American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  153. Quoted in James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), p. 63.

  154. Englebert, Last of the Conquistadors, p. 49; see also Fray Francisco Palóu, Life and Apostolic Labors of the Venerable Father Junípero Serra (Pasadena: G.W. James, 1913).

  155. Palóu, Historical Memoirs, Volume One, pp. 86–87.

  156. For details on these matters, see my earlier-cited “Disease and Infertility: A New Look at the Demographic Collapse of Native Populations in the Wake of Western Contact,” Journal of American Studies, 24 (1990), 325–50.

  157. Quoted in Ed. D. Castillo, “The Native Response to the Colonization of Alta California,” in Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, Volume One, p. 380.

  158. Quoted in Cook, Indian versus the Spanish Mission, p. 82.

  159. Rawls, Indians of California, p. 38; the previously cited observation on severity of punishment is from J.M. Amador, “Memoria,” manuscript in Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, quoted in Cook, Indian versus the Spanish Mission, p. 127.

  160. Quoted in Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, pp. 74–75.

  161. Rawls, Indians of California, pp. 96–97; Robert F. Heizer, ed., They Were Only Diggers: A Collection of Articles from California Newspapers, 1851–1866, on Indian and White Relations (Ramona, Calif.: Ballena Press, 1974), p. 1.

  162. Heizer, They Were Only Diggers, p. 1.

  163. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, p. 145.

  164. Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of California Indians: A Collection of Documents from the Period 1847 to 1865 in Which Are Described Some of the Things that Happened to Some of the Indians of California (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1974), p. 279.

  165. Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), pp. 84–85.

  166. The estimate of the number of Indians indentured under the laws of 1850 and 1860 comes from Heizer, ed., Destruction of California Indians, p. 219.

  167. Quoted in Rawls, Indians of California, p. 93.

  168. Quoted in Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, pp. 134–36.

  169. Rawls, Indians of California, pp. 190–201.

  170. Quoted in Rawls, Indians of California, pp. 132–33.

  171. Quoted in John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 348.

  Chapter Five

  1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 180.

  2. Terrence Des Pres, “Introduction” to Jean-Francois Steiner, Treblinka (New York: New American Library, 1979), p. xi.

  3. Ibid.

  4. See Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), passim.

  5. See Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1986).

  6. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. chapter 16.

  7. For summaries of these and other genocides, along with recent bibliographical references, see Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

  8. For estimates of the numbers of Romani, commonly referred to as Gypsy, people killed in the Holocaust, see the discussion in Ian Hancock, “‘Uniqueness’ of the Victims: Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust,” Without Prejudice, 1 (1988), 55–56. There were, of course, many other victims of Nazi mass murder—homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the congenitally malformed, pacifists, communists, and others—who are not mentioned here. For an examination of the fate of these other groups, see Michael Berenbaum, A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990).

  9. The number of people forcibly exported from Africa remains a subject of intense historical controversy, but recent estimates suggest that up to 12,000,000 or even 15,000,000 captured Africans survived the ordeal of forced migration to become plantation laborers in North or South America or the Caribbean. About 50 percent of the original captives appear to have died during the forced march to the West African coast and in the holding pens there known as barracoons, while approximately 10 percent of the survivors died on board the trans-Atlantic slave ships, leaving about 45 percent of the original total to be “seasoned,” sold, and set to work. However, the “seasoning” process itself appears to have killed half of those who survived the ocean journey, leaving between 20 and 25 percent of the originally captured total to actually labor as chattel; thus, for every African who survived to become a working slave, between three and four conventionally died during the enslavement process. With a total of 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 Africans surviving to become slaves, this makes for an overall death rate directly attributable to enslavement—and prior to the Africans’ beginning to labor as New World bondsmen and bondswomen—of anywhere from 36,000,000 to 60,000,000. As with most estimates of genocidal mortality, these are very general estimates arrived at by extrapolation from situations where reasonably good historical data are available to situations where they are not. Thus, for example, some estimates calculate a lower death toll than the above during the within-Africa forced march and coastal imprisonment, while others suggest that death rates aboard ship conventionally were 15 to 20 and even more than 30 percent—that is, up to three times as high as is assumed above. On this, see, for example, Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 275–82; Robert Stein, “Mortality in the Eighteenth Century French Slave Trade,” Journal of African History, 21 (1980), 35–41; Raymond L. Cohn, “Discussion: Mortality in the French Slave Trade,” Journal of African History, 23 (1982), 225–26; and David Northrup, “African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade: The Case of the Bight of Biafra,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9 (1978), 47–64. For discussion of the overall volume of the slave trade, compare Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 268, Table 77; J.E. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,” Journal of African History, 17 (1976), 197–223; J.E. Inikori, “The Origin of the Diaspora: The Slave Trade from Africa,” Tarikh, 5 (1978), 1–19; the same author’s comments in J.E. Inikori, ed., Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Trade on African Societies (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1982), pp. 19–21; and Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,” Journal of African History, 23 (1982), 473–501. Conventional thought regarding the number of deaths caused by the African slave trade posits a number lower than that suggested here because it is based solely upon deaths occurring at sea between the points of embarkation from West Africa and docking in the Americas—thus ignoring the enormous number of deaths that occurred prior to the slave ships’ departures and during the “seasoning” periods. If these on-land deaths are included in the overall mortality figure—as they must be to arrive at a true measure of the horrific impact of the slave trade on African peoples—even the lowest estimates of slave imports, Philip D. Curtin’s and Paul E. Lovejoy’s 10,000,000 or so, produce an overall mortality figure of between 30,000,000 and 40,000,000. On mortality rates during all phases of the enslavement process, drawing largely on Brazilian slave import data, see Joseph C. Miller, “Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11 (1981), 385–423, esp. 413–14.

  10. Irving Louis Horowitz, “Genocide and the Reconstruction of Social Theory: Observations on the Exclusivity of Collective Death,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 62. Wiesenthal’s letter is quoted in part in Hancock, “‘Uniqueness’ of the Victims,” 55.


  11. A recent example of pertinence to the present discussion is an article on the Pequot War by Steven T. Katz, Professor of Near Eastern Studies (Judaica) at Cornell University and author of several studies on the history of the Holocaust. Professor Katz apparently became annoyed when he discovered that some historians had described the almost total extermination of the Pequot people as “genocide” and so he took time out from work in his own field to set them straight. Beginning with a rejection of conventional definitions of genocide—including that of the United Nations—and offering a substitute of his own, Professor Katz concludes his essay by observing that some Pequots survived the English colonists’ efforts to annihilate them as a people, adding: “As recently as the 1960s, Pequots were still listed as a separate group residing in Connecticut. . . . [W]hile the British could certainly have been less thorough, less severe, less deadly in prosecuting their campaign against the Pequots, the campaign they actually did carry out, for all its vehemence, was not, either in intent or execution, genocidal.” In other words, because the British did not kill all the Pequots they did not commit a genocide. This is not the place for a detailed critique of Professor Katz’s flimsy thesis, but one can only wonder (actually, one need not wonder) at what his response might be to a Professor of Native American Studies taking the trouble to write an essay claiming that the Holocaust was not an act of genocide (“although the [Nazis] could certainly have been less thorough, less severe, less deadly in prosecuting their campaign against the [Jews]”) because, after all, some Jews survived—a number of whom even live in Connecticut today. See Steven T. Katz, “The Pequot War Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly, 64 (1991), 206–24, quoted words on p. 223.

  12. Michael Berenbaum, “The Uniqueness and Universality of the Holocaust,” in Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims, p. 34. Increasingly, scholarship on genocide has recognized the necessity for comparative analysis, while acknowledging the unique particulars of individual cases. For some recent examples, in addition to A Mosaic of Victims, see the following: Israel Charny, ed., Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984); Leo Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Wallimann and Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age; and Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide.

  13. Noam Chomsky, “Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences,” in James Peck, ed., The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 315.

  14. Irving Abrahamson, ed., Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985), Volume One, p. 33; for Wiesel on the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust, see Volume Three, p. 314.

  15. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History, Expanded Edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), p. 98.

  16. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1976), p. 702. See also, Richard Rubenstein, “Afterword: Genocide and Civilization,” in Wallimann and Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age, p. 288.

  17. Giulia Sissa, “Maidenhood Without Maidenhead: The Female Body in Ancient Greece,” in David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 346.

  18. William Guthrie, ed. and trans., Cicero de Officiis; or, His Treatise Concerning the Moral Duties of Mankind (London: Lackington, Hughes, 1820), pp. 70–71.

  19. Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 99, 145. Jacques le Goff is quoted in Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 441.

  20. Jo Ann McNamara, “Chaste Marriage and Clerical Celibacy,” in Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage, eds., Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1982), pp. 22–33. See also, P.J. Payer, “Early Medieval Regulations Concerning Marital Sexual Relations,” Journal of Medieval History, 7 (1980), 370–71; and Jean-Louis Flandrin, “La vie sexuelle des gens mariés dans l’ancienne société,” Communications: Sexualités Occidentals, 35 (1982), pp. 102–105. I am grateful to the late Philippe Ariès for sending me a copy of this last reference.

  21. See Peter Brown, “Person and Group in Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 266–67.

  22. Quoted in Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, translated by Felicia Pheasant (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 170.

  23. Ibid., p. 150.

  24. Ibid., pp. 151–52.

  25. Quoted in Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 75.

  26. Rousselle, Porneia, p. 154–56.

  27. Excerpted in Roland Bainton, Early Christianity (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1960), p. 153.

  28. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 180.

  29. See Cyril C. Richardson, ed., Early Christian Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), pp. 74–120; and Saint Augustine, The City of God, translated by Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), pp. 22–32.

  30. Quoted in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries, translated by Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 14. In a different context I have treated the contemptus mundi tradition and its theological precursors in an earlier work: The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 19–27.

  31. Quoted in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, p. 15.

  32. Ibid, p. 17.

  33. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 127.

  34. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 209–10.

  35. Ibid, pp. 214–15, 221.

  36. loan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, translated by Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 209–11; Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, translated by Felicitas Goodman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 52–55.

  37. John Bromyard, Summa Predecantium, quoted in T.S.R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment and Remembrance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), pp. 44–45.

  38. Quoted in Philippe Braunstein, “Toward Intimacy: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in Georges Duby, ed., A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 603–606.

  39. The best study of this subject focuses on France: Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages, translated by Jean Birrell (New York: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  40. J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 229.

  41. See Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 25–45.

  42. Duerr, Dreamtime, p. 55.

  43. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, pp. 212–14. See also Couliano’s recent literature review, “A Corpus for the Body,” Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991), 61–80.

  44. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 214; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 94–95. On the relationship between sexuality and witchcraft in the Malleus and the Tratado, see Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil
in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), pp. 155–59.

  45. Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 101–102.

  46. Quoted in Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p. 151.

  47. Agostino Carracci did, it must be noted, also produce much more graphically sexual work that some might think borders on the pornographic. It was, however, suppressed—although even in this work he made an effort to connect with the mythical past: almost all Carracci’s happily coupling couples in these latter works are named Jupiter, Juno, Hercules, Deianira, and the like. For a discussion, see David O. Frantz, Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 118–39.

  48. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), pp. 3–16.

  49. Kurt von Fritz, “The Influence of Ideas on Ancient Greek Historiography,” in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), Volume II, pp. 499–511.

  50. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 178.

  51. A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 3.

  52. Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Walter Shewring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 48.