, many of the things you list, @Charles, built on each other or occurred because of some of the events before them. For example, slavery was one of the central factors in the Civil War, which in turn led to Jim Crow, which led to… you get the point. You list Korea, which influenced our government’s reactions/behavior in Vietnam, which then influenced how we behaved in Grenada, Kuwait, Iraq, etc. They are all part of a national tapestry, part of our story, and as such, I don’t think there is one example that is worse (or better) than another.

However, for the sake of your question, I think one of the greatest tragedies is that we collectively failed to live up to the potential enshrined in the Constitution. We are now in the process of allowing our courts and politicians to destroy the Bill of Rights. The uniqueness of the American experiment in constitutional government influenced the political development of other societies and nations, yet we allowed our government to subvert the rights and principles outlined in the governmental framework. Many of the tragedies/disasters/failings you list came about because of how the government, in our name, abused these principles.