American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  116. R.C. [Robert Cushman?], “Reasons and Considerations Touching Upon the Lawfulness of Removing Out of England into the Parts of America,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Second Series, 9 (1832), 69–70.

  117. John Winthrop, “Reasons to be Considered, and Objections with Answers,” reprinted in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., The Founding of Massachusetts: Historians and the Sources (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 175. Regarding the apocalyptic beliefs of these early settlers, the leading minister and religious thinker among the first Massachusetts colonists was John Cotton, who delivered a series of highly influential sermons during the 1630s and 1640s that not only announced the imminent coming of the end of the world but even pinpointed the date—1655. See John Cotton, An Exposition Upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (London, 1655), first distributed in 1639 or 1640. For discussion, see Everett H. Emerson, John Cotton (New York: Twayne, 1965), pp. 95–101; Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 170–202; and, more generally, J.F. Maclear, “New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium in Early American Puritanism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 32 (1975), 223–60.

  118. Winthrop, “Reasons to be Considered,” pp. 177–78.

  119. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643), quoted in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), p. 60.

  120. Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, translated by Herma Briffault (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 41. By 1720 the combined white populations of the various British colonies was approximately 400,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures reprinted in The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965), p. 756, Series Z 1–19. As noted earlier (Chapter Three, note 127), the comparable figure after more than a century of Spanish settlement in the New World was probably about 200,000, although it may have been less than that in view of the heavy return traffic; one study, for example, contends that an average of about 6000 Spaniards per decade left the New World and returned to Spain between 1550 and 1650. [Theopolis Fair, “The Indiano During the Spanish Golden Age from 1550 to 1650” (Doctoral dissertation, Temple University, 1972), p. 75.] Moreover, unlike the British colonists, most of the Spanish migration to the Americas for more than a century was overwhelmingly young, single, male, and impoverished. Magnus Mörner has demonstrated that the Spanish migrants were 95 percent male through 1540, while Peter Boyd-Bowman has shown that even after a century of migration, two of three Spanish settlers were male. Indeed, here is Boyd-Bowman’s “composite picture” of the “typical . . . Spanish emigrant” near the start of the seventeenth century: “a poverty-stricken Andalusian male aged 27, unmarried, unskilled, and probably only semi-literate, driven by hunger to make his way to Peru in the employ of any man who would pay his passage and had secured the necessary permit.” [See Magnus Mörner, “Spanish Migration to the New World Prior to 1810: A Report on the State of Research,” in Chiappelli, Allen, and Benson, eds., First Images of America, Volume Two, p. 744; and Peter Boyd-Bowman, “Spanish Emigrants to the Indies, 1595–98: A Profile,” in ibid., pp. 729, 732.] Letters home from these men—both conquistadors and ostensible settlers—show that they shared a common goal: as James Lockhart puts it, “practically all [Spanish] settlers originally intended to return [home], and . . . the maximum ambition for all, regardless of how often it could be realized, was a seigneurial existence in Spain.” [James Lockhart, “Letters and People to Spain,” in ibid., pp. 795–96, note 28.] One example of the success rate for those desiring to return, which may or may not have been typical, shows that of the men who followed Pizarro to Peru—approximately 80 percent of whom have been accounted for—fully half are known to have returned to Spain to live out their lives. [James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press for the Institute of Latin American Studies, 1972), p. 47, Table 12.] In contrast, not only were a much greater proportion of the seventeenth-century English colonists females and married males, but servants tended to remain in the colonies following the completion of their indentures, and even English servants in Barbados, when they achieved their freedom, tended to head for Virginia or other North American colonies rather than return to England. [See Morgan, American Slavery—American Freedom, pp. 298–99.] It is true that some of the earliest Massachusetts Bay colonists planned at some time to return to England, but that hope ended for most within a decade or two with the outbreak in England of civil war. [For discussion, see William L. Sachse, The Colonial American in Britain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956).]

  121. See Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 16–33; another version of this analysis is the same author’s essay, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 79–98.

  122. Quoted in David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 228–30; see also, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), pp. 62–63.

  123. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Modern Library, 1967), pp. 270–71; Canup, Out of the Wilderness, pp. 21, 30.

  124. Cotton Mather, Magnolia Christi Americana, ed. Kenneth B. Murdock (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 129; second passage quoted in Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 262.

  125. Canup, Out of the Wilderness, p. 77.

  126. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, p. 89.

  127. There is a good deal of literature on this, but see especially the following: Neal E. Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 31 (1974), 27–54; James P. Ronda, “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 34 (1977), 65–82; Gary B. Nash, “Perspectives on the History of Seventeenth-Century Missionary Activity in Colonial America,” Terrae Incognitae, 11 (1979), 19–27; and Zuckerman, “Identity in British America,” esp. pp. 147–48.

  128. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 141.

  129. Ibid., pp. 141–43.

  130. From Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), p. 13.

  131. Quoted in Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 103. It is not incidental to Jefferson’s willingness to exterminate Indians that at about this same time he was devising a plan to ship the nation’s African Americans back to Africa. When this turned out to be excessively expensive, he proposed taking black infants away from their parents (each black baby he calculated to be worth $22.50) and shipping them back, leaving the adult African American population to die out “naturally.” On the matter of the morality of forcibly removing an entire race of children from their parents (itself an act of genocide, so the United Nations later would decide), Jefferson acknowledged that it “would produce some scruples of humanity. But this would be straining at a gnat, and swallowing a camel.” See, ibid., pp. 44–45.

  132. See Chapter Four, notes 89 and 90.

  133. Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), pp. 170–7
1. While the use of smallpox-infected blankets as a method for exterminating Indians was not as widespread (or as effective) as is popularly believed, it was an occasional practice, and as such it marked “a milestone of sorts” in military history, writes Robert O’Connell: “While infected carcasses had long been catapulted into besieged cities, this seems to be the first time a known weakness in the immunity structure of an adversary population was deliberately exploited with a weapons response.” O’Connell, Of Arms and Men, p. 171. For an eighteenth-century example of the deliberate use of smallpox as a weapon “to extirpate [the] exorable race” of Indians—an example that killed large numbers of Delaware, Mingo, and Shawnee people—see E. Wagner Stearn and Allen E. Stearn, The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian (Boston: Humphries, 1945), pp. 44–45.

  134. Cotton Mather, Souldiers Counselled and Comforted (Boston, 1689), p. 28; Rev. Solomon Stoddard to Gov. George Dudley (22 October 1703) in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 24 (1870), 269–70.

  135. Some of the cultural byways of these conflicting impulses are discussed in Lawrence J. Friedman, Inventors of the Promised Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975).

  136. Quoted in Christopher Lasch, “The Anti-Imperialists, the Philippines, and the Inequality of Man,” in Lasch’s The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics, and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 78. See also Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 307–32.

  137. J.D.F. Smith, A Tour of the United States of America (London, 1784), Volume One, pp. 345–46.

  138. Samuel G. Morton, Crania Americana, or a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia: John Pennington, 1839), pp. 81–82.

  139. Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), Volume One, pp. ix, 48.

  140. Frederick Farrar and H.K. Rusden, quoted in Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, and Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation, and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Company, 1975), pp.14, 81–82.

  141. Rev. Rufus Anderson, D.D., The Hawaiian Islands: Their Progress and Condition Under Missionary Labors (Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1864), p. 276.

  142. Quoted in James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986), p. 299.

  143. Quoted in Gossett, Race, p. 243.

  144. William Dean Howells, “A Sennight of the Centennial,” Atlantic Monthly, 38 (July, 1876), p. 103.

  145. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, Volume Two (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), p. 651.

  146. Quoted in Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pp. 78, 86, 159–64.

  147. Ibid., p. xiii.

  148. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (New York: Elsevier, 1971), pp. 150, 39–40.

  149. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 431, 441–42.

  Epilogue

  1. Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” in Franklin Sherman, ed., Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), Volume 47, pp. 265–92.

  2. Ibid., p. 306. Emphasis added.

  3. On Marr, see Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  4. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 171.

  5. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 172.

  6. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), p. 108.

  7. For discussion of this in Hitler’s thinking and in Nazism in general, see Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 481–85.

  8. Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1926), p. 25. The toll in Soviet military casualties from Operation Barbarossa is reported in Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, and John Pritchard, Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World War, Revised Second Edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p. 204.

  9. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, eds., The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Volume Two, p. 16. Hitler’s contempt for humanity is well known and widely discussed, but see, for example, Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Revised Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 398–99.

  10. Albert J. Guerard, “Introduction” to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer (New York: New American Library, 1950), pp. 7–8.

  11. The quoted words are from Chinua Achebe’s brilliant essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1989), pp. 14–15; and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 141.

  12. Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” pp. 11, 19. In Gone Primitive, pp. 270–71, Torgovnick discusses the outrage that erupted in some literary circles following the original 1977 publication of Achebe’s essay; Torgovnick herself (pp. 141–58) focuses on the female element in Conrad’s racist vision of African primitivism.

  13. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 105–106.

  14. Chinua Achebe, “Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South,” in Hopes and Impediments, p. 23.

  15. Quoted in John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 64. The quotations in the preceding paragraph are from ibid., pp. 108, 335.

  16. Ibid., pp. 64–65.

  17. Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 96.

  18. Quoted in Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 448–49.

  19. Ibid., pp. 369, 449; Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), pp. 367–68.

  20. Further excerpts—much more violent and obscene than this—were published in Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” The Nation (13 February 1989), p. 187, but even Hitchens could not reprint certain verses.

  21. New York Times (28 March 1991), p. A18, columns 3 and 4.

  22. The estimates of the number of children killed as a direct result of the war, and the prediction of numbers slated to die in the months ahead, come from a ten-member Harvard University medical team that visited Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the war. See New York Times (22 May 1991), p. A16, columns 1 and 2. See also the report of a United Nations Secretary-General investigation in London’s Guardian Weekly (4 August 1991), p. 9, columns 1 through 5. Reflections on the U.S. war against Iraq are just beginning to appear at this writing, but one of the first books to be published that is deserving of attention is Thomas C. Fox, Iraq: Military Victory, Moral Defeat (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1991).

  23. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History, Expanded Edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), pp. 365, 462.

  24. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 1987), p. 20.

  25. There is an overview of these and other practices in Rex Weyler, Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement (New York: Random House, 1982), esp. pp. 218–26. The best sources for up to date reports on such matters are the South and Meso American Indian Information Center in Oakland, Californi
a, which publishes a newsletter and other documents, and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, home-based in Copenhagen, which publishes a newsletter and a Document Series on violence and genocide against native peoples. To date, there are several score book-length reports in the IWGIA Document Series.

  26. Until the recent passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, year in and year out between a quarter and a third of all American Indian children were removed by government authorites from their families and placed in foster homes, adoptive homes, or institutions—80 to 90 percent of which were headed and run by non-Indian persons. Article II, Section (e) of the Genocide convention defines as genocide “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” On the problem of the forced break-up of Indian families (published prior to the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act), see Steven Unger, ed., The Destruction of American Indian Families (New York: Association on American Indian Affairs, 1979).

  27. Leo Kuper, “The United States Ratifies the Genocide Convention,” Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, 19 (February, 1989), reprinted in Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) pp. 422–25.

  28. For detailed discussion and analysis of the American government’s ongoing refusal to join the rest of the world’s nations in their unconditional condemnation of genocide, see Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

  29. New York Times International (21 May 1991), p. A5, columns 1–6.

  30. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 37–86.

  31. U.S. Department of Commerce-Bureau of the Census, We, the First Americans (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), pp. 12–13; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Indian Health Service Chart Series Book (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), pp. 43 (Table 4.20), 47 (Table 4.24). It must be noted that even these shocking suicide and health statistics greatly understate the desperate reality of life on many Indian reservations, for there are direct correlations between such so-called quality of life indices and the degree of cultural integrity individual Indian peoples have been able to maintain. Thus, for example, among the different Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, those who have suffered the most erosion of traditional values through forced acculturation into American life have two to three (and in one case almost forty) times the overall suicide rate of those who have been able to hold on to more of their customary lifeways. See N. Van Winkle and P. May, “Native American Suicide in New Mexico, 1957–1979: A Comparative Study,” Human Organization, 45 (1986), 296–309; and Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Suicide and Ethnicity in the United States (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1989), p. 6.