title:Facing West : The Metaphysicsof Indian-hating and Empire-building

author: Drinnon, Richard.publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

isbn10 | asin: 080612928Xprint isbn13: 9780806129280

ebook isbn13: 9780806172408language: English

Indians of North America--Publicopinion, Indians of North

subject America--Civil rights, Publicopinion--United States, Racediscrimination--United States,United States--Territorialexpansion, United States--Racerelations.

publication date: 1997lcc: E98.P99D74 1997eb

ddc: 305.8/00973

subject:

Indians of North America--Publicopinion, Indians of NorthAmerica--Civil rights, Publicopinion--United States, Racediscrimination--United States,United States--Territorialexpansion, United States--Racerelations.

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Facing West:The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and

Empire-Building

byRichard Drinnon

University of Oklahoma PressNorman and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataDrinnon, Richard. Facing west : the metaphysics of Indian-hating and empire-building / by Richard Drinnon. p. cm. Originally published: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c 1980. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8061-2928-X 1. Indians of North AmericaPublic opinion. 2. Indians of North AmericaCivil rights. 3. Public opinionUnited States. 4. Race discriminationUnited States. 5. United StatesTerritorial expansion. 6. United StatesRace relations. I. Title. E98.P66D74 1997 305.800973dc20 96-38834

CIP

Permissions acknowledgments can be found on p. 572.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence anddurability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for BookLongevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc.

Copyright 1980, 1990 by Richard Drinnon. Preface to the 1997Edition copyright 1997 by Richard Drinnon. All rights reserved.Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,Publishing Division of the University. Manufactured in the U.S.A.First edition, 1980. First printing of the University of OklahomaPress edition, 1997.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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For our grandson Saul, who has lovely dark-brown skinand some understanding already of what this book is all about

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSAs always, I am hopelessly indebted to Anna MariaDrinnon, grandmother of the young man to whom thisbook is dedicated, critic, coeditor, and companion in allthat matters, including the vision quest these pagesrepresent. In this our fifth undertaking together, John F.Thornton provided encouragement from the outset,nudged me toward the final title, curbed my excessesand wanted to delete more, and again acted as anincisive and exemplary editor. Except for the uncurbedvagaries that remain, despite his best efforts, this workis the result of a truly cooperative effort. Judy Gilbert,another veteran of joint projects, patiently typed andretyped the manuscript and again proved herself afriend who cared enough to take pains.

In 196364 I held a Faculty Research Fellowship tostudy patterns of American violence. War,assassinations, and other studies, including a book ofmy own, intervened, compelled revision of my plans,and delayed fulfilling my obligations for the grant.

However belatedly, I wish to express now my gratitudeto the Social Science Research Council for financingthe beginnings of this book. I am also grateful to theTrustees of Bucknell University for summer grants thathelped in the research and writing.

Fellow historians, colleagues and students alike, haveread or heard sections of the manuscript. I have alreadythanked most of them for their criticisms; in specificinstances I also acknowledge their help elsewhere. Ithas been invaluable, especially for a work thatpresumes to carry its theme across the span of Anglo-American history. No doubt I have been guilty not ofminor poaching but of major trespass. Specialists in thevarious fields and eras will not and should not excusemy inevitable blundersthe most I can hope is that theywill point them out with the legendary forbearance ofthe community of scholars. Whether they forbear ornot, I

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am much obliged to them, for they frequently guidedme to the primary sources on which this study is based.I am indebted to ethnohistorians for what is by now animpressive body of writing on red-white relations, tothose who have studied the complexities of racism, tobiographers of figures discussed below and to editorsof their memoirs and lettersand in fact to all those citedin the notes and bibliographical essay. Even thoseauthors with whom I am in profound disagreementhave helped me identify problems and formulate what Ithought about them and about specific individuals,events, and themes.

Welcome harbingers of an overdue reinterpretation ofour past have been four books that came out while thisbook was at various stages of preparation. RichardSlotkin's Regeneration through Violence: TheMythology of the American Frontier, 16001860 (1973)and Francis Jennings's Invasion of America: Indians,Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) came tomy desk after I had substantially completed mychapters on the seventeenth century, but elsewhere Ihave taken advantage of their insights and findings.

(For an appraisal of Jennings's contributions, see my"Ravished Land" in The Indian Historian, IX [Fall1976], 2426.) In Fathers and Children: AndrewJackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian(1975), Michael Paul Rogin imaginatively harnessedtogether depth psychology and political theory to relatethe man to his times and vice versa. I drew directly onRogin for my understanding of Jackson and the FirstSeminole War and have been instructed by his exampleelsewhere. (For more extended analysis of Rogin'swork, see my evaluation in the New York Times BookReview, June 15, 1975.) Finally, Robert F. Berkhofer,Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the AmericanIndian from Columbus to the Present (1978) relatesvery directly to my themes and, in its own way, fills inthe gap created below when I leave the mainland in the1890s to go island-hopping out in the Pacific. (Again,for more extended analysis, see my "Red Man'sBurden," Inquiry, I [June 26, 1978], 2022.) I have beenreassured by the reflection that all our hands have been,in their very different ways, feeling the same elephant.

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FACING WEST FROM CALIFORNIA'S SHORESFacing west from California's shores,Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero;From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,Long having wander'd since, round the earth havingwander'd,Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,(But where is what I started for so long ago?And why is it yet unfound?)Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 186061

CONTENTS

Preface to the 1997 Edition

Preface to the 1990 Edition

Introduction

Part One Maypoles and Pequots

I The Maypole of Merry Mount

II Thomas Morton

III John Endicott

IV The Pequot War

V The Legacy of the Pequot War

Part Two

Part Two Founding Fathers and Merciless Savages

VI Timothy Dwight of Greenfield Hill

VII John Adams

VIII Thomas Jefferson

IX Jefferson, II: Benevolence Betrayed

X Driving Indians into Jefferson's Stony Mountains

Part Three Philanthropists and Indian-Haters

XI Westward Ho! with James Kirke Paulding

XII An American Romance in Color: William Gilmore Simms

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XIII Nicks in the Woods: Robert Montgomery Bird

XIV Friend of the Indian: Colonel McKenney

XV Professional Westerner: Judge Hall

Part Four Civilizers and Conquerors

XVI The American Rhythm: Mary Austin

XVII The Manifest Destiny of John Fiske

XVIII Outcast of the Islands: Henry Adams

XIX The Open Door of John Hay

XX Insular Expert: Professor Worcester

XXI

XXI The Strenuous Life Abroad: "Marked Seventies" in thePhilippines

XXII The Strenuous Life at Home: To and Beyond theLouisiana Purchase Exposition

Part Five Children of Light

XXIII The Occident Express: From the Bay Colony to Indochina

XXIV The Ugly American

XXV The Secret Agent: Edward Geary Lansdale

XXVI Covert Savior of the Philippines

XXVII Closing the Circle of Empire: Indochina

XXVIII The Quiet American

XXIX The New Frontier

The New Frontier

XXX The Problem of the West

Notes and Bibliographical Essay

Index

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PREFACE TO THE 1997 EDITIONGoing back to the beginning always highlightscontinuities. Just the other day the living-color cover ofthe New York Times Book Review carried a likeness ofone of the Great Captains looking out over the fountainof waters at the Continental Divide. "UNDAUNTEDCOURAGE," read the legend. "Meriwether Lewis is stilla hero in Stephen E. Ambrose's story of the opening ofthe American West" (March 10, 1996). "Opening'' landthat had been from time immemorial empty, vacant,"closed," is a very old story indeed, older than WilliamBradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1642) and hispositing therein an unpeopled wilderness, the "vast andunpeopled countries of America." With an undauntedtenacity that this book traces through the centuries,Americans still cling to the assumptions behind thispreposterous story. Prophetically relevant today is JohnQuincy Adams's observation after the LouisianaPurchase: "Westward the star of empire takes its way, inthe whiteness of innocence."

Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara,head of the team who pushed the empire westward allthe way to Indochina, very recently has cried out withmea culpas that seemingly announce his defection fromthe closed ranks of the guiltless. "We were wrong," headmits in his memoir, In Retrospect (1995), "terriblywrong." Acting according "to what we thought were theprinciples and traditions of this nation," McNamara andhis empire-builders made mistakes"mostly honest," heclaimsthe foremost of which was their total failure toidentify the nationalist core of the Vietnamese drive tounify their country. "I had never visited Indochina," heacknowledges, "nor did I understand or appreciate itshistory, language, culture, or values." Moreover, thanksto the purging of top State Department Asia hands inthe McCarthy fifties, he and

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other officials in the Kennedy and Johnsonadministrations "lacked experts for us to consult tocompensate for our ignorance about Southeast Asia."But this supposed dearth of "experts" is itselfsuggestive. McNamara still does not grasp that hisimperial ignorance of other cultures and peoples,especially colored, is as American as the Pledge ofAllegiance. It is precisely because he was actingaccording to "the principles and traditions of thisnation" (which I analyze throughout this study) that theVietnamese were as unknown to him as the Seminoleswere to Andrew Jackson and the Filipinos to WilliamMcKinley.

McNamara tells us to focus on one question. "The rightquestion is, did you rely on the wrongstrategyconventional military tactics instead of winningthe hearts and minds of the peopleand the answer tothat is yes. It was totally wrong." But here he is simplyrecycling the counterinsurgency thesis of his erstwhilespecial assistant, Edward G. Lansdale, the mastersceneshifter I try to keep up with in my concludingchapters, and in my 1990 preface. What went terribly

wrong was not the empire's westward destination butthe flawed strategy that kept it from getting there and toall those hearts and minds.

Here shines still the whiteness of innocence.

In my text I used the word genocidal as descriptive ofJohn Endicott's orders before he sailed for Block Islandin 1636 (p. 34) and to characterize Puritan intentionstoward New England tribes (p. 44). Later, in a note, Imade explicit that I was drawing directly on thedefinition of genocide formulated by the UnitedNations General Assembly in 1946 (p. 324n). In a 1991essay, "The Pequot War Reconsidered" (New EnglandQuarterly, LXIV, 20624), Steven T. Katz remonstratesagainst my usage and that of other errant historians. Aprofessor of Jewish studies at Cornell University, Katzstarts by discarding the UN definition in favor of hisown, "more stringent," use of the term to mean "anintentional action aimed at the complete physicaleradication of a people." He uses that as a springboardfor giving Puritans the benefit of more doubtful factorsthan we can possibly consider here, and finishes bybrandishing his conclusion: "Such factors suggest thatwhile the British could certainly have been lessthorough, less severe, less deadly in prosecuting their

campaign against the Pequots, the campaign theyactually did carry out, for all its vehemence, was not,either in intent or execution, genocidal." Why not?Well, because his stringent definition had ruled it outfrom the beginning. Some Pequots having escaped thevehemence, their tribe was not completely eradicated."As recently

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as the 1960s, Pequots were still listed as a separategroup residing in Connecticut"and Katz might haveadded, some survivors were still there playing bingo asrecently as the 1990s. In American Holocaust (1992; p.318n), David F. Stannard wonders what Professor Katzwould say to a professor of Native American studieswho went out of his way to write an essay claiming theHolocaust was not genocidal, "because, after all, someJews surviveda number of them even live inConnecticut today."

What defensive professors say about genocide can beunintentionally revealing. What protective politiciansdo about it, or rather did not do for forty years, isperhaps still more significant.

On December 9, 1948, the General Assembly of theUnited Nations unanimously passed a "GenocideConvention" to prevent (and punish) the mass killingof racial, ethnic, religious, and national groups. Itbecame international law in 1951 upon ratification bythe necessary twenty member nations, and scores ofothers soon signed on. But the United States left itbottled up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

for decades and withheld ratification until 1988. LeoKuper, who is after Raphael Lemkin the leading studentof genocide, cites this extraordinary delay and theobvious reluctance of the United States to ratify thisbasic human rights convention as framework for justthe right question: "Did it fear that it might be heldresponsible, retrospectively, for the annihilation ofIndians in the United States, or its role in the slavetrade, or its contemporary support for tyrannicalgovernments engaging in mass murder?"* Who knows?But the senators made this an even better question bymaking U.S. ratification not only late and grudging butalso conditional: they excluded the jurisdiction of theInternational Court and thereby made certain thatneither they nor their constituents would ever be hauledbefore an international penal tribunal to answer foralleged genocidal acts against the Pequots or any othertargets of what I call Indian-hating. The survivors areleft to draw what comfort they can from the likelihoodthat the overbearing whiteskins have at least betrayedconsciousness of guilt.

In March 1968 an American task force swept down theBatangan peninsula by the South China Sea, burninghamlets and killing fleeing Vietnamese. "We were out

there having a good time," said a

* Leo Kuper, "The United States Ratifies the GenocideConvention," in The History and Sociology of Genocide,ed. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1990), pp. 42225.

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participant I quoted (p. 454). "It was sort of like beingin a shooting gallery." In February 1991 Americans on acarrier in the Persian Gulf launched interminable airstrikes against Iraqis fleeing down the roads out ofKuwait. A dispatch from the deck of the USS Rangerhad one pilot saying it was a "turkey shoot" and anotherlikening the targets to "fish in a barrel." So once more,a year after the 1990 edition of this book, Americancowboys were out there in "Indian country" having agood time.

Yet the westward star of empire had gone hopelesslyoff course. Those following in Lewis and Clark'sfootsteps could lay claim to the Pacific Ocean as anextension of the American Westas "my Western sea," inWalt Whitman's wordsand those who carried thispossessiveness all the way to Asia and the South ChinaSea could dreamily contend that they had been going inthe right direction. But on around to the Persian Gulf inthe Middle East? The last traces of the West as an areaor place went up in smoke over the electronicbattlefields of Desert Storm. True West had become atraveling shooting gallery. By engulfing the other

cardinal points it had become global. It was everywhereand bound nowhere. It was ungrounded.

With landless Wests of the next millennium incoming atthe speed of missiles and rockets, we have good reasonto hunker down here and listen to a voice from theNorthern Cheyennes, a people for whom place hasalways mattered. "To us, to be Cheyenne means beingone tribeliving on our own land," says John WoodenLegs. "Our land is everything to us. . . . It is the onlyplace where Cheyennes remember same thingstogether." Without places that matter that way, this voicewould have us reflect, we need no missiles and rocketsto make us homeless.

So then let us once again go back to the beginning.

RICHARD DRINNONPORT ORFORD, OREGONJULY 1996

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PREFACE TO THE 1990 EDITIONOriginally I had closed this study with an insight fromLame Deer: Seeker of Visions: "I have seen pictures ofSong My, My Lai, and I have seen pictures of WoundedKneethe dead mothers with their babies," said the Siouxshaman. "And I remember my grandfather, Good Fox,telling me about the dead mother with a baby nursing ather cold breast, drinking that cold milk. My Lai was hotand Wounded Knee was icy cold, and that's the onlydifference" (1972; p. 69). Lame Deer's wordsunderscored, from a Native American point of view,my theme of "Indian-hating," the white hostility that forfour centuries had exterminated "savages" who stood inthe path of Anglo-American expansion. But my Job-like editor rightly pointed out that the extract hardlyprovided an upbeat note on which to conclude and,besides, if readers had not been persuaded of the inneridentities of the two massacres by that point, nearly fivehundred pages along, they never would be. I agreed,cut the paragraph from the galleys, and concludedinstead by voicing what I thought was a modest,

sharply qualified hope: with Indians taking the lead,"Americans of all colors might just conceivably danceinto being a really new period in their history.''

Enter Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood cowboy, formerlieutenant in the 14th Cavalry Regiment, andcampaigner for cutbacks in federal programs.

First reconsider the doom of those proto-victims calledPequots: in part one I accompany the punitive Puritanexpeditions of 1637 that made some four hundredPequots "as a fiery Oven" in their village near theMystic River and later finished off three hundred morein the mud of Fairfield Swamp. For these proceedings,said

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Captain John Underhill, "we had sufficient light fromthe word of God." At the head of parts two throughfive I place epigraphs that suggest how everygeneration of Anglo-Americans down to the presenthas followed the pattern set then and has repeated, withminor variations, such justifications for burning nativesin their villages and rooting them out of their swamps.Understandably the Puritans had not intended to havethat pattern of oppression associated with the tribe theydestroyed. Rather they sought, as Captain John Masonreported, "to cut off the Remembrance of them fromthe Earth." The name Pequot had become extinct,declared the Connecticut General Assembly, and nosurvivors should carry it. Yet scattered individuals did,and both the name and the remembrance lived on inthem, in a recent lawsuit they joined to reclaim landstaken illegally, and finally in a bill, unanimouslyapproved in both houses of the Congress, that wouldhave given them $900,000 to buy eight hundred acresof their own reservation. In April 1983 PresidentReagan vetoed this settlement of the Pequot claim onthe grounds that $900,000 was "too much to pay" theseimprobable survivors.

Reagan handed down his Pequot veto just a fewmonths after his Secretary of the Interior hadpronounced all such reservations socialistabominations. "If you want an example of the failuresof socialism, don't go to Russia," urged James Watt."Come to America, and see the American Indianreservations. . . . If Indians were allowed to be liberatedthey'd go out and get a job and that guy [the triballeader] wouldn't have his handout as a paidgovernment official" (Washington Post, January 20,1983). Watt's reasoning echoed that behind the 1950s"termination" bills, the series of acts that ''liberated"nearly a hundred tribes and bands from their inheritedtreaty rights, trust status, and reservations. Cut off fromtheir land sanctuaries, they lost those places whereIndians "remember same things together," as JohnWooden Legs once said of his tribe's CheyenneReservation. All too aware of these precedents, Indiansmounted a sharp protest that moved Watt to say that hedid not say what he had said, as it were, and his bosstried to outline a policy that would pursue "self-government for Indian tribes without threateningtermination" (New York Times, January 25, 1983). Butmany tribal peoples remained unbelievers: "The Reagan

Policy Is Termination," editorialized Wassaja, thenational Indian newspaper (July/August 1983).

Reagan and his officials did seek to abrogate the treatiesthat supposedly guaranteed the Indian land base and cutthe Indian budget by forty percent (domestic budgetcuts for all other Americans amounted to about twelvepercent). In this mean-spirited

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milieu racial attitudes hardened, and proliferating anti-Indian organizations lobbied for termination andcirculated hate materials, including posters of an arrow-pierced fish saying "I'LL BE GLAD WHEN THOSEDAMN INDIANS QUIT FISHING AND GO BACKON WELFARE" and bumper stickers urging "SAVE AFISH: SPEAR AN INDIAN."

Finally on June 30, 1988, after eight years in office,Reagan came as close as he would ever come to issuingan Indian policy statement. Maybe "we" had made amistake in "giving" Indians reservations, the presidenttold a Russian audience in Moscow:

Maybe we made a mistake in trying to maintain Indiancultures. Maybe we should not have humored them in that,wanting to stay in that primitive life style. Maybe weshould have said: No, come join us. Be citizens along withthe rest of us.

Maybe "we" should have dealt with the other tribes asthe Connecticut colonists had tried to deal with thePequotsto wit, "to cut off the Remembrance of themfrom the Earth." With marvelous compression, thepresident had revealed his impenetrable ignorance of

the status and circumstances of his redconstituentsIndians had been citizens since 1924 andtheir reservations had not been government giftswhilevoicing the historic certitude that ''we" white Americanshave a natural right to say yes or no to these aboriginalneighbors. The exact measure of Anglo-American racialarrogance has been "our" arrogation of the right todecide whether they should be "humored" in their"primitive life style" or have it wiped out.

Woe are "we," or should be. In his Indian statement, thegreat communicator surely spoke for most of "the restof us" white Americans and thereby made this study ofIndian-hating as timely as yesterday's headlines. Andhad we collectively stepped back or even inched backfrom the primordial tradition of disrespect he soeffortlessly articulated, then the modest hope of my1980 conclusion would seem less embarrassinglyimmodest today.

Four centuries after Columbus, Frederick JacksonTurner had pronounced the continental frontier "gone,and with its going has closed the first period ofAmerican history." In his seminal 1893 paper, Turnerfound that thus far, to the Pacific and the present, thedominant fact in American life had been the expansion

of its land frontier, "the meeting point betweensavagery and civilization." Now with the passing of"free" land, the problem he pur-

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sued in another essay was how to find a substitutesomewhere elsein a "remoter West," in education, inscience. The historian of the frontier drew hope fromthe current call for a more assertive foreign policy, foran interoceanic canal, for enhanced sea power, "and forthe extension of American influence to outlying islandsand adjoining countries." What was to stop the Winningof the West from taking to the high seas?

In part five I track Turner's outriders of empire to theoutlying islands and adjoining countries he had wavedthem toward. There they waged wars of subjugationshaped by attitudes toward native peoples ("goo-goos"and "gooks") that made the massacres in Vietnam's"Indian Country" in the 1960s consistent with those ofFilipinos in Batangas at the turn of the century and withthose of Indians on the continent earlierthe My Lai-back-to-Wounded Knee connection drawn by LameDeer so aptly across space and time.

Yet Vietnam represented a novel break in this historicalsequence. For the first time Anglo-Americans hadhurled themselves westward against a human barrierthat proved insurmountable. The roll back of empire

from the far Pacific rim marked a decisive reversal andthe close of Turner's second period in Americanhistory. "I saw that we had overreached ourselves," saidLook foreign editor J. Robert Moskin on his returnfrom a trip to Vietnam. "America's historic westward-driving wave has crested" (November 18, 1969). Inchapter XXX I quoted Moskin approvingly but hedgedby adding quickly that what Turner said of the secondperiod applies with a vengeance to the third period ofAmerican history: "He would be a rash prophet whoshould assert that the expansive character of Americanlife has now entirely ceased." Indeed.

For all my self-protective hedging, I still wasunprepared for the swiftness and the effectiveness ofthe ensuing campaign to restore confidence in "theexpansive character of American life," Turner'scircumlocution for our imperial destiny. Forestallingany possibility of a pause for root-and-branchrethinking and reimagining, weavers of mystificationand blurrers of memory rushed in to patch over thebreak in narrative sequence and then rewrote thehistory of the immediate past as though nothing novelhad occurred. Scholarly fabulists even contrived tohave American "innocence" emerge, unblemished as

ever. In America in Vietnam, the most elaborateapology, Guenter Lewy reached "the reasonedconclusion" that "the sense of guilt created by theVietnam war in the minds of many Americans is notwarranted" (1978; p. vi). Now you see the millionbodies, now you don't . . .

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In A Bright Shining Lie, a best-selling and award-winning requiem for our lost colony, Neal Sheehanrecently observed that "South Vietnam, it can truly besaid, was the creation of Edward Lansdale" (1988; p.138). The claim that the legendary Lansdale "created"South Vietnam is far less improbable than it mightseem, as I try to show in my own chapters on the seniorCIA operative who became our best-known secretagent and, in the eyes of many, our preeminentauthority on counterinsurgency in the Third World.With what Sheehan calls his "brilliantly ledcounterrevolution" against the Filipino peasants justbehind him, Lansdale moved on to Vietnam in 1954,made Ngo Dinh Diem president, and helped repulse thefirst wave of his new Friday's enemies. WithoutLansdale, Sheehan argued persuasively, "the Americanventure in Vietnam would have foundered at the outset"(p. 137). That it kept afloat allowed Sheehan's flawedsubject, ''the good colonialist" John Paul Vann, to comeaboard years later, determined to "emulate his hero,Lansdale" by learning how to manipulate his nativeadvisees (pp. 75, 76).

Lansdale liked to say that "counterinsurgency" wasanother word for "brotherly love." In practice, it wasanother word for manipulation, and the hoary objectiveat its core was manipulation of expendable natives intofurthering American interests while convincing themthey were furthering their own. Had we won over theVietnamese people, argued Lansdale and other covertwarriors such as John Vann and Robert Komer, then wemight have adopted the guerrillas' own tactics to crushthem and win the war. In America in Vietnam GuenterLewy made their counterinsurgency thesis his own ashe deferentially drew on Lansdale and the others toblame the loss of the war primarily on the highcommand's big-unit attrition strategy.

Held the creator of South Vietnam and its possiblesavior, had American officialdom only listened,Lansdale added these singular tributes to his otherdistinctions and became still more legendary in thepostwar years. In an adulatory biography EdwardLansdale: The Unquiet American, the military historianCecil B. Currey joined Sheehan and Lewy in claimingthat Lansdale had virtually invented Diem and yearslater might have put his tottering regime on a stablepolitical footing, had he not been ignored and undercut

by the American mission at every turn: "This gray,unassuming man with the Mount Rushmore head mayhave held the keys to American success in his handsand yet no one listened" (1988; p. 317). If we had onlylistened, that is to say, we might still be out therebuilding Lansdale's "Third Force" on the farthest edgeof our cravings for empire.

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In May 1984 the Pentagon invited Lansdale to address atwo-day conference on new tactics to use against theSandinista government in Nicaragua and the insurgentsin El Salvador.* According to Currey, he condemnedthe current reliance on heavy weapons andconventional forces, and proposed his counterinsurgentalternative, "a broad campaign of psychologicaloperations" (p. 346). A few months after theconference, the House Select Committee on Intelligencemade public two documents proposing "psychologicaloperations" that I believe may have come directly fromthe emeritus proconsul's bag of dirty tricks: a CIAcovert-warfare manual encouraged assassinations inNicaragua similar in every essential to the targetedkillings in Cuba Lansdale had worked out for theKennedys in the early 1960s; and a CIA comic book forNicaraguan citizens came up with freewheelingsuggestions for sabotage that were suggestive of hispsychological-warfare operations in the Philippines andIndochinadown to and including stopping up toiletswith sponges and putting dirt into gas tanks. EvenLansdale's hallmark ignorance of target populationswas matched by the comic book's droll advice that

Nicaraguans steal mail from mailboxes; but as one anti-Sandinista pointed out, "in Nicaragua, we don't haveany mailboxes" (New York Times, October 19, 1984).

So the empire-building is ongoing and as timely asyesterday's headlines. In the 1970s I could still supposethat the American invaders would eventually learn fromVietnam the great folly of trying to make the world overin their own white image. But it proved no such lessonto Lansdale, who died in 1987 convinced that he knewwhat it would have taken to win in Vietnam; and nosuch lesson to Lewey and Sheehan and Currey and nodoubt most of the rest of us. "The United States nowfaces the possibility of increased involvement inCentral America," Currey cautions. "Perhaps it is time,finally, to apply the lessons of Edward G. Lansdale" (p.282). Currey has been comforted to find "an identifiedcadre of 'Lansdalians'" who rushed to pick up the torch,including John

* In "Victims of Our Visions," a thoughtful review of thisstudy, Piero Gleijeses had a "minor criticism"he wonderedwhy my account of white American experience with"inferior races" did not include "Hispanics, especiallyMexicans. . . . Drinnon does not explain his failure toinclude them in the book" (Washington Post Book World,

September 28, 1980). The failure stemmed from mydecision, based on considerations of focus and space, toexclude Hispanics and not follow some of the sameempire-builders into their countries south of the border.Had I done so by adhering less rigidly to my East-Westaxis, readers might have more readily anticipated thisexport of Lansdale's lessons to Latin America. In fine, Iagree with the criticism and fear Gleijeses too generous incalling it ''minor."

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Singlaub and "a young Marine lieutenant colonelnamed Oliver North [who] came also to view himselfas a Lansdalian, thinking of himself as a Lansdale ofthe 1980s" (p. 347).

Whether or not Graham Greene modeled theprotagonist in The Quiet American (1955) on the thenColonel Lansdale, Alden Pyle was an astonishinglikeness, and the secret agent rightly saw himselfcarrying on Pyle's great dream of Americanizing theworld.* Pyle's deadly "innocence" also anticipated thenext generation of Lansdalians, for to this day they toogo abroad "like a dumb leper who has lost his bell,wandering the world, meaning no harm" (p. 36).

From my closing sentence hangs, for now and forever,my impenitent hope of a new day: with Indians takingthe lead, "Americans of all colors might justconceivably dance into being a really new period intheir history." This was "an inappropriate ending,"reproved a friendly reviewer: "Drinnon's own work istestimony to the importance of less dancing and moreanalysis" (Inquiry, September 22, 1980, p. 26). But wasit?

Equally unmoved by the prospect of discerning theland's rhythms, a moderately hostile reviewer dislikedmy "dark, dancing tribesmen" and undertook to teachme the realities of tribal life: "One cannot look toNative American societies, past or present, for modelsof life without repression, projection, sadism,ethnocentrism (God is Red?), and violence. The NobleSavage is also a racist stereotype" (New MexicoHistorical Review, October 1981, p. 413). But"savages," noble or ignoble, had entered my pages onlyas inner demons of the white invaders, so had I reallyearned this admonition?

Finally, a thoroughly disgusted reviewer lamented mywant of propriety:

When [Thomas L.] McKenney reveals the sexuallimitations of his Quaker upbringing after observing anIndian dance, Drinnon makes some revelations of his own.If McKenney had let go, surmises

* In June 1987 Greene told a correspondent that he had notused Lansdale "at all as my character and I really have noinformation about him"quoted in a letter from ChristopherRobbins to the New York Times Book Review, June 18,1989. For Lansdale's reasons for believing that Pyle wasbased on him, see Currey, pp. 19798. Not altogether

persuaded that the novelist's memory has served him wellin this instance, I have limited my response to a fewrewordings that flag this contested ascription.Apart from these rewordings in chapter XXVIII, "The QuietAmerican," and a handful of typographical correctionsthroughout, the text of this edition remains unchanged.

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Drinnon, "a dancing counterpart might have leaped out ofhim, joined the circle, chanted, copulated, and run off intothe free and boundless forest." McKenney may well haveentertained such infantile fantasies, but at least he had thegood sense to repress them. [Western Historical Quarterly,October 1981, pp. 43334]

But what if the first head of our Indian service hadbeen a great voluptuary who welcomed this embrace ofthe shaggy New World? What if he had acted out thefantasyincluding that hair-raising copulationwould thathave been so awful? Worse than awful, answer thisvexed historian and the long line of his predecessorswith the good sense to share his loathing of the body'srhythms, though they used other words to condemnthem. In the beginning, Increase Mather plainly had"such infantile fantasies" or something like them inmind when he warned in his Danger of Apostacy(1679) that "people are ready to run wild into thewoods again and to be as Heathenish as ever, if you donot prevent it."

Yes, on this Turtle Continent God may indeed be Red,for all we non-Indians know. Unwilling to let go, grasp

the outstretched hands, and join the circle, we haveseen in those feet thumping and caressing the earth onlywhat we must be prevented from becoming, wildrunning bodies, dusky dancing reminders of our owninescapable mortality. Outside the circle always, wehave walled ourselves off from experiencing theseritual reaffirmations of the relatedness of everything.Repressing our yearnings, we have failed even to seethe existence of a tribal metaphysics that calls intoquestion the universality and benificence of ourcherished binary oppositions, includingsubjective/objective, imagination/understanding,reason/passion, spirit/flesh, and not least,civilization/savagery. As opposed to the whitemetaphysics I pursue in this book, the shut-out redmetaphysics affirms rather than negates, and asks us tolift ourselves to the Sioux truth: "We are all related."

To lift ourselves so high would be, no doubt, to falldown into the circle again, into Mather's heathenism,my disgusted critic's infantilism, and assortedaberrations we have all been warned against, includinganimism, romanticism, and those "primitive life styles"that worry presidents. It would elicit courteous calls for"less dancing and more analysis," and blunt reminders

that "the Noble Savage is also a racist sterotype." So beit, for somehow we must transcend a recorded historythat has sung hallelujahs for the conquerors of our redrelatives. We must learn to speak a new language, thelanguage of the body, as Martha Graham called thedance. Or rather, we shall have to relearn an oldlanguage, as the shaman I have quoted knew we would:Human beings "have for-

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gotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses. . . their dreams" (Lame Deer, p. 157).

I have called the rediscovery of that secret knowledgemy "modest" and my "impenitent" hope. In 1925, theyear of my birth, the poet William Carlos Williamscalled it, more bleakly, our only hope: "Howeverhopeless it may seem, we have no other choice: wemust go back to the beginning; it must all be done over. . ." (In the American Grain, p. 215).

Let us then go back to the beginning.

RICHARD DRINNONNOVEMBER 1989

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INTRODUCTION"Here," said Cotton Mather, "hath arisen light indarkness." Here, said Jonathan Swift, hath arisen suresigns of blight: "Remark your commonest Pretender toa Light within, how dark, and dirty, and gloomy he iswithout."

In A Tale of a Tub and its magnificent appendix, "TheMechanical Operation of the Spirit" (169698), Swiftshowed that the Puritans' heavenly light had beendeflected within by their cardinal principle, "theCorruption of the Senses is the Generation of theSpirit":

Because the Senses in Men are so many Avenues to the Fortof Reason, which in this Operation is wholly block'd up.All Endeavours must be therefore used, either to divert,bind up, stupify, fluster, and amuse the Senses, or else tojustle them out of their Stations; and while they are eitherabsent, or otherwise employ'd or engaged in a Civil Waragainst each other, the Spirit enters and performs its Part.

Exalting the spirit while ingeniously suppressing the

senses, such Protestant enthusiasts fled from theiranimal bodies just as the New England Puritans, or"God's afflicted Saints" as they called themselves, hadfled from the complex historical process across theAtlantic. Yet their "higher" and "lower" natures facedeach other across a common frontier, so that the higherthey soared above their flesh the further they plunged"into the lowest Bottom of Things; like one who travelsthe East into the West; or like a strait Line drawn by itsown Length into a Circle.''

My own tale is merely part of the larger story ofasceticism marching out into the modern worldbuildingeconomies,

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founding nation states, and conquering empiresall thewhile corrupting the senses and fashioning the "ironcage" for humankind Max Weber lamented in TheProtestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (19045):"For the last stage of this cultural development," heconcluded, "it might be truly said: 'Specialists withoutspirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imaginesthat it has attained a level of civilization never beforeachieved.'" In the several parts of this volume, I tracethis cultural development mainly among the immigrantswho became Anglo-Americans but ask the reader hereat the outset to bear in mind their common backgroundand attitudes and assumptions with those Europeanswho stayed at home or spread out to colonize othercorners of the globe. This awareness of the worldwidecontext of comparable phenomena becomes all themore necessary in the light of our national habit ofseeing U.S. history as being so exceptional as to beunique.

Distinctive patterns of response to unfamiliarsurroundings did emerge, to be sure, and elucidatingthese is the task of this book. Yet for it not to miscarry,

that elucidation must be grounded in the vigilance Iinvoke, grounded in watchful recognition that therecord of history is nearly barren of authentically novelresponses to novel circumstances. In an imaginativepiece in the April 1965 Speculum titled "The Legacy ofthe Middle Ages in the American Wild West," LynnWhite, Jr., easily demonstrated "our detailed andmassive continuity with the European Middle Ages,"including prototypes of the revolver, barbed wire, thewindmill, and other paraphernalia for Winning theWest, down to the rope thrown by lynching parties overa limb of the nearest lone pine: "In most societies,"White pointed out, "there are clear rubrics forexecution, a tradition of propriety as to the forms ofkillings committed by the group, which the group feelsdeeply impelled to follow, perhaps, because to followthem makes the past share the guilt of the execution. Toknow the subliminal mind of a society, one must studythe sources of its liturgies of inflicting death" (XL, 199).Societies are known by their victims. On the moreinclusive level of wholesale killings and hurtings, ''themetaphysics of Indian-hating," as Herman Melvillecalled that national animosity, provided just such aliturgy of inflicting death and just such sources forstudying the European-derived subliminal mind.

A critical constant of that subliminal mind manifesteditself as the will to power over "fallen" nature. Longbefore their first landfall, European immigrants werealienated from the "howling Wilderness" that had to bemastered in themselves and in their new surroundings.Yet Native Americans were bodies in that

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wildness, indwellers of the very animal world thenewcomers so arrogantly sought to rise above. Thecollision between indigenous nature and importedasceticism had the disastrous consequences that theethnobotanist Melvin Gilmore expressed succinctlydecades ago: "The people of the European race incoming into the New World have not really sought tomake friends of the native population," he observed,"or to make adequate use of the plants, or the animalsindigenous to this continent, but rather to exterminateeverything they found here and to supplant it withplants and animals to which they were accustomed athome" ("Uses of Plants by Indians of the MissouriRiver Region," Thirty-third Annual Report of theBureau of American Ethnology, 191112). In the severalparts of this book I undertake an analysis in depth of aseries of encounters with "the West," from theMassachusetts Bay Colony and Block Island across theAlleghenies to the Mississippi; on across the Rockies tothe Pacific slope; out from there onto island stepping-stones; and touching down most recently in Asiaastraight line of march drawn by its length almost into acircle.

2Place has always mattered to plants and animals.Mainstream historians pay it their due when they stressthe importance of both place and time, yet how oftenthe sensual surfaces of organisms in particular settingsfail to grace their pages. In effect trying to leave thegrowth-and-decay cycle of their own bodies behindnotunlike the religious enthusiasts Swift indictedtheseEurocentric historians are the guardians of a linear,continuous, irreversible Time of perpetual progress, inwhich place is largely irrelevant. They are the secularheirs of Judeo-Christian teleology with its reified Time,which had and has little or nothing to do with thecycles of organisms. "Christian religion and the Westernidea of history are inseparable and mutually self-supporting," noted Vine Deloria, Jr., in God Is Red(1973):

To retrench the traditional concept of Western history at thispoint would mean to invalidate the justifications forconquering the Western Hemisphere. Americans in somemanner will cling to the traditional idea that they suddenlycame upon a vacant land on which they created the world's

most affluent society. Not only is such an idea false, it isabsurd. Yet without it both Western man and his religionstand naked before the world.

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To avoid similar absurdity, I have adopted a view oftime that is more akin to the one advanced byDuwamish Chief Seattle in a great and sad speech of1854: "Tribe follows tribe, nation follows nation, likethe waves of the sea."

My study begins with Robert Lowell in the 1960s,swings rapidly back past Nathaniel Hawthorne in the1830s to Thomas Morton and John Endicott in the1620s, then turns about and returns more slowly pastThomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, pastHerman Melville and others to the volunteers in thePhilippines at the turn of the century, and concludeswith the nation-builders in Indochina in the 1960s and alittle beyond. But like a tree trunk's concentric rings, mycompleted cycle contains smaller cyclesfive parts likeso many Indian round dances of life and deathwithinwhich time internal to individuals, groups, and complexevents receives the scrupulous attention it meritsafterall, as a Western historian I have a certain vestedinterest in Time. But since I perceive the same sort ofmassive continuity that Lynn White perceived betweenthe Middle Ages and the Wild West, I occasionally

swing or shuffle from one episode to another, to makeor renew acquaintances and point to consistencies inpreceding and succeeding generations. To reflect thatonly six generations of their family separated theimmigrant Henry Adams in the 1630s from the historianHenry Adams in the 1890s, for instance, puts the pastinto a less linear framework; and to learn thatsuccessive waves of Adamses had a relatively fixedview of natives says much about their society'ssubliminal mind. If the reader does not become toodisoriented by this process, my heretical method will, Ihope, make the present help explain the past and thepast help write the history of the present.

On a spatial level, the strategy of this book isembarrassingly simple-minded. I propose we tag alongwith these European immigrants as they becomecitizens of the republic and push the American empireinto the setting sun, see what they do and listenattentively to what they have to say, and then try tounderstand all that, as well as their unspokenconvictions. Since the psychic history of generations isembedded both in what they say and in what they leaveunsaid, language is both the subject and the medium ofthis inquiry. As faithful amanuensis and interpreter of

the historical actors featured in this work, I introduce asmany quotations of their prose and verse as space willallow, so they can in a sense be heard speaking theirown lines. But why Endicott and Hawthorne and theothers in my cast? Because individuals are the livingsubstance of history, the carriers and creators,sometimes, of the attitudes and ideas of theirgenerations. Just as a

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thoughtful writer on the history of architecture must, Ifocus on selected edifices as microcosms of largertrends and styles in that generational cycle. Individualsappear because in my judgment they embodymainstream attitudes and assumptions, as do JohnAdams and Jefferson, or because they swim against thecurrent, as do Morton and Melville. They were notchosen because they are easy targetssuch killers as JohnUnderhill, George Armstrong Custer, and William LawsCalley have in fact only walk-on or minor parts. On theother hand, such overt philanthropists as ThomasLoraine McKenney and such covert philanthropists asEdward Geary Lansdale have leading roles, since theyare more elusive, more interesting, and I venture, moreinstructively revealing. If my choices have beenreasonably judicious, then they will enable us toidentify significant national patterns of deracination andextermination that other students of our past can buildupon, modify, correct, or refuteas they can, of course,my understanding of three concepts that merit specialmention here.

1. Repression. For the Saints and their descendants

"going native" has always been tantamount to "goingnature." "People are ready to run wild into the woodsagain and to be as Heathenish as ever," warned IncreaseMather in The Danger of Apostacy (1679), "if you donot prevent it." Prevent it the Saints did, by convertingbodies from instruments of rhythmic pleasure intoinstruments of domination and aggression. Theywithdrew libidinal energies from individuals and fromthe family levelwitness their practice of placing theirown children with other families for fear of "spoiling''them through natural affection. Simultaneously theyharnessed these withdrawn energies to their economyand church-state, which in time became the Americanempire. The consequences were not entirely denied bythe Saints themselves, as my discussion of WilliamBradford shows. Their system of repressions resultedin the corruption of the senses Jonathan Swift saw atthe time for what it was. The implied correlationbetween repression and violence, a central theme in thisbook, is in accord with evidence accumulated bystudents working with the familiar "frustration-aggression hypothesis" and is more vividly illustratedby the bottled-up sexual and other longings periodicallyrising up out of Attica and other prisons across thecountryand across the world, for that matter. In our

modern "carceral" society, as Michel Foucault hasdemonstrated in Discipline and Punish (1977), "Timepenetrates the body and with it all the meticulouscontrols of power." For the relatively free body in a lessrepressive society, on the other hand, we can turn toMelville's novel Typee (1846) for a definition of "joy"in the South Pacific: "interchange-

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able days." Or consider Henry David Thoreau'sprescription in A Week on the Concord and MerrimackRivers (1849): "We need pray for no higher heaven thanthe pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life."

Plainly, sexual repression was not a purely imaginaryphenomenon Sigmund Freud foisted upon anunsuspecting world. To a significant degree he merelyfleshed out in psychological terms insights alreadyexpressed by imaginative writers, poets, and artists,some of whom are important for my ownunderstanding of progress and impoverishment.Nonetheless, my deep indebtedness to Freud forilluminating the discontents of "civilization" will beclear to any reader of these pages. I remain indebtedeven though Freud himself accepted linear time, stagesof society, and other Eurocentric notions I reject.Following his own courageous example, I go beyondthe master to treat his findings as a set of workinghypothesessome to be accepted if they further ourinquiries, others to be rejected if they do not. In mymind the empirical evidence at hand remains alwaysprimary and always finally resistant to any attempt to

force it into the scholastic system built by Freud'sdisciples on his ground-breaking inquiries. Repression,in the nontechnical sense in which I use the term, refersnot only to restraint and denial of genital gratification,though that is surely an important component, but alsoto social controls and constraints imposed upon thedesires and needs of the whole body. Here a goodillustration would be the fifty long years the U.S.Bureau of Indian Affairs refused to let the PlainsIndians experience their Sun Dance. On this level,Freud's ideas have equal importance and dovetail withJohan Huizinga's discussion of dancing as "sacred play"and with Max Weber's analysis of the antitheticalCalvinist drive "to bring the things of the flesh underHis will."

2. Racism. One of the varieties of Western racism hasbeen what I call, following Melville's lead, themetaphysics of Indian-hating, those deadly subtleties ofwhite hostility that reduced native peoples to the levelof the rest of the fauna and flora to be "rooted out." Itreduced all the diverse Native American peoples to asingle despised nonwhite group and, where they didsurvive, into a hereditary caste. In its more inclusiveform, Western racism is another name for native-

hatingin North America, of "niggers," "Chinks," ''Japs,""greasers," "dagoes," etc.; in the Philippines, of "goo-goos"; and in Indochina, of "gooks."

Winthrop Jordan has justly remarked that the termracism is terribly hard to define. I hazard a provisionaldefinition, in chapter 5, that stresses social prejudicesand discriminatory actions or

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learned emotions and learned behavior. There, Iadduce my reasons for rejecting the accepted wisdomthat racist practice waited upon systematic racist theory,the nineteenth-century "scientific" ideologyrationalizing Western imperialism and colonialism.(Accepting such wisdom is roughly equivalent tosayingthough the parallel is more benignthat thepractice of birth control waited upon Margaret Sangerto coin the term.) But my definition and argument arebetter left to their evidential context. Here, I shoulddistinguish racism from ethnocentrism, the inner-centeredness of a group united by social and culturaltiespolitical and economic institutions, language, myths,and the like. Unlike a racial group, an ethnic group mayhave mixed ancestry and relatively few hereditary ties.It may evince religious bigotry and other forms ofintolerance in its dealings with other groupsas theEnglish with the Irishbut without identifiable hereditarycharacteristics separating the groups, bona fide racismremains stillborn. The valiant efforts of the English toturn their ethnocentric feelings of superiority over the"black" Irish into racism ultimately failed, despite theirbest efforts, since the Celts remained at most "white

niggers" in their eyes. In fact the Irish proved useful tothe English in keeping real nonwhites ("wogs'') inlineRudyard Kipling's Kim in the work of that title(1901) was "a Sahib and the son of a Sahib" who hadserved in an Irish regiment and, precisely because ofthat white ancestry, was qualified and destined to"command natives."

The origins of racism remain relatively obscure. Thisstudy undertakes to make them less so with findingsthat buttress those of other scholars who have tracedtheir deep roots in the Western psyche. The evidencesuggests that the roots lie there intertwined with moregeneral repressive attitudes toward nature and the body,and with concomitant associations of dark skin colorwith filth, death, and radical evil generally. Out of thispsychosexual complex arose the generic native, thatdespised, earthy, animalic, suppressed "shadow self"projected by the Western mind.

The consequences of racism are more tangible.Anchored however obscurely in the unconscious, itbecame a key component of the national theology, fromthe Bay Colony's New Israel to the republic's ManifestDestiny and white man's burden and New Frontier. Inthe national experience race has always been of greater

importance than class, the cornerstone of Europeanproperty-based politics. Racism defined natives asnonpersons within the settlement culture and was in areal sense the enabling experience of the risingAmerican empire: Indian-hating identified the darkothers that white settlers were not and must not underany cir-

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cumstances become, and it helped them wrest acontinent and more from the hands of these nativecaretakers of the lands. This book is about that racism.

3. "Civilization." Western writers, including Freud,have not used this term interchangeably with culture,so that other peoples might have other "civilizations."Instead, they have used it to distinguish Westernsuperculture, or the one true "civilization," from so-called primitive cultures. This ethnocentricity with itsunmistakable racist overtones led to what Weberproperly scoffed at, the "nullity'' imagining that it had"attained a level of civilization never before achieved."To guard against such nonsense, I have fenced in thisexpansionist term with ironic quotation marks.

3On a clear day you can see Block Island from the placeon the Rhode Island coast where I wrote most of thisbook. It is a visible reminder that Captain JohnEndicott's 1636 expedition to kill all the adult males onthe island was an expedition to the Saints' first West

after the Bay Colony. Other Wests followed hard after,in the Connecticut Valley and across the continent to the"New England of the Pacific," as historian John Fiskecalled Oregon. I grew up on the Pacific slope there, theson of belated pioneers.

Norwegian immigrants, my mother's people, theTweeds, settled first in Iowa and then, after a cyclonehad leveled their farm buildings, continued theirwestering to the Pacific, relocating in the lushWillamette Valley. That was in the 1890s, just asFrederick Jackson Turner had announced the passingof the frontier and "free" land. Of Irish and Germanstock, my father, John Henry, was born and raised nearthe Cumberland Gap in the Boone and Crockett countryof Kentucky and Tennessee. A good man with an axand a rifle, Jack, as we called him, valued vigilance andalways slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow orclose at hand. He worked his way west at the turn ofthe century and, Turner notwithstanding, took up "free"land in the Columbia River basin.

I can still vividly recall one of Jack's stories abouthomesteading on those dry lands. It pivoted around thepopular local pastime that made all "squaws" in thefield, except the very old, fair sexual game for mounted

ranchers. A twist in the usual upshot of "squawchasing" came one day, it so happened, when onequick-thinking

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quarry squatted down and threw sand up into her"privates," as Jack always called them, before herardent pursuer could haul her in with his lariat. Theimage of the thwarted rider of the purple sage andperhaps memories of the old days always raised bellylaughs from Sherm Wilcox and Jack's otherhomesteading cronies, as though they were hearing thetale for the first time. I myself liked it hugely, which isto admit that I also grew up an unthinking andunfeeling heir to the contempt for the land and itspeoples that I have portrayed in this book. As a boy Ishot two of the few remaining native pheasants in theWillamette Valley, just as perhaps a few decades earlierI might have delightedly shot two of the remainingNative Americans. In college, Turner became one ofmy favorite historians, and from him I assuredlylearned nothing that would have led me to question thetriumphant saga of my people's march across a landthat was deemed vacant save for the few wretcheswhose "savagery" had to be ended.

I mention these autobiographical fragments not toestablish my bona fides as a sourdough but to present

my own early unconscious presuppositions. In a wayevery inquiry into Western history, into reifiedrepressed Time, implicitly raises the question: Howhave we become so alienated from ourselves and fromthe land? This study differs slightly in raising thatquestion explicitly. But putting it to myself, I have triedto rethink and refeel our past, tried to extricate myselffrom the strictly internal perspective of Western"civilization."

"The white man does not understand the Indian for thereason he does not understand America," said SiouxChief Standing Bear. "The roots of the tree of his lifehave not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white manis still troubled with primitive fears." In the chaptersthat follow, the reader may be certain, however, that asa white man I locate myselfall but a painfully extractedsliver of myselfwithin the process under scrutiny. Mygoal is not to represent, indict, and condemn thiscommon heritagethough judgments are both inevitableand desirablebut to unearth, recall, and respond. Myaim has been to be guided by sensuous reason and anethic of honesty rather than to practice a specious"objectivity."

On every frontier the "perennial rebirth" of national

fable has yet to happen. Standing Bear's contention thatrootless whites were still landless sojourners on thiscontinent was echoed over a quarter of a century agoby Felix S. Cohen in the American Scholar (195152):"The real epic of America is the yet unfinished story ofthe Americanization of the White Man, thetransformation of the hungry, fear-ridden, intolerantmen that came to these shores

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with Columbus and John Smith." And he went on:"The American way of life has stood for 400 years andmore as a deadly challenge to European ideals ofauthority and submissive obedience in family life, inlove, in school, in work, and in government." Stillstanding with that challenge is the invitation of NativeAmericans: "The lands wait for those who can discerntheir rhythms." If it is too much to expect that this bookwill contribute to that perennially desired regeneration,I still cherish the hope that it may be another steptoward the lands andonce again in Thoreau'swordstoward giving our history "some copper tints andreflections at least."

WEEKAPAUG RHODE ISLANDJULY 1978

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PART ONEMAYPOLES AND PEQUOTSMoreover, when saints call themselves sinners, they are notso wrong, considering the temptations to instinctualsatisfaction to which they are exposed ina specially highdegreesince, as is well known, temptations are merelyincreased by constant frustration, whereas an occasionalsatisfaction of them causes them to diminish, at least for thetime being.SIGMUND FREUD, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930

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Chapter IThe Maypole of Merry MountJollity and gloom were contending for an empire.NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, Twice-Told Tales, 1837

In May 1968 Robert Lowell's play Endecott and theRed Cross opened at the American Place Theater inNew York. One of a trilogy called The Old Glory, itappeared at just the right time. That was the spring ofthe Columbia University sit-ins and, across the Atlantic,of the insurrectionary Paris May days. That Easter, ahalf-block from Lowell's apartment in the West Sixties,Central Park danced with Indian-clad hippies andyippies making merry. On television the Vietnam Showdragged on, while half a world away U.S. soldiers andmarines complained bitterly about an enemy "whowould not stand up and fight" but, elusive as the playof shadows, glided back into the jungles and villages ofwhat American officers liked to call "Indian Country."Ties between these current happenings and the poet-playwright's historical drama were nearly palpable.

Set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1630s,Endecott and the Red Cross was an imaginativereconstruction of the actual suppression of ThomasMorton and his followers and of their dispersal fromMerry Mount near Wollaston, the site of present-dayQuincy, Massachusetts. Proving ancestral distastesperennial, Lowell's nostrils took offense at the pleasure-loving Morton, as though he sniffed a yippie AbbieHoffman who had unexpectedly ambled on stage fromthe streets of Greenwich Village. As Lowell presentedhim, Morton was a sloppy, fat, two-faced rogue whosold guns and liquor to the Indians while pretending tobelieve that "the blue-assed Puritans" hated him merelybecause of his love for the Book of Common Prayer.Even the Anglican priest Blackstone, his ally, chokedon Morton's salacious doggerel about having freemaids, white or red, in the forest or in bed, declaring inrevulsion that there had to be some decency: "Theremust be some boundary between the Indian andEnglish subjects." And

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though the priest and the invading Puritan captainagreed on little else, that was exactly why Endicott hadmarched his expedition from Salemto establish such aboundary, to stop the infernal Maypole dancing andenforce moral decorum, and to put an end to the horrorof drunken whites mating with red women. To theirconventional English minds, it was as if Morton hadgone native in a big way; proof existed in the numberof his red friends among the revelers seized by thePuritans.

The expedition's chaplain, Elder Palfrey, warnedEndicott not to consider these Indians harmless nor tounderestimate the threat they posed:

There are three thousand miles of wilderness behind theseIndians, enough solid land to drown the sea from here toEngland. We must free our land of strangers, even if eachmile is a marsh of blood!

To this man of God the Indians were a plague that"must be smothered if we want our children to live infreedom." He demanded they be taken out of sight andshot. Endicott later actually so ordered, with thepromise that after his men had finished killing the

Indians, they might then start burning down the housesof Merry Mount. Tomorrow would be soon enough toburn the native village itself.

It always was. As the actors spoke their lines in theAmerican Place Theater, traditional burnings andkillings had just culminated at My Lai, though themassacre there would not become public knowledgeuntil 1969. But to look forward so prophetically, whichis to say realistically, Lowell had first had to lookbackward for basic historical truths about thoseimmigrants who became Anglo-Americans. As he sawthem, Morton and Endicott were archetypes in thedevelopment of the national character.* Repelled by theformer, the poet had him appear as a one-dimensionalexpression of the pleasure principle, an eruption ofpure id. Attracted to Endicott almost in spite of himself,Lowell had that Puritan share his own predilection forantinomies: Endicott surprisingly turned out to be anirresolute and mild man, forced to suppress imprudentsympathies for his victims and unsettling memories ofhis former life as a courtier of King James: "Why did Icome to this waste of animals, Indians, and nine-monthwin-

* See "Notes and Bibliographical Essay" at the conclusion

of the book for a running commentary on sources mentionedin the text and on others used as general background in eachchapter.

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ters?" Yet, when circumstances seemed to demandaction, act he did. At the play's end Endicott stoodvictorious atop Merry Mount, in control of the presentand heir to the future.

2

In March 1837, thirteen decades closer to this world ofthe Puritan fathers, Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story"The Maypole of Merry Mount" appeared in Twice-ToldTales. In great measure the inspiration and foundationof Lowell's play, it, too, had ties to current events. TheSecond Seminole War was dragging on, with U.S.soldiers and marines trying to "root the Indians out oftheir swamps" and damning them for not standing upand fighting. The year before, President AndrewJackson had urged that Seminole women and childrenbe tracked down and "captured or destroyed," but eventhose tactics had not brought the Indians to heel. FromBaltimore the Niles Weekly Register continued to hope,nevertheless, that "the miserable creatures will bespeedily swept from the face of the earth." Elsewherepreparations were under way to send the Cherokees on

their Trail of Tears to the West. Worthy forerunners ofthis Jacksonian America, then, were Endicott and hisband as they appeared in Hawthorne's short story.''Their weapons were always at hand to shoot down thestraggling savage," he wrote of the Saints. "When theymet in conclave, it was never to keep up the old Englishmirth, but to hear sermons three hours long or toproclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and thescalps of Indians."

In Hawthorne's hands that curious incident at MerryMount two hundred years earlier came to resemble asort of primal Woodstock nation of epochalsignificance. Nothing less than the future of the nationalcharacter was at stake. "Jollity and gloom werecontending for an empire."

On one side were the children of Pan, thoughHawthorne sensibly questioned whether they had comedirectly from classical Greece: "It could not be that thefauns and nymphs, when driven from their classicgroves and homes of ancient fable, had sought refuge,as all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of thewest. These were Gothic monsters, though perhaps ofGrecian ancestry." That the great god was their ancestorwas more certain than probable, however, for one

comely youth "showed the beard and horns of avenerable he-goat," while another appeared scarcelyless monstrous with the head and antlers of a stag onhis shoul-

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ders. Green boys and glee-maidens all, they lovedtwenty different colors "but no sad ones"; they wore"foolscaps and had little bells appended to theirgarments, tinkling with a silvery sound responsive tothe inaudible music of their gleesome spirits."

Flower children who dressed their Maypole inblossoms "so fresh and dewy that they must havegrown by magic on that happy pine tree," they acted outa wild philosophy of pleasure that made games of theirlives. "Once, it is said, they were seen following aflower-decked corpse with merriment and festive musicto his grave." On the joyous occasion Hawthornedescribed, the jovial priest Blackstone crowned a''lightsome couple" Lord and Lady of the May andprepared to join them in pagan wedlock, for they were"really and truly to be partners for the dance of life." Inother, quieter times, the Merry Mounters were said tohave sung ballads, performed juggling tricks, playedjokes on each other, and when bored by their nonsense,"made game of their own stupidity and began ayawning match." Yet their gay veneration of theMaypole was quite serious: they danced around it

"once, at least, in every month: sometimes they called ittheir religion or their altar, but always it was thebanner-staff of Merry Mount." Theirs was no narrowcreed of the elect, however, for sometimes they couldbe seen playing around the great shaft and exertingthemselves to entice a live bear into their circle or tomake a grave Indian share their mirth.

Onto this sun-bright field rushed the Saints, "blackshadows" sworn to eternal enmity against such mirth,and at the same time "waking thoughts" bent onscattering the fantasies of such dreamers. Theydisplayed a taste for the funereal, the colors of death;their songs were psalms; their festivals, fast days.Among them, "woe to the youth or maiden who did butdream of a dance." Mingling with the Merry Mountersthat nuptial night, they suddenly turned on theirunsuspecting hosts and captured the dancers one andall. Their leader's command followed swiftly:

Wherefore bind the heathen crew and bestow on them asmall matter of stripes apiece as earnest of our futurejustice. Set some of the rogues in the stocks to restthemselves so soon as Providence shall bring us to one ofour own well-ordered settlements where suchaccommodations may be found. Further penalties, such as

branding and cropping of ears, shall be thought of hereafter.

The lovelock and long glossy curls of the bridegroomchallenged Puritan proprieties: "And shall not theyouth's hair be cut?" asked ancient Palfrey. "Crop itforthwith, and that in the true pump-

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kin-shell fashion," answered his commander. Nounmanly sentiments tempted the latter to heed theyouth's pleas to spare his bride, do what they wouldwith him: "'Not so,' replied the immitigable zealot. 'Weare not wont to show an idle curiosity to that sex whichrequireth the stricter discipline.'" As for the dancingbear," 'shoot him through the head!' said the energeticPuritan. 'I suspect witchcraft in the beast.'"

The zealot at the head of the invaders was, of course,John Endicott, "the severest Puritan of all who laid therock-foundation of New England." As indecisive as anavalanche, Hawthorne's Endicott was seemingly muchless complex than Lowell's and much more grim andforceful, so that "the whole man, visage, frame andsoul, seemed wrought of iron gifted with life andthought, yet all of one substance with his head-pieceand breast-plate." To be sure, the early love of thebridal pair softened him a little and led him tocommand that after the boy's hair was cropped, they bebrought along "more gently than their fellows." But thisorder betrayed no second thoughts or inner misgivings.To Endicott's mind the boy was a likely recruit for his

armed band, since he promised to become "valiant tofight and sober to toil and pious to pray"; the girl was awelcome addition, since she had the makings of a fit''mother in our Israel." They merited special treatment,for one day they would join Israel in its holy war forthe American wilderness: "But now shall it be seen thatthe Lord hath sanctified this wilderness for his peculiarpeople," as Endicott had already declared. "Woe untothem that would defile it!"

Yet Hawthorne saw in this man of iron, with hisunswerving singleness of purpose, an essential side thatLowell passed by. The latter, in his preoccupation withinner hesitancies and divisions, created a figure notunlike himself and his age, a figure torn by doubts andfrustrations, by ambiguous feelings of historical guilt,and by treacherous sympathies for the victims of NewIsrael. Hawthorne did not lack ambivalences of hisown, of course, and was very much a man of hisgeneration; still he burrowed within himself and backthrough the centuries to come up with an insight ofcritical importance: Endicott had enjoyed being a keypart of the system of repressions. From all theirdeposits of self-denial he and other Puritan fathers hadmade furtive withdrawals of gratification in the

suppression of othersin cropping ears, placingreprobates in stocks, and branding and whipping them.That clearly was what Hawthorne meant when he saidthat the whipping post "might be termed the PuritanMaypole." Around it the Saints got their kicks, albeit ofa different sort from those of the Gay Sinners.

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In all of American literature there is perhaps no greatermetaphoric epiphany than when Hawthorne's Endicott,immediately after capturing the dancers, assaults theMaypole with his keen sword:

Nor long did it resist his arm. It groaned with a dismalsound, it showered leaves and rosebuds upon theremorseless enthusiast, and finally, with all its greenboughs and ribbons and flowers, symbolic of departedpleasures, down fell the banner-staff of Merry Mount. As itsank, tradition says, the evening sky grew darker and thewoods threw forth a more somber shadow.

There it all was, a tableau as memorable as "TheCastration of Uranus," except this time the victim wasPan and he was emasculated in an American setting:The fall of the Maypole shadowed forth, as Endicottproclaimed triumphantly, "the fate of light and idlemirthmakers among us and our posterity." It wasHawthorne's genius to see an orgiastic dimension inEndicott's wanton act, to cast the act as a sexual assault,and to have him carry it out with all the frenzied sadismof a ''remorseless enthusiast."

Any doubts that Hawthorne was consciously clothinghis insight in this splendid symbolism are put to rest bythe one regret he allowed Endicott to voice:

I thought not to repent me of cutting down a Maypole . . .yet now I could find in my heart to plant it again and giveeach of these bestial pagans one other dance around theiridol. It would have served rarely for a whipping post.

Endicott's suppressed sexuality rose up here, in hisvision of whipping pagans around the upright symbolof their bestiality. And just as his pleasure was perverse,Hawthorne made plain, so were many other Puritanviolent delights.

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Chapter IIThomas MortonAfter this they fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolutelife, pouring out themselvesinto all profaneness. And Morton became Lord of Misrule.WILLIAM BRADFORD, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1642

In "The Maypole," Hawthorne said, "The facts recordedon the grave pages of our New England annalists havewrought themselves almost spontaneously into a sort ofallegory." Of course facts rarely work themselves intoany kind of symmetry, and it was only while diggingfor the "deep and aged roots" of his family that thewriter had found those facts in the first place.Nevertheless, in his obsessive search for a usablepersonal past Hawthorne had unearthed the collectiverepressions that surfaced on his pages with such nearspontaneity. His art fused these emergent repressionswith facts into an allegory that has profound historicalmeaning. It was as though the long-silenced ThomasMorton, the very antithesis of his grave New England

annalists, had finally been allowed, in the gay andcolorful part of the story, to say a few words on hisown behalf.

For almost two decades, from 1627 through 1645, thecolonial authorities had sought to silence Mortonforever. Their straining efforts to retch him out of theirsystems by sending him off in chains might well bethought of as a prototypical case. It pretty much set thepattern for an unending series of attempts to purge thecountry, always once and for all, of rebels and heretics,savages and barbarians, familists and antinomians,loose livers and free lovers, and all other undesirablespecies. It came first, and it was no less pregnant withissues than the cases against Roger Williams, AnneHutchinson, the Quakers, and those that followed. Thatit remains so largely unknown today is the measure ofthe triumph of Morton's enemies: they discovered thatif they could not spit him out of the country to beforgotten, they could

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swallow him, as it were, by having him rot away inprison to be forgotten. Almost.

The campaign to silence Morton had three distinctstages. The first dated almost from his arrival in 1625.He traded extensively with the Indians, prospered, andraised his Maypole in 1627. The following year CaptainMiles Standish and eight men from nearby Plymouthinvaded Merry Mount, captured its host, and hauledhim off to their settlement. From there, in the latesummer of 1628, he was shipped to England (in thecharge of John Oldham) to stand trial for selling gunsand spirits to the Indians. The allegations and evidenceagainst him were so insubstantial, however, that thecase collapsed before it reached the courtroom. Withina year from his deportation Morton returned mockinglyto Plymouth and soon reestablished himself in his oldhome at Merry Mount. About Christmas of 1629 JohnEndicott, then in charge of Massachusetts Bay, tried tohave Morton arrested for not submitting to his own"good order and government," but the unrepentantscoffer "did but deride Captain Littleworth," as hecalled Endicott, and easily eluded his pursuers.

The second stage dated from the fall of 1630: Shortlyafter the arrival of Governor John Winthrop and thefirst wave of the Great Migration, the enlarged body ofmagistrates met for the first time and issued a warrantfor Morton's arrest. He was brought before them onSeptember 17, for which session Endicott came downfrom Salem. Never was a kangaroo court moresummary. Morton's words of self-defense were cut offshort so he could hear the verdict against him. He wasto be set in the stocks; his goods were to be seized topay for his transportation back to England, to meet hisdebts, and most curiously, "to give satisfaction to theIndians for a canoe hee unjustly tooke away from them;and . . . his howse, after the goods are taken out, shal-be burnt downe to the ground in the sight of theIndians, for their satisfaction, for many wrongs heehath done them from tyme to tyme." These were themen, as Morton ironically observed in his own account,who had "come prepared to ridd the Land of allpollution." In imposing sentence, he added, Winthrophad explained that Merry Mount was to be burned tothe ground "because the habitation of the wickedshould no more appeare in Israeli." Four months laterMorton was finally hoisted over the side of theHandmaid by tackle, since he refused to go aboard

voluntarily. Only then, as he was shipped off into exilea second time, was his house burned downin his sightand not simply in sight of the Indiansleaving behind, asMorton recorded, "bare ashes as an emblem of theircruelty."

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Again set free in England, for this set of spindlycharges had even less chance of surviving an Atlanticpassage than the first, Morton promptly mounted acounterattack. A solicitor and member of Clifford's Innbefore his emigration in the early 1620s, he wascompetent, angry, and possessed of an energy thatmade him a more formidable adversary than Winthropand Endicott could have anticipated. He handled legalwork for Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the dominant figurein the Council for New England and active foe of theBay Puritans, and spearheaded an assault on the charterof the Massachusetts Company. By 1634 he and hisassociates had been so successful that the colony was ina state of panic that their patent and powers would fallto an expedition headed by Gorges, the newlyappointed governor-general, and seconded by his aide-de-camp, the despised Morton. And it was during thisheady period, with his high-handed enemies squirming,that Morton wrote New English Canaan, to which weshall turn presently. At all events, apparently only lackof funds kept the expedition from being launched, withGorges, Morton, and their associates bidding fair to winall the stakes in both Old and New England. But their

fortunes were tied to those of Archbishop Laud andCharles I; the rush of events toward civil war put anend to their hopes. In the summer of 1643 Mortonreappeared at Plymouth as nothing more, in the unkindwords of his editor, "than a poor, broken-down,disreputable, old impostor, with some empty envelopesand manufactured credentials in his pocket."

The third stage was short and bitter. Morton was closelywatched in his temporary refuge at Plymouth. When hemade preparations to go to Maine in the spring of 1644,Endicott, by then governor, had a warrant issued for hisarrest but was unable to serve it. A few months later,however, Endicott's officers grabbed Morton, perhapsas he tried to slip through the province, and broughthim before the court of assistants in September 1644.This time his alleged offense was having appealed tothe King's Privy Council against the actions of thecolonial government. When even this singular "crime"could not be proved, he was thrown into jail until moreevidence could be accumulated. He was still lockedaway in May 1645 when he addressed an appeal to thecourt to "behould what your poor petitioner hathsuffered in these parts"; the list of sufferings concludedwith his most recent, "the petitioner coming into these

parts, which he loveth, on godly gentlemen'simployments, and your worshipps having a formerjelosy of him, and a late untrue intelligence of him,your petitioner hath been imprisoned manie Monethsand laid in Irons to the decaying of his limbs." Lyingchained in an unheated cell through

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a New England winter might have broken the health ofa much younger man. Now ill and enfeebledor "old andcrazy," as Winthrop would have itMorton was fined andturned loose to die somewhere, as he finally obliged theauthorities by doing a couple of years later.

Out of this medley of unproved accusations andsummary judgments emerged one awkward fact: thecolonial authorities never once had compellingevidence that Morton had committed any punishableoffense under English law. It was not a crime, at leaston any formal level, to fraternize with natives. It wasnot a crime to have a Maypole and especially not since1618 when King James had issued a decreeencouraging Maypole dancing. And least of all was it acrime to petition the Crown through proper legalchannels for redress of grievances. To move againstMorton the Puritans were thus forced into indirectionand extralegality, into veiling the true source of theirfear and hatred of himhis true offense against "yeMassachusetts Magistrats," as Samuel Maverickobserved, "was he had touched them too neare."

The least trumped up and most serious of all the counts

was that he had sold guns to the Indians. This wasnever established in open court, and in fact there wasno English law against itKing James's proclamation(1622) against the practice did not have the status oflaw and was in any event of doubtful application toMorton. But say that he had traded firearms to theIndians for furs, as he almost certainly had, and then,as William Bradford angrily recorded, had given theIndians instructions in their use. So what? Whyprohibit one set of human beings something permittedanother? The Saints affirmed they wished to live inharmony with the Indians and bring them Christianlight: What then was more logical than for them also toshare their technology with red friends who couldthereby more efficiently share their wilderness? Alas,the logic was not that of sharing. The planters werecolonizers. They were the cutting edge of a colonialempire that was currently subjugating Ireland andmoving to apply that experience to North America. Toarm those about to be conquered struck them asillogical to the point of madness. They knew that werethey despoiled of their lands and subjected to foreigndiscipline, they would use the guns in their hands. Ittook little imagination for them to sense that otherswould do likewise, especially if the others were

Indians.

Of course the planters and their kinsmen preferred toput the matter the other way round: not their expansionbut their very existence was threatened. They warnedMorton, according to William Bradford, that "thecountry could not bear the injury he did"

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by trading pieces to the Indians; "it was against theircommon safety and against the King's proclamation."And this became the fixed view of the matter. Fourgenerations later John Adams forcibly restated itsessentials. Morton's fun, he wrote in 1802,

his songs and his revels were provoking enough, no doubt.But his commerce with the Indians in arms and ammunition,and his instructions to those savages in the use of them,were serious and dangerous offenses, which struck at thelives of the new-comers, and threatened the utterextirpation of all the plantations.

Three generations still further along, Charles FrancisAdams, Jr., approvingly quoted his great-grandfather'sdictum in the course of editing the 1883 edition of NewEnglish Canaan, conceding as well that Morton'ssuppression was not a question of law but one of self-preservation:

Yet it is by no means clear that, under similarcircumstances, he would not have been far more severelyand summarily dealt with at a later period, when thedangers of a frontier life had brought into use an unwrittencode, which evinced even less regard for life than, in

Morton's case, the Puritans evinced for property.

But the dangers of frontier life had seemed real enoughto Bradford and the colonists of his day as they actedon the leading assumption of the vigilante code theAdamses later defended. Throughout, I venture, from1628 to 1883 and after, the unwritten code assumedIndians not to be persons, who might be responsive tokindness and fair dealing, but "savages," who wouldinevitably use any available weapon to strike at thelives of newcomers, those bearers of "civilization."

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Were it not for New English Canaan, there we wouldhave to leave Morton, a curious footnote i