To Establish Justice

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ...
Preamble, United States Constitution

I might have become an attorney. During my junior year of college I attended the prelaw meetings, consumed advice concerning preparation for law school, digested information from representatives of law schools that visited my college to discuss legal careers, took steps to prepare for the LSAT. Moral qualms put an end to this activity.

Two Political Science courses--Constitutional Law (PolS 300) and Civil Liberties (PolS 402)--cultivated my interest in the Bill of Rights, my commitment to equal justice under law, and some minimal comfort with legalese. The entire sequence of U.S. history courses that I packed under my belt broadened my understanding of the ongoing struggle to bring American realities in line with American ideals. President Reagan, who assumed command during my sophomore year, may have echoed John Winthrop's appropriation of a metaphor from the Sermon on the Mount to describe the U.S. nation as a "city upon a hill," but the light, it seemed to me, was directed into people's eyes more so than upon the path toward justice. Embarking upon a massive program of consuming U.S. history texts while watching the President serve up the imaginary food of Peter Pan's banquets proved to be a recipe for indigestion.

The Bill of Rights was under attack. American liberties struggled against the rhetoric of freedom. American values were the daily fare. More and more, however, the meat and potatoes that tasted so good appeared to be full of unnatural additives. They added flavor and aided digestion, but evidence began coming to light that cancer would be the long-term consequence of such a diet.

How should I earn my slice of the American pie? Defending guilty criminals seemed to be the means of keeping civil liberties off the butcher's block. Cultivating the raw truth that revealed how history books had been cooked appealed more fully to my sense of moral fiber. My stomach ached less when I contemplated prosecuting those that lied about the past than when I contemplated protecting those that might be guilty from a rush to judgment on the basis of inadequate or tainted evidence. I remained committed to my youthful quest to become a history teacher. I chose history over law, and in graduate school the history of Federal Indian law pulled me back to a steady diet of legalese.

Neolithic Revolution and American Indians

In Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1999 [1980]), we read:

On their own, the Indians were engaged in the great agricultural revolution that other peoples in Asia, Europe, Africa were going through about the same time. (18)

Zinn proceeds to observe the contrast between the "egalitarian communes" of hunter-gatherers with the development of "divisions of labor among men and women," the rise of priests and chiefs, and other aspects of the cultures of settled populations of agriculturalists. Although he hints of an underside of the development of agriculture, his focus notes the achievements of civilization in the Americas prior to the European invasion.

He dwells less upon the differences between "nomadic hunters" and agricultural peoples in the Americas than upon describing social relations among the Haudenosaunee (he uses the term League of the Iroquois). Zinn describes property values and gender relations in such as way as to support a generalization.

So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. (21)

Zinn mentions in passing the Moundbuilder Culture, but omits discussion of their religion--some form of sun worship,--and neglects elaboration of its hierarchical arrangements aside from the passing phrase, "more surplus to feed chiefs and priests" (18-19).



Just as he faults Samuel Eliot Morison, Zinn opens himself to criticism. He observes that Morison's Christopher Columbus, Mariner (1954) mentions genocide as a consequence of policies initiated by Columbus, but then moves on to emphasize positive achievements. Zinn opines:

To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important--it should weigh very little in our final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world. (8)

As Morison quickly brushed past the issue of genocide, Zinn brushes past the hierarchical arrangements and theocratic states that emerged along the trail of corn in order to romanticize the American Indian past.


Pandora's Seed

Spencer Wells does not romanticize Neolithic peoples in Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization (2010). Wells presents data from a 1984 study of skeletal remains in the eastern Mediterranean by J. Lawrence Angel that demonstrates substantive indices of health decrease--pelvic inlet depth, average stature, and median life span--during the Mesolithic (9000-8000 BCE), Early Neolithic (7000-5000 BCE), and Late Neolithic (5000-3000 BCE). Wells notes similar patterns in the Americas, "the data shows that the transition to an agricultural lifestyle made people less healthy" (24).

How can we explain the massive increase in human population and the dominance of agriculture, which has pretty much completely replaced hunting and gathering in every inhabited corner of the world, when it didn't improve people's lives? (24)

It would seem that hunter-gatherers had an evolutionary advantage, yet agriculturalists prevailed. How was this victory achieved?

Although Wells poses this question, his focus concerns more centrally the long-term consequences of the Neolithic upon modern society, including the impact of a carbohydrate based diet upon general health and even how such changes so long ago contribute to global climate change. Along the way, however, he discusses the work of William H. McNeill (Plagues and Peoples [1976]) and Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel [1997]). These works address how peoples from Europe prevailed over peoples in the Americas. Although the Neolithic Revolution transformed the Fertile Crescent, MesoAmerica, and southern China approximately the same time, the revolution in the Americas was principally plant oriented, while elsewhere domestication of animals proceeded apace. From these animals came the diseases that devastated the Indians when Europeans arrived.


People's versus Patriot's

Although Zinn skirts past the unpleasant side of the Neolithic Revolution in the Americas to advance his excoriation of the heroes of conquest, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen take a different tact. A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) draws upon other studies that document deleterious effects of the Neolithic Revolution to argue for an insignificant demographic impact of the European invasion. There is no need to repeat here all that I have written concerning the claims of Schweikart and Allen and how they distort the science they cite. I address elements of their fantastic edifice in "Larry Schweikart's Claim" (looking at his History News Network plug for the book), "Footnote to Larry Schweikart's Claim" (examining his source, The Backbone of History, and how he distorts its findings), and "Death in Jamestown" (investigating A Patriot's most outlandish claim). "Origins of Malaria" adds some solid science to the refutation of Schweikart's claim that malaria originates in America.

I note in "Origins":

Civilization made us sick, but it also made us more numerous so we could impose our will on those otherwise more fortunate. The maladies that afflicted Europeans contributed in significant measure to their global expansion.

As a working hypothesis, I am prepared to put forth the claim that Zinn's history distorts through conscious and open bias that romanticizes Indians, while Schweikart and Allen distort either through abysmal scholarship or through flagrant dishonesty.

Zinn on Slavery

During an argument on Facebook concerning observations of racism in the Tea Party movement, a putative historian opined:

Maybe you got your history from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States--the most assigned history textbook in our schools. Howard Zinn, Communist Party Member, said that, "objective history was undesirable if it is to serve a social purpose." He also explained that if you ask 100 different people who lived through an event or time what happened you'll get 100 different answers. So he sought to teach history through the perspectives of the victims of history. That makes me wonder who decided who the victims were and how accurate can we expect his books (our history textbooks) to be? One example of how Howard Zinn was wrong: he claimed that European whites brought slavery to the Americas, when in fact there was already an abundant slave trade in place between the Indian tribes well before the white Europeans came. [spelling and punctuation errors in original corrected]

Zinn's discussion of slavery in the first two chapters of A People's History is not quite as represented by this Tea Party apologist. I urge my readers to read Zinn more carefully.

American Wealth: Timber

The history of the United States is fundamentally a history of rapid exploitation of immensely valuable natural resources. The possession and exploitation of these resources have given most of the distinctive traits to American character, economic development, and even political and social institutions. Whatever preeminence the United States may have among the nations of the world, in industrial activity, efficiency and enterprise, in standards of comfort in living, in wealth, and even in such social and educational institutions as are dependent upon great wealth, must be attributed to the possession of these great natural resources; and the maintenance of our preeminence in these respects is dependent upon a wise and economical use of remaining resources. Thus the question of conservation is one of the most important questions before the American people ...
John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (1920), xix.

Remember this: this text criticizing wasteful over-cutting of timber and other wanton exploitation of the sources of American wealth was published in 1920. Its criticism of wrong-headed government actions was published a dozen years prior to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the office of President of the United States. Long before publicly funded welfare existed for the poor and destitute, it existed for the railroads. These railroads, and companies with which they made sweet deals (Weyerhaeuser), came to own most of the nation's timber resources.

The three largest timber holdings in the United States— those of the Southern Pacific, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, and the Northern Pacific—aggregated about 9,000,000 acres of timber land—since the forfeiture of the Southern Pacific lands in Oregon, only about 7,000,000 acres—some of it among the finest in the world. The five largest holdings in the country included 12,794,000 acres, an average of 2,560,000 acres each. Among holdings smaller than these were 9 of from 500,000 to 1,500,000 acres, averaging almost 1,000,000 acres each; 27 holdings of from 300,000 to 500,000 acres each; 48 holdings of from 150,000 to 300,000 acres; 124 of from 75,000 to 150,000 acres; and 520 holdings of between 18,000 and 75,000 acres. Thus 733 holders owned in fee a total of 71,521,000 acres of timber land and land owned in connection with or in the vicinity of this timber land—an average of nearly 100,000 acres each. There were also 961 smaller holders owning a total of 6,731,000 acres, an average for each of 7,000 acres—the equivalent of forty homesteads. This makes a total of over 78,000,000 acres owned in fee by 1,694 holders—nearly one twentieth of the land area of the United States, from the Canadian to the Mexican border.
John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (1920), 317.

Indian Names: Nez Perce

Tribal names, as the names Native, Native American, Indian, American Indian, Native American Indian, are inventions more often than not. Some of these inventions stem from simple confusion, as when Captain James Cook heard the Nuu-chah-nulth offering instructions on where to anchor his ship, he heard "Nootka" and gave them that name. Some names are corruptions of what their enemies call them, as is the case with Sioux. Some names remain shrouded in the mists of time.

Already by 1835, the reasons for calling the Salish people in Montana, Flathead, and for calling the Ni-Mii-Puu, Nez Perce, had been forgotten. At least Samuel Parker could not discern the reasons during his travels.

I was disappointed to see nothing peculiar in the shape of the Flathead Indians, to give them their name. Who gave them this name, or for what reason, is not known. Some suppose it was given them in derision for not flattening their heads, as the Chenooks and some other nations do, near the shores of the Pacific. It may be so, but how will those, who indulge this imagination, account for the Nez Perces being so called, since they do not pierce their noses. That those names are given by white men, without any known reason, is evident from the fact, that they do not call each other by the names which signify either flat head or pierced nose.
Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838), 76.

Many years ago, when I was a graduate student, my friend Otis Halfmoon told a class that I was teaching that the name Nez Perce probably stems from the Ni-Mii-Puu sign language term for themselves in which they pointed from right to left across their face to indicate that they had crossed over between those mountains. He speculated that someone thought they were piercing their noses with the gesture, adding that he is glad they did not think it was an act of cleaning their noses.