by Mary Grabar
But there is not the slightest question of who is to blame in Zinn’s account. According to Zinn’s favorite “ethnohistorian” Francis Jennings, the Indians took three lessons to heart from the Pequot War: that Englishmen would break their pledges when it advantaged them, that their warfare “ ‘had no limit of scruple or mercy,’ ” and that Indian weapons were “ ‘almost useless’ ” against the Europeans. Zinn adds that the New England “Indians were used against each other”—just like the Aztecs!27 But Jennings allows his ideology to blur any kind of balance. Like Zinn’s other favorite historian, Hans Koning, Jennings slips into polemics, providing political commentary—in his case, on Watergate, which was going on at the time he was writing The Invasion of America in 1975. The “Watergate deceits,” he opines in the preface to the book, “do not seem to be a new thing in history.”28 And all the deceits in early American history are deceits of the colonists against the Indians. As Oscar Handlin noticed, Jennings’s call “for a turn away from legend to history, ‘from heroes and demons to conflicting persons’ ” was “honorable” in “intention,” but not in “execution.” Handlin points out, “Jennings’ evidence would have sustained a portrayal of the Puritans as confused, well-intentioned, and incapable of adapting to differences a universalistic faith could not recognize. Instead they became pious hypocrites, their ideas ‘cant,’ who all along wanted to do the original inhabitants out of their land.” In this version of American history “settlement” was transformed into “conquest,” then “invasion.”29
Thus, we should not be surprised by Zinn’s discussion of King Philip’s War, forty years later, which presents another murder “attributed” to an Indian as only another “excuse” for a “war of conquest.” Actually, as Duffy explains, Wampanoag leader Metacom, “known to the English as Philip,” began the war in June 1675 by attacking Plymouth Colony. On top of his usual canards against Western civilization, Zinn manages to drag in a little more Marxist class theory: “Jennings says the elite of the Puritans wanted the war; the ordinary white Englishman did not want it and often refused to fight.”30 “For a while, the English tried softer tactics,” Zinn says. “But ultimately, it was back to annihilation.”31
While Zinn goes further than most in depicting the Indians as the peaceful, blameless victims, the cliché was already a well-known trope that Richard R. Johnson—in 1977, three years before the publication of A People’s History of the United States—identified as “the usable Indian”: the Native American as a prop in furtherance of a predetermined agenda. Just as the caricature of the savage Indian was convenient to some in earlier times, the caricature of the innocent, generous, pacifist Indian was convenient to collectivists of the 1960s and beyond. In correction of both myths, Johnson offered a more nuanced and accurate account of the complex relationship between the white settlers and the American natives.32
As Johnson explains, in 1675, “the pressures of advancing English settlement finally drew several of the major tribes into unprecedented coalition against the whites. In . . . King Philip’s War, over half of New England’s towns were attacked and nearly a quarter destroyed or heavily damaged.” Eventually, the settlers and their Indian allies gained the victory, but with high casualties. In Connecticut, the “powerful Mohegans” offered their services to the colonists, and several hundred of them served as scouts and auxiliaries, along with Pequots and Niantic: “In March 1676, the authorities devised a tactic so effective that it became the pattern of New England’s offensive operations for many years to come—the dispatch of combined parties of white and Indian volunteers in search of the enemy with the promise of pay, provisions, and the profits of their plunder.” Massachusetts and Plymouth soon followed Connecticut’s example. When war “blazed” on New England borders “a dozen years later,” Indians made up to 25 percent of the forces fighting for the English. They took part in expeditions against Canada in 1690. “Indians formed a substantial proportion—one-seventh in 1707 and one-eighth in 1710—of colonial forces mustered for the assaults on Canada,” according to Johnson.33
As Johnson explains, “Though mercenaries in all but name, [Indians], like the whites, were fighting to defend their homes; and they proved to be loyal and dependable allies.” They knew the woods, could act as spies among the enemy, and were mobile and effective fighters. These alliances in New England went back to when the Pilgrims and Wampanoag formed “a common front against the Narragansetts”; the latter, in turn, joined forces with the Connecticut settlers in 1637 against the Pequot. (The Mohegans, who with the “Praying Indians” made up the bulk of the colonists’ Indian allies in Prince Philip’s War from 1675–1678, had seceded from the Pequots in 1636.) Some genuine friendships also developed between whites and their Indian allies. As Johnson notes, “wartime comradeship often spun lasting bonds of loyalty and friendship.”34
Such detail and nuance are absent from A People’s History. Instead, Zinn fills space with anti-capitalist polemic: “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. . . .” Then comes a quotation from Roger Williams about the colonists’ “depraved appetite” for “great portions of land.” Of course, Zinn fails to acknowledge the fact that Williams, just like Bartolomé de Las Casas before him, makes his criticism from the Christian perspective. Williams’s complaint is about “the great vanities, dreams and shadows of this vanishing life. . . . which the living and most high Eternal will destroy”35
Zinn also does some alliterative editorializing: “Was all this bloodshed and deceit—from Columbus to Cortés, Pizarro, the Puritans—a necessity for the human race to progress. . . . ?” This bit of rhetoric is used to set up Zinn’s suggestion that anyone who tries to put the suffering of the Indians in context is guilty of crimes on the order of Stalin’s. According to Zinn, historians who provide that kind of balance are making the very same case that “was made by Stalin when he killed peasants for industrial progress in the Soviet Union.” Zinn asks histrionically whether “miners and railroaders of America, the factory hands . . . who died by the hundreds of thousands from accidents or sickness” were also “casualties of progress?” It’s a bloody tradeoff that may not be worth it—even for the oppressor, Zinn suggests—as he will always have to be looking over his shoulder: “And even the privileged minority—must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?”36
This part of the chapter on “Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress” is a rhetorical tour de force. Whipping boy Samuel Eliot Morison is dragged into the argument again as an example of the wicked, old, and balanced history supposedly guilty of “burying the story of genocide inside a more important story of human progress.” Who can argue with Zinn when he asks, “We can all decide to give up something of ours, but do we have the right to throw into the pyre the children of others, or even our own children, for a progress which is not nearly as clear or present as sickness or health, life or death?” And then it’s back to that monster Columbus: “Beyond all that, how certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortés and Pizarro ride through their countryside, who peered out of the forest at the first white settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts?”37
He answers, we “call them Indians, with some reluctance,” because they are “saddled with names given them by their conquerors,” and then launches into an encomium. Their farming methods were so advanced. “They perfected the art of agriculture, and figured out how to grow maize (corn), which cannot grow by itself and must be planted, cultivated, fertilized, harvested, husked, sh
elled.” His enthusiasm at the Indians’ agricultural prowess knows no bounds: they “ingeniously developed a variety of other vegetables and fruits, as well as peanuts and chocolate and tobacco and rubber.”38
Furthermore, their lifestyles were light years ahead of European civilization: “While many of the tribes remained nomadic hunters and food gatherers in wandering, egalitarian communes, others began to live in more settled communities where there was more food, larger populations, more divisions of labor among men and women, more surplus to feed chiefs and priests, more leisure time for artistic and social work. . . .”39 The Iroquois lived in proto-hippie communes, with land “worked in common” and hunting “done together,” with their catch “divided among the members of the village. Houses were considered common property and were shared by several families. The concept of private ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois.”40 In this portrait of the Indians as Communists ahead of their time, Zinn draws heavily on Gary Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, which Oscar Handlin put alongside Jennings’s as an “atonement book” that “pivoted on the hostility to whites,” with the portrayal of Indian culture varying “with the preference of the author.” As Handlin points out, for Nash the Indians were “California countercultural rebels, defenders of women’s rights, and communist egalitarians—to say nothing
of their anticipation of Freudianism.”41
On the topic of the Iroquois, Zinn leans heavily on Nash just as he leaned on Koning on the subject of Columbus—following the earlier historian’s text too closely and lifting his quotations of original sources without giving him credit for doing the research. Zinn’s pages 19–21 follow Nash’s 13–23. Zinn quotes most of Nash’s quotation from the 1899 Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791 about the Indians’ willingness to share with each other. But neither Nash nor Zinn quote the passage about the Iroquois’s torture of the priest Father Jean de Brébeuf by the usual methods of beating, burning, scalping, cutting off of flesh, but also adding a mock baptism with boiling water. Nash at least mentions that the Jesuits were willing to be “martyred.”42 Not Zinn.
Iroquois culture was superior in the way women are treated, according to Zinn: “Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives’ family. . . . when a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outside the door.”43 That’s one of many Zinn passages suspiciously close to his source. Compare Nash on page twenty: “the Iroquois family was matrilineal, with family membership determined through the female rather than the male line. . . . sons and grandsons remained with their kinship group until they married; then they joined the family of their wife or the family of their mother’s brother. Divorce was also the woman’s prerogative; if she desired it, she merely set her husband’s possessions outside the longhouse door.”44
In another sign of feminist advancement, the senior woman in the village chose the men who represented the clans at the village and tribal councils, as well as the forty-nine chiefs for the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy. You can’t help noticing that even in Zinn’s (or Nash’s) telling, these supposedly liberated Indian women were choosing men to rule them—and that women did not speak at clan meetings, where the women all stood behind the men. Zinn: “The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women.”45 Nash: “the senior women were fully in attendance, caucusing behind the circle of men who did the public speaking and lobbying with them, and giving them instructions.”46 Nash anticipates the reader’s skepticism: “To an outsider it might appear that the men ruled, because it was they who did the public speaking and formally reached decisions. But their power was shared with the women. If the men of the village or tribal council moved too far from the will of the women who had appointed them, they could be removed, or ‘dehorned.’ ”47 After cribbing several pages from Nash’s book in this manner, Zinn quotes approvingly from it: “As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study . . . Red, White, and Black, ‘Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.”48
Edmund Morgan, however, another of Zinn’s sources—though he naturally does not follow him on him this point—reports that things weren’t so good in Virginia, where “nearly any activity that could be designated as work at all was left to the women. . . . man counted on [his wife] to support him. He could make canoes, weapons, and weirs without losing his dignity, but the only other labor he ordinarily engaged in was clearing fields for planting, and the method employed [girdling trees and burning brush around them] made this less than arduous. . . . the next year the women worked the ground between the trees, using a crooked stick as a hoe. . . .”49
Zinn, however, presents such drudgery as women’s empowerment: “The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing.” In other words, the women were in charge—when there were no men around! Zinn’s idea of women’s power in military matters includes stitching, hoeing, and grinding meal: “And since they supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military matters.”50 This, too, comes from Nash, who had written, “While men were responsible for hunting and fishing, the women were the primary agriculturalists of the village. In tending the crops they became equally important in sustaining the community. . . .”51 Of course, one can always say that a housewife is “equally important” to her breadwinner husband in sustaining her family, and, by extension, the larger community, and claim that women’s work in the traditional division of labor—cooking, cleaning, sewing—means she has control over matters in the larger world. But that’s not exactly a feminist take.
In Zinn’s telling, there is really nothing in which the Indians are not superior to Europeans, right down to potty-training. Zinn borrows Nash’s Freudian analysis to claim the Iroquois “did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn self-care.” They learned “solidarity with the tribe” and “to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority.”52 They were taught to think of themselves as equals and to share. Of course this enlightened Indian approach was completely unlike the Europeans’ authoritarian attitude exemplified by the Pilgrim pastor John Robinson, whom Zinn (once again cribbing from Nash) quotes on breaking children’s “natural pride.”53 “Other Indian tribes,” Zinn assures us—on no particular evidence—“behaved in the same way.”54 Of course they did.
Zinn’s purportedly diligent “note-taking” seems to have stopped before the last page of Nash’s chapter, where Nash tries for a modicum of scholarly judgment and historical context, warning, “It would be mistaken to romanticize Iroquois culture or to judge it superior to the culture of the European invader.” Nash, although clearly an admirer of the Indians to a fault, warns that “grading cultures” is an “exercise in ethnocentrism.” Unlike Zinn, Nash looks honestly at the Iroquois’ own aggression and violence: In addition to advancing in agricultural techniques, “[t]hey were also emerging as one of the strongest, most politically unified, and militaristic native societies in the Northeast woodlands. Even after the formation of the League of Iroquois, which had as one of its objectives the abatement of intertribal warfare, an impressive amount of fighting seems to have occurred between the Five Nations and surrounding Algonkian peoples. Many of these conflicts involved a quest for glory and some of them may have been initiated to test the newly forged alliance of the five tribes against lesser tribes which could be brought under Iroquoian subjugation.”
What? Subjugation? Alliances? Militarism? These are supposed to be European traits!
Maybe that’s why Zinn skips this page, on which Nash also notes that “the Iroquois on the eve of European arrival were feared and sometimes hated by their neighbors for their skill and cruelty in warfare.” Furthermore, “[t]heir belief in the superiority of their culture was as pronounced as that of the arriving Europeans.”55
Nash’s book—which, alas, has been updated and imposed upon innocent students in American classrooms—skims over Indian acts of cruelty while providing vivid descriptions of those by Puritans. But Nash, unlike Zinn, at least acknowledges that there was “enmity” between Indians (the Hurons and Iroquois, for example) before the Europeans arrived.56
Zinn leaps beyond his counterculture colleagues in simplistically blaming all the violence and oppression on “European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families.”57 (Ah, those Puritan priests!) And little did the Europeans realize how superior a culture—for Zinn lumps all Indian tribes into one mythical pre-Columbian utopia—they were despoiling: “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.” Poetry and history were passed on in an “oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama.”58 Shakespeare and Dante, apparently, don’t come up to the standard of Amerindian poetry—or to the little bit we know about it, given the fact that they didn’t have a written language.