Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Mason’s creation became a significant force in American cultural life, in large part through its inspiration for new forms of popular music. COGIC meetings resounded with spirited expression and powerfully hypnotic music employing repetitive chanted phrases. The origins of American popular music in the twentieth century come in significant part from the joyful noise in Holiness and Pentecostal churches, where a blue note and a back beat got married to a gospel message and melody. That was a dynamic combination of race and religion, which transformed American culture.

  SHERMAN COOLIDGE AND THE PROGRESSIVE INDIAN

  Idealists and abolitionists who had led the fight against slavery and in support of black rights after the Civil War increasingly turned their attention to “the Indian” (a term always singularized in that way, much as was done with “the Negro”) in the 1880s and 1890s. Native peoples, now clearly subjugated and colonized in the American republic, faced two alternatives: assimilation or extermination. Or so went the dominant thought of many Protestant leaders in the decades after the Civil War. Forming groups such as the “Friends of the Indian,” they created Indian boarding schools, intending to teach a younger generation the arts of civilization. They also persuaded Congress to pass the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up communal property on Indian reservations, allotted plots of land to Indian families for purposes of farming, and sold off or leased the remainder of the land, the proceeds going to fund those same Indian boarding schools. Protestant and Catholic organizations divided up Indian tribes for purposes of mission work, and those with the best reputations for dealing fairly with Indians in the past, the Quakers, took charge of the national missionizing endeavor.

  The result mocked the idealism which had motivated Protestant philanthropists. African Americans found ways to turn Christianity into a force for liberation, regardless of the motives of the white Christianizers. For native peoples, however, the idealistic motives of many of the Christianizing groups turned out to have disastrous consequences. The 1890s probably represented the nadir of Native American life and population for all of American history since colonization. The ghost dance episode at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, resulting in the massacre of more than two hundred Lakotas at the hands of U.S. Army personnel baffled and frightened by Indian religious ritual, stands as the low point of white-Indian relations in the post–Civil War era.

  Native Americans were kept within the bounds of their habitations, usually on reservations. The results were unsatisfactory for those who believed they should be assimilated into the dominant society. For Native Americans in the post–Civil War era, religious resistance appeared increasingly futile, but controversies over religious assimilation tore apart many communities. The Bureau of Indian Affairs repressed native religious practices in Indian boarding schools. There children were punished for “talking Indian,” appealing to “medicine men,” or otherwise practicing parts of their cultural heritage. Images of the white Jesus, and literally clothing Indian children with the garments and “look” (especially in haircuts) of white civilization, pervaded the behavior norms at the schools. According to novelist Rupert Costo, “When the Christians took the Indian children off to boarding schools, the minister used to lead the children into the chapel and point up to the picture of Jesus, with long flowing hair, and tell the Indian children that they were going to learn how to be just like that man, Jesus. After this statement, the minister would send all the Indian boys off to get their hair cut short.”

  Government officials also repressed adult Indian religious ceremonies and practices still deemed heathenish. Thus, regulations in the 1920s attempted to delegitimize or stamp out native dances held at Indian Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona. In 1921, Circular 1665 directed agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to discourage or prohibit all types of native ceremonies, particularly including religious ones. While social dancing was certainly acceptable, Commissioner Charles Burke said, immoral or heathenish dances were to be condemned:

  The sun-dance and other similar dances and so-called religious ceremonies are considered “Indian Offences” under existing regulations, and corrective penalties are provided. I regard such restriction as applicable to any dance which involves acts of self-torture, immoral relations between the sexes, the sacrificially destruction of clothing or other useful articles, the reckless giving away of property, the use of injurious drugs or intoxicants and frequent [and] or prolong periods of celebration which bring the Indians together from remote points to the neglect of their crops, livestock, and home interests; in fact any disorderly or plainly excessive performances that promotes superstitious cruelty, licentiousness, idleness, danger to health, and shiftless indifference to family welfare. . . .

  During the Progressive Era, a variety of Indian voices tried to clear a path toward Indian respectability and citizenship. They created organizations such as the Society for the American Indian; published books that defended Indian rights; proclaimed their Christianity and urged Indians to leave behind cultural ways no longer appropriate in a modernizing America; and fully aligned themselves with the values of progressive reformers. One of these progressive Native reformers, Etes-che-wa-ah, or “Runs on Top,” took the Anglo name Sherman Coolidge and became an exemplar of what many hoped for in terms of Indian life in the Progressive Era. Born in the Northern Arapaho tribe in the early 1860s, he became an Episcopalian minister in the early twentieth century and leader of the Society of American Indians and the Indian Rights Association. Not as well known now as the author Charles Alexander Eastman, author of The Soul of the Indian and numerous other works, Coolidge was central to Progressive-Era debates about race, religion, and Indianness. He came to represent a category that, for many, did not exist —an educated and prosperous Native who could interact equally with Christian middle-class leaders of his day.

  As a boy, Coolidge’s father died in a violent conflict with a rival tribe. A United States Army officer named Charles Austin Coolidge adopted him. As a young man, Coolidge attended an Episcopalian seminary in Minnesota and became an Episcopal Priest in 1885. Later, he took a college degree at Hobart College in New York and subsequently moved to the Shoshone Indian Agency and Episcopal mission at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. In 1902, after a courtship of five years, he married Grace Darling Wetherbee, the daughter of a wealthy New Yorker who had come to Wyoming for Indian mission work. Coolidge remained in Wyoming for twenty-six years, pastoring a church at the Shoshone agency and overseeing chapels that ministered to Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation. He also taught at the Wind River Boarding School and took a number of other jobs at the agency. In 1910, he moved to Oklahoma, where he worked in an Episcopal mission among the Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho for three years. He became a founding member of the Society of American Indians. In 1919, he moved to Colorado and pastored the Church of the Good Shepherd in Colorado Springs as well as another congregation in Denver.

  Coolidge criticized representations of Native violence in popular culture, charging Buffalo Bill in particular with exploiting Indians and reinforcing “the fear with which all Indians are regarded by children.” More importantly, the work of the society took on centuries of perception and distortions of Indian life. At best, members could expect to make only a little headway in counteracting those. He added, “Such pictures of the pioneer days grossly misrepresent the Indian race. Indians are naturally a peace loving people instead of the cruel savages usually shown in pictures. The red man never killed for the joy of killing. The pioneers they regarded as invaders and the Indian fought to protect his home and family.”

  Rev. Sherman Coolidge (1862–1932)

  Source: Photo: BAE GN 00010B 06077500, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

  Beyond internal conflicts within the organization, there were issues difficult for anyone to manage. Coolidge was an advocate for assimilation, the breakup of reservations, and educating Indians into Anglo-American ways of life and culture. “Don’t let our people neglect t
heir opportunities; let them realize that they must compete in life’s race, and in the conditions of our American civilization,” Coolidge argued, embracing a Darwinian concept of race struggle. He sought to use the Society for American Indians toward the “revitalizing and cherishing of race pride,” and to encourage pan-Indian cooperation toward addressing the needs of Indian people.

  Regardless of his efforts to promote civilization, and to present himself as the representative Indian man for the new age, Coolidge remained, like all Indians, a curiosity, someone to be observed. And Coolidge’s emphasis on progressive citizenship faced the reality that whether Indians could be citizens remained questionable, at best. In the Indian Reorganization Act (sometimes called the Indian New Deal) of 1934, John Collier and other Indian reformers reversed these practices of the last two generations. The Indian New Deal terminated the “allotment” scheme of the Dawes Act and allowed for Indian religious and cultural practices. Here, religion and race were still connected, but in a way that could be valorized rather than condemned. A coming generation of Indian rights activists built upon that foundation, leading to the American Indian Movement and movements for cultural revival a generation later.

  THE LATINO SOUTHWEST

  After 1848, with the incorporation of huge parts of the Southwest into American territory, including the territory of New Mexico, Protestants saw new home mission territory populated by those who practiced forms of Christianity threatening to the Protestant majority. With Catholic and Jewish immigration dramatically increasing and the incorporation of large portions of Catholic country into the United States, the Protestant future of the country appeared to be under threat. Works such as Josiah Strong’s Our Country made it clear that Catholicism was a threat to the “fundamental principles and institutions” of the country.

  New Mexico could be made a test case. As a writer for the Rocky Mountain Presbyterian explained, New Mexicans were American citizens “and yet unassimilated, foreign, and in some measure hostile to the genius of our American institutions.” What was required was an “early and persistent introduction of the leaven of Protestantism,” especially through public education. Protestants, especially Presbyterians, responded, sponsoring a sizable home missionary effort, including a number of women who made careers out of missions work. They became involved in early efforts to create a social welfare state. Presbyterian schoolteachers explained the dilemmas faced by Latinos trying to decide whether to send their children to public or Protestant mission schools, which were spreading throughout the region: “It must needs take the spirit of a martyr to deny the established religion, the forms and ceremonies of which have been for generations a part of the customs of the people.” It required much courage, another wrote, “for these people to stand up against all the manners and customs of the church in which they were born and bred, and in the face of all their relatives declare themselves Christians.” The most successful of the teachers became part of the community. They looked to be leaders, teachers, and arbitrators of social conflicts that came up in local communities.

  In the twentieth century, church leaders looked increasingly with suspicion on national parishes, fearing they represented too much segregation and reliance on ethnic enclaves. Ironically, it was during the era of segregation in American life that the segregated “national parish” in Catholic life fell out of favor. “It is the wish of the Holy Father that national churches as far as possible be dispensed with in the United States,” wrote the chancellor of the diocese of Los Angeles. Many, including Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago, felt that national parishes simply fed anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment, because it allowed Catholic immigrants to remain apart from American life and thus vulnerable to attacks from Protestant nativists. Moreover, immigrant children often deserted the church because they saw the national parishes as stuck in an old-world past.

  In 1939, Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, New York’s archbishop, banned the creation of national parishes, insisting that “integration” should be the desideratum of the Catholic ministry, and that the desertion of home national parishes by the second- and third-generation immigrant children left the church saddled with decaying and emptying church structures. In its stead, the Catholic Church would strive for universality, detached from national traditions and ethnic loyalties. In portions of Texas, New Mexico, and California, however, the sheer preponderance of Mexican American populations created de facto segregated parishes. The church continued to work toward integrated parishes. As one Mexican Catholic official explained it, “We are American Catholics. The Church is one. We must certainly bring the Latin American Catholics to church by means of devotions in Spanish and by contact with priests in their own language, but our aim must ever be to assimilate and incorporate them into parish life.” Meanwhile, Mexican American Catholics in San Jose petitioned for a national parish, insisting that they wanted “a church of their own, where they can worship God according to their devotions and customs . . . have easy access to confession in their own language at any time, understand the sermons at Sunday mass, receive the sacrament of matrimony from a priest of their own race, who understands their psychology and customs, and finally where they can feel at ease in a Church of their own, without fear of humiliation due to racial discrimination which unfortunately still exists, even among Catholics.” Without national parishes, Mexican American Catholics remained in “missionary status” and had little opportunity to develop their own church leadership. The result, not surprisingly, was friction and tension within parishes that serviced largely Mexican American Catholic populations with Euro-American priests. The historic anticlericalism particularly of Mexican men was only reinforced in such a setting.

  In Los Angeles, the Mexican population grew from less than 1,000 in 1900 to nearly 100,000 in Los Angeles proper by 1930, with another 100,000 scattered through Los Angeles county. Nonetheless, despite the population increase, the relative power of Latino Catholicism was in rapid decline. An increasingly segregated Latino population congregated in barrios. Catholic priests intent on Americanizing the church and replacing homegrown rituals of Californio days with standard Catholic rites fought with a population who sought to protect the unique blend of customs that made up Latino Catholicism. Frontera Catholicism was heavy with rituals not requiring the presence of clergy, which was often an uncertainty in frontier-era California. For example, the practice of compadrazgo involved assigning godparents for children to assist in raising the child and adopt him or her in the event of a parent’s death. Such communal ties, which could easily incorporate Anglo settlers or other outsiders, bound together community members and remained strong well after the U.S. conquest of California.

  In 1936, Mexican Catholics in Los Angeles began publishing The Guadalupan Voice: Journal of Mexican Culture. Guadalupe increasingly became a transnational symbol, her meanings being transported from Mexico to East Los Angeles and back again. The first issue came out at the same time as the establishment of a Guadalupe center, and the paper advertised and promoted Guadalupe pilgrimages. Pilgrimage groups came from Mexico to visit Los Angeles. All this came at a time when official religious devotion remained relatively low. A study conducted in Los Angeles in the 1950s showed that parishioners in East Los Angeles attended Mass irregularly, if at all, with the parish clubs and societies mostly kept up by a “few old faithfuls.” As one priest told an interviewer, “The old families will light candles before their Guadalupe statue at home, but you’ll never see them at Mass on Sunday.”

  In the World War II era, the Americanization of the church, always incomplete, met up with the continuing streams of immigrants who refreshed Mexican Catholicism. Archbishop Robert Emmet Lucey led a major transition toward connecting Latino Catholics with issues of social justice. As a young priest, Lucey took an active interest in working-class issues, encouraging unions and publicizing the principles favorable to organized labor from Rerum Novarum and other official statements of Catholic doctrine. Named archbishop of San A
ntonio in 1941, he put his energies into pursuing justice for ordinary Mexican Americans. For example, he called a conference for clergy emphasizing issues of social justice that was, as one participant said, “as far to the left as the thinking of the San Antonio Archdiocese had heretofore been to the right.” He was especially enthusiastic about his project the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, whose role it was to spread Catholic doctrine among parishioners who might not have access to Catholic education. He also chaired the Bishop’s Committee for the Spanish Speaking, one of the first efforts of the Church to recognize and respond to the special needs of Latino members. Despite criticisms from other bishops, he used the committee to draw attention to the plight of braceros. Lucey and Raymond McGowan of the National Catholic Welfare Conference pressed tirelessly for the needs of Hispano Catholics. In one pastoral letter draft, which other bishops refused to sign, they explained that “the greatest root of the trouble is that the first English-speaking people came here as conquerors and have tried ever since to rule as oppressors . . . instead of as brothers of the Spanish speaking in the development of a civilization that will bring both groups together. Yet the conquering attitude still prevails. . . . Hardly anywhere in the United States is greater or more systematic injustice done to and suffered by the Spanish speaking of our dioceses. . . . The injustice done them is a disgrace.” Lucey pressed the church to minister to the Latino community in ways that would respond directly to their needs. Lucey paved the way for the activism generated from the Cesar Chavez generation, a topic covered in the next chapter.