Before either Jefferson or Jackson, George Washington, the father of the country, had said much the same thing: the Indians were wolves and beasts who deserved nothing from the whites but “total ruin.”132 And Washington himself was only repeating what by then was a very traditional observation. Less than a decade after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, for example, it was made illegal to “shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian or a wolf.” As Barry Lopez has noted, this was far from a single-incident comparison. So alike did Indians and wolves appear to even the earliest land-hungry New England colonist that the colonist “fell to dealing with them in similar ways”:
He set out poisoned meat for the wolf and gave the Indian blankets infected with smallpox. He raided the wolf’s den to dig out and destroy the pups, and stole the Indian’s children. . . . When he was accused of butchery for killing wolves and Indians, he spun tales of Mohawk cruelty and of wolves who ate fawns while they were still alive. . . . Indians and wolves who later came into areas where there were no more of either were called renegades. Wolves that lay around among the buffalo herds were called loafer wolves and Indians that hung around the forts were called loafer Indians.133
As is so often the case, it was New England’s religious elite who made the point more graphically than anyone. Referring to some Indians who had given offense to the colonists, the Reverend Cotton Mather wrote: “Once you have but got the Track of those Ravenous howling Wolves, then pursue them vigourously; Turn not back till they are consumed. . . . Beat them small as the Dust before the Wind.” Lest this be regarded as mere rhetoric, empty of literal intent, consider that another of New England’s most esteemed religious leaders, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, as late as 1703 formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal to purchase and train large packs of dogs “to hunt Indians as they do bears.” There were relatively few Indians remaining alive in New England by this time, but those few were too many for the likes of Mather and Stoddard. “The dogs would be an extreme terror to the Indians,” Stoddard wrote, adding that such “dogs would do a great deal of execution upon the enemy and catch many an Indian that would be too light of foot for us.” Then, turning from his equating of native men and women and children with bears deserving to be hunted down and destroyed, Stoddard became more conventional in his imagery: “if the Indians were as other people,” he acknowledged, “. . . it might be looked upon as inhumane to pursue them in such a manner”; but, in fact, the Indians were wolves, he said, “and are to be dealt withal as wolves.”134 For two hundred years to come Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and other leaders, representing the wishes of virtually the entire white nation, followed these ministers’ genocidal instructions with great care. It was their Christian duty as well as their destiny.
. . .
In sum, when in 1492 the seal was broken on the membrane that for tens of thousands of years had kept the residents of North and South America isolated from the inhabitants of the earth’s other inhabited continents, the European adventurers and colonists who rushed through the breach were representatives of a religious culture that was as theologically arrogant and violence-justifying as any the world had ever seen. Nourished by a moral history that despised the self and that regarded the body and things sensual as evil, repulsive, and bestial, it was a culture whose holiest exemplars not only sought out pain and degradation as the foundation of their faith, but who simultaneously both feared and pursued what they regarded as the dark terrors of the wilderness—the wilderness in the world outside as well as the wilderness of the soul within. It was a faith that considered all humanity in its natural state to be “sick, suffering, and helpless” because its earliest mythical progenitors—who for a time had been the unclothed inhabitants of an innocent Earthly Paradise—had succumbed to a sensual temptation that was prohibited by a jealous and angry god, thereby committing an “original sin” that thenceforth polluted the very essence of every infant who had the poor luck to be born. Ghastly and disgusting as the things of this world—including their own persons—were to these people, they were certain of at least one thing: that their beliefs were absolute truth, and that those who persisted in believing otherwise could not be tolerated. For to tolerate evil was to encourage evil, and no sin was greater than that. Moreover, if the flame of intolerance that these Christian saints lit to purge humanity of those who persisted down a path of error became a sacred conflagration in the form of a crusade or holy war—that was only so much the better. Such holocausts themselves were part of God’s divine plan, after all, and perhaps even were harbingers of his Son’s imminent Second Coming.
It is impossible to know today how many of the very worldly men who first crossed the Atlantic divide were piously ardent advocates of this worldview, and how many merely unthinkingly accepted it as the religious frame within which they pursued their avaricious quests for land and wealth and power. Some were seeking souls. Most were craving treasure, or land on which to settle. But whatever their individual levels of theological consciousness, they encountered in this New World astonishing numbers of beings who at first seemed to be the guardians of a latter-day Eden, but who soon became for them the very picture of Satanic corruption.
And through it all, as with their treatment of Europe’s Jews for the preceding half-millennium—and as with their response to wildness and wilderness since the earliest dawning of their faith—the Christian Europeans continued to display a seemingly antithetical set of tendencies: revulsion from the terror of pagan or heretical pollution and, simultaneously, eagerness to make all the world’s repulsive heretics and pagans into followers of Christ. In its most benign racial manifestation, this was the same inner prompting that drove missionaries to the ends of the earth to Christianize people of color, but to insist that their new converts worship in segregated churches. Beginning in the late eighteenth century in America, this conflict of racial abhorrence and mission—and along with it a redefined concept of holy war—became secularized in the form of an internally contradictory political ideology. In the same way that the Protestant Ethic was transformed into the Spirit of Capitalism, while the Christian right to private property became justifiable in wholly secular terms, America as Redeemer Nation became Imperial America, fulfilling its irresistible and manifest destiny.
During the country’s early national period this took the form of declarations that America should withdraw from world affairs into moral isolation (to preserve the chaste new nation from the depravities of the Old World and the miserable lands beyond) that was uttered in the same breath as the call to export the “Rising Glory of America,” to bring democracy and American-style civilization to less fortunate corners of the earth.135 Less than a century later, during the peak era of American imperialism, the same contradictory mission presented itself again: while those Americans who most opposed expansion into the Philippines shared the imperialists’ belief in the nation’s predestined right to rule the world, they resisted efforts to annex a nation of “inferior” dark-skinned people largely because of fears they had of racial contamination. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said it most straightforwardly when he referred to America’s virulent treatment of the Indians as the lesson to recall in all such cases, because, harsh though he admitted such treatment was, it had “saved the Anglo-Saxon stock from being a nation of half-breeds.”136 In these few words were both a terrible echo of past warrants for genocidal race war and a chilling anticipation of eugenic justifications for genocide yet to come, for to this famous scion of America’s proudest family, the would-be extermination of an entire race of people was preferable to the “pollution” of racial intermixture.
It was long before this time, however, that the notion of the deserved and fated extermination of America’s native peoples had become a commonplace and secularized ideology. In 1784 a British visitor to America observed that “white Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whol
e race of Indians; nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.”137 And this visitor was not speaking only of the opinion of those whites who lived on the frontier. Wrote the distinguished early nineteenth-century scientist, Samuel G. Morton: “The benevolent mind may regret the inaptitude of the Indian for civilization,” but the fact of the matter was that the “structure of [the Indian’s] mind appears to be different from that of the white man, nor can the two harmonize in the social relations except on the most limited scale.”138 “Thenceforth,” added Francis Parkman, the most honored American historian of his time, the natives—whom he described as “man, wolf, and devil all in one”—“were destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward unchecked and unopposed.” The Indian, he wrote, was in fact responsible for his own destruction, for he “will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together.”139
But by this time it was not just the native peoples of America who were being identified as the inevitable and proper victims of genocidal providence and progress. In Australia, whose aboriginal population had been in steep decline (from mass murder and disease) ever since the arrival of the white man, it commonly was being said in scientific and scholarly publications, that
to the Aryan . . . apparently belong the destinies of the future. The races whose institutions and inventions are despotism, fetishism, and cannibalism—the races who rest content in . . . placid sensuality and unprogressive decrepitude, can hardly hope to contend permanently in the great struggle for existence with the noblest division of the human species. . . . The survival of the fittest means that might—wisely used—is right. And thus we invoke and remorselessly fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the inferior Australian.140
Meanwhile, by the 1860s, with only a remnant of America’s indigenous people still alive, in Hawai‘i the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those islands’ native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as a tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian people was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to “the amputation of diseased members of the body.”141 Two decades later, in New Zealand, whose native Maori people also had suffered a huge population collapse from introduced disease and warfare with invading British armies, one A.K. Newman spoke for many whites in that country when he observed that “taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.”142
Returning to America, the famed Harvard physician and social commentator Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in 1855 that Indians were nothing more than a “half-filled outline of humanity” whose “extermination” was the necessary “solution of the problem of his relation to the white race.” Describing native peoples as “a sketch in red crayons of a rudimental manhood,” he added that it was only natural for the white man to “hate” the Indian and to “hunt him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God’s own image.”143
Two decades later, on the occasion of the nation’s 1876 centennial celebration, the country’s leading literary intellectual took time out in an essay expressing his “thrill of patriotic pride” flatly to advocate “the extermination of the red savages of the plains.” Wrote William Dean Howells to the influential readers of the Atlantic Monthly:
The red man, as he appears in effigy and in photograph in this collection [at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition], is a hideous demon, whose malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence. In blaming our Indian agents for malfeasance in office, perhaps we do not sufficiently account for the demoralizing influence of merely beholding those false and pitiless savage faces; moldy flour and corrupt beef must seem altogether too good for them.144
Not to be outdone by the most eminent historians, scientists, and cultural critics of the previous generation, several decades later still, America’s leading psychologist and educator, G. Stanley Hall, imperiously surveyed the human wreckage that Western exploration and colonization had created across the globe, and wrote:
Never, perhaps, were lower races being extirpated as weeds in the human garden, both by conscious and organic processes, so rapidly as to-day. In many minds this is inevitable and not without justification. Pity and sympathy, says Nietzsche, are now a disease, and we are summoned to rise above morals and clear the world’s stage for the survival of those who are fittest because strongest. . . . The world will soon be overcrowded, and we must begin to take selective agencies into our own hands. Primitive races are either hopelessly decadent and moribund, or at best have demonstrated their inability to domesticate or civilize themselves.145
And not to be outdone by the exalted likes of Morton, Parkman, Holmes, Howells, Adams, or Hall, the man who became America’s first truly twentieth century President, Theodore Roosevelt, added his opinion that the extermination of the American Indians and the expropriation of their lands “was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable. Such conquests,” he continued, “are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with the weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.” It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this beloved American hero and Nobel Peace Prize recipient (who once happily remarked that “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth”) also believed that “degenerates” as well as “criminals . . . and feeble-minded persons [should] be forbidden to leave offspring behind them,” The better classes of white Americans were being overwhelmed, he feared, by “the unrestricted breeding” of inferior racial stocks, the “utterly shiftless,” and the “worthless.”146
These were sentiments, applied to others, that the world would hear much of during the 1930s and 1940s. (Indeed, one well-known scholar of the history of race and racism, Pierre L. van den Berghe, places Roosevelt within an unholy triumvirate of the modern world’s leading racist statesmen; the other two, according to van den Berghe, are Adolf Hitler and Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s original architect of apartheid.)147 For the “extirpation” of the “lower races” that Hall and Roosevelt were celebrating drew its justification from the same updated version of the Great Chain of Being that eventually inspired Nazi pseudoscience. Nothing could be more evident than the fundamental agreement of both these men (and countless others who preceded them) with the central moral principle underlying that pseudoscience, as expressed by the man who has been called Germany’s “major prophet of political biology,” Ernst Haeckel, when he wrote that the “lower races”—Sepúlveda’s “homunculi” with few “vestiges of humanity”; Mather’s “ravenous howling wolves”; Holmes’s “half-filled outline of humanity”; Howells’s “hideous demons”; Hall’s “weeds in the human garden”; Roosevelt’s “weaker and wholly alien races”—were so fundamentally different from the “civilized Europeans [that] we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.”148 Nor could anything be clearer, as Robert Jay Lifton has pointed out in his exhaustive study of the psychology of genocide, than that such thinking was nothing less than the “harsh, apocalyptic, deadly rationality” that drove forward the perverse holy war of the Nazi extermination campaign.149
The first Europeans to visit the continents of North and South America and the islands of the Caribbean, like the Nazis in Europe after them, produced many volumes of grandiloquently racist apologia for the genocidal holocaust they carried out. Not only were the “lower races” they encountered in the New World dark and sinful, carnal and exotic, proud, inhuman, un-Christian inhabitants of the nether territories of
humanity—contact with whom, by civilized people, threatened morally fatal contamination—but God, as always, was on the Christians’ side. And God’s desire, which became the Christians’ marching orders, was that such dangerous beasts and brutes must be annihilated.
Elie Wiesel is right: the road to Auschwitz was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the road’s pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America.
EPILOGUE
It is unlikely to have escaped notice that this book is being published to coincide with the Columbian Quincentennial—the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide that nearly expunged the Western Hemisphere of its people. It is, however, less probable that many readers will know that 1992 also is the 50th anniversary of the Nazis’ conversion of Auschwitz from a prisoner of war and concentration camp into a chamber of unspeakable horrors, designed to exterminate systematically as many as possible of Europe’s Jews, Gypsies, and other Nazi-characterized “useless lives.”
As we have seen, one of the preconditions for the Spanish and Anglo-American genocides against the native peoples of the Americas was a public definition of the natives as inherently and permanently—that is, as racially—inferior beings. To the conquering Spanish, the Indians more specifically were defined as natural slaves, as subhuman beasts of burden, because that fit the use to which the Spanish wished to put them, and because such a definition was explicable by appeal to ancient Christian and European truths—through Aquinas and on back to Aristotle. Since the colonizing British, and subsequently the Americans, had little use for Indian servitude, but only wanted Indian land, they appealed to other Christian and European sources of wisdom to justify their genocide: the Indians were Satan’s helpers, they were lascivious and murderous wild men of the forest, they were bears, they were wolves, they were vermin. Allegedly having shown themselves to be beyond conversion to Christian or to civil life—and with little British or American need for them as slaves—in this case, straightforward mass killing of the Indians was deemed the only thing to do.
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