Chapter one of Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian
“a society built on Indian graves” (5)
“America clearly began not with primal innocence and consent but with acts of force and fraud. Indians were here first, and it was their land upon which Americans contracted, squabbled, and reasoned with one another.” Moreover, “America was continually beginning again on the frontier, and as it expanded across the continent, it killed, removed, and drove into extinction one tribe after another (3).
“The years spanned by Andrew Jackson’s life were the great years of American expansion” (3).
“Two-thirds of the American population of 3.9 million lived within fifty miles of the ocean in 1790. In the next half-century 4.5 million Americans crossed the Appalachians, one of the great migrations in world history. The western states contained less than three percent of the U.S. population in 1790, twenty-eight percent in 1830. In two decades [more] the west would become the most populous region of the country” (3-4).
Indian removal was one of Jackson’s major achievements. “125,000 Indians lived east of the Mississippi in 1820. Seventy-five percent of these came under government removal programs in the next two decades” (4).
Justifying Genocide
The need, felt at the time, to justify treatment of the Indians, both internationally and internally (self-image).
The theme of the Indian brother as an inner double (p5).
The justifying myth of a superior civilization vs. the lower stage of savagery: "Southerners like Bouldin often rooted authority in unredeemed force and contaminated inheritance. Whites must take Indian land, Bouldin suggested, but the process was contaminated at the core. The fraternal conflict of Indians and whites contained no moral resolution. But neither the south nor the country as a whole could rest with such a birthright. Whites developed, as they took Indian land, a powerful, legitimating cultural myth. America's expansion across the continent, everyone agreed, reproduced the historical evolution of mankind. "The first proprietors of this happy country" were sometimes said to be the first people on earth. Early in time, they were also primitive in development. Human societies existed along a unilinear scale from savagery to civilization. As civilization advanced westward, it must inevitably displace savagery"(6).
Naturalness lost/conquered in growing up: "Not the Indians alive, then, but their destruction symbolized the American experience. The conquest of the Indians made the country uniquely American. But this conquest was, in the language Americans used, a conquest of their own childhoods. Jordan is right: America identified at once with the conquered and the conquering. The Indians -that "much-injured race" who were once "the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions" became a symbol of something lost, lost inevitably in the process of growing up" (7).
Rogin's summary of the liberal condition/consensus: "America was born with the modern age, with discovery and expansion, Protestant reformation, and bourgeois development. Liberalism--to identify the modern impulse by its name in political thought--transformed European societies; it operated on a state of nature in America. Americans were, in Tocqueville's phrase, "born equal." There was 'no right of primogeniture in the law of nature" (Brackenndge), and none took deep root in America. America had no feudal past. It lacked a hereditary nobility, a long-established church, a standing army, and a peasantry bound to the soil. Settlers lived by the covenants of God with man and men with each other. They reproduced in westward migration their self-imposed exile from mother country. The wilderness exposed them to the dangers of domination by nature. Fleeing European traditional ties, they set out self-consciously to conquer the wilderness, and to people the land with God-fearing, self-reliant families (7).
Liberalism encountered resistance in Europe, first from feudalism and then from revolutionary socialism. But the Europeans who settled America were confronted with no alternatives to liberal uniformity save the psychically charged presences of "the black race within our bosom . . . [and] the red on our borders." Subculture conflict and historical change mark white American history. Nevertheless, the country lacked the historical bases for political alternatives to liberalism, and radical historians who search for such alternatives mistake the American experience. Liberalism reached everywhere in white America; the resistance it encountered came from within.
Liberalism and its Indian other: First, Rogin contrasts liberal values with Euro-American perceptions of Indians:
| Euro-American liberal man | Euro-American perception of Indian |
|---|---|
| the independence of men from each other and "from cultural, traditional, and communal attachments" | "connected to their past, their superstitions, and the land" |
| priority of "work, instinctual repression, and acquisitive behavior" | "playful, violent, improvident, wild" |
| separated from nature in an effort to conquer it | in harmony with nature/TD> |
| private property | communal property |
| contracts and promises | anarchic and irresponsible |
| peaceful competition | social disorder and war (p8). |
Second, though, "Liberalism generated a forbidden nostalgia for childhood--for the nurturing, blissful, primitively violent connection to nature that while Americans had to leave behind (p8). Thus boundaries were insecure and sources of psychic tension. Third, this was resolved through "heroic Indian combat" (p9). Frontier expansion violently reconfirmed liberal identity (and confirmed an identity of liberalism with violence). Rogin also characterizes this as revenge for the loss of childhood displaced onto the putatively childlike Indians and as a permitted indulgence in "primitive rage," that is, a regression to childhood feelings. Fourth, in the wake of conquest Euro-Americans adopted the role of paternal benefactors. On the one hand, this was part of the justificatory myth according to which Indians needn't be accorded the rights and liberties of Euro-American men because they were still in cultural (and individual) childhood); on the other, through paternalism Euro-Americans "indulged primitive longings to wield total power" (p10). Fifth, the regressive mixture of rage and nostalgia (expressed in the image of the noble savage) were both satisfied in the consumption of the western lands ("the annihilation of the object through oral introjection" p9). Lastly, frontier expansion and Indian genocide resulted in an arrested and pathologic development; America avoided undergoing a "genuine maturing" (p10).
Seeds of totalitarianism: "Hannah Arendt has suggested that the prolonged meeting of advanced and primitive peoples forms an important factor in the origins of totalitarianism. Consider as central to the American-Indian experience: the collapse of conceptions of human rights in the face of culturally distant peoples, with resulting civilized atrocities defended as responses to savage atrocities; easy talk about, and occasional practice of, tribal extermination; the perceived impossibility of cultural coexistence and a growing acceptance of "inevitable" Indian extinction; total war, with all-or-nothing conflicts over living space, and minimal combatant- noncombatant distinctions; and the inability of the savage people to retire behind a stable frontier, provoking whites' confidence in their ability to conquer, subdue, and advance over all obstacles in their environment" (p11).
Methodological justification: (1) "It is a peculiarly split view of human existence in which symbolizations of meaning operate in a closed universe of their own, divorced from the "real" facts of historical causation. Men make history; they develop complex inner worlds because they do not make it in circumstances of their own choosing. These inner worlds, projected outward, become part of the continuing history men do make. Objective forces act only through men; men transform external causes into internal principles of action" (12). (2) Rogin argues that while "economic motives of ordinary men feed the market once it has established its sway . . . Such motives were unequal to primitive accumulation" (13). (3) Rogin justifies his focus on Jackson with the claim that "A great man embodies in extreme form the central cultural tensions of his time" (13). He links these methodological points together as follows: The leaders of Jackson's generation "had to prove that they were not a 'degenerate race . . . unworthy of the blessings which the blood of so many thousand heroes has purchased for them.' The sons contrasted their own materialism unfavorably with the public spirit of the [revolutionary] fathers. They longed for paternal authority to control acquisitive behavior. They feared for the decline of that republican virtue which distinguished America from the old world" (pp14-15).