For much of the postwar period, the West and the need for candidates to appear as coming from outside the halls of power converged with conservative politics. Conservatives had been on the outside of national power since FDR’s New Deal. But meanwhile, conservative “businessman’s governments” held sway over state and local politics in the West. Their agendas were heavily laden with economic restructuring, big capital projects promoting irrigation, freeway construction, airports, urban renewal, convention centers, and sports and office complexes. The full force of taxpayer financing was put behind the continued growth of urban empires. Private property was sacred, and true to old western traditions, no one had the right to tell developers where or how they could build on their own property. In the mid-1960s this conservative tradition ran headlong into a rising clamor of social protest. Women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians were demanding their civil rights. Students were marching in the streets and demanding an end to the war in Vietnam. More perplexing was the outcry over the “alienated” life of the suburbs—the gross materialism, the excessive competition, and the loss of community.
No one exploited these tensions better than Ronald Reagan—a former movie actor who starred in a number of Hollywood westerns and loved nothing better than riding horses and chopping wood on his ranch in the southern California foothills. Immigrating to Hollywood from the Midwest in 1937 at the age of twenty-six, he enjoyed modest success as a leading man but discovered his real talent when he became the leader of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s. Reagan turned to the right during the era of communist hunting and blacklisting, and when his movie career began to sour he went to work as a spokesman for the General Electric Company and added a probusiness, anti–big government perspective to his anticommunism. He burst onto the national political scene in 1964 in a televised speech endorsing Republican right-winger Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Two years later he ran for governor in a campaign featuring promises to “cut and squeeze and trim” state government, attacks on ungrateful demonstrators, and endorsements of the California “way of life.” Reagan’s rhetorical skills and personal charm combined to win the election. As governor, however, his attacks on state programs were selective. Although he cut funds for mental health care, higher education, and social welfare (“a cancer eating at our vitals”), he lobbied vigorously for federal defense dollars and supported federally subsidized water for agribusiness.12
Rising property taxes precipitated a taxpayer revolt in California in 1978 that quickly swept the nation. Although Reagan had done little to cut taxes during his two terms as governor, he used that movement successfully to ride into the White House in 1981 after defeating the weary and beleaguered incumbent Jimmy Carter. He sponsored massive tax cuts while simultaneously pumping up military spending. The deficit spending produced an economic spurt but also the biggest deficits in the nation’s history. During his two terms better than 50 percent of federal military dollars went to defense contractors in the West, many of them in California.
Reagan’s popularity was due in large part to the economic good times that prevailed during most of his tenure. But his advisers were masters of the use of western imagery. An excellent horseman, Reagan had been accustomed to dressing in jodhpurs and riding boots but was told that it wouldn’t wash, that he had to act the part of the cowboy. Costumed and frequently photographed in Stetson, Levi’s, and Justins, Reagan inherited Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle of “cowboy president,” a distinction he wore with pride. In his most soaring rhetoric, he called on the frontier myth. “I have always believed that this land was placed here between two great oceans by some divine plan,” he offered in the first debate of the 1980 presidential campaign. “It was placed here to be found by a special kind of people—people who had a special love of freedom and who had the courage to uproot themselves and leave hearth and homeland and come to what in the beginning was the most undeveloped wilderness possible. We came from 100 different corners of the earth. We spoke a multitude of tongues—landed on this eastern shore and then went out over the mountains and prairies and the deserts and the far Western mountains of the Pacific building cities and towns and farms and schools and churches.”
Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan didn’t compose odes to the frontier himself. His speech writers put the words before him on a teleprompter. Yet Reagan knew a good part when he saw it, and he played the son of the frontier with gusto, especially in the closing lines of his second inaugural address in 1984: “History is a ribbon, always unfurling; history is a journey. And as we continue on our journey we think of those who have traveled before us. . . . The men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound; it is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic—daring, decent and fair. That’s our heritage, that’s our song. We sing it still. For all our problems, our differences, we are together as of old.”13
Ronald Reagan, 1976. National Archives.
. . .
“Together as of old.” Reagan’s speech writers attempted a final twist by ending with these words. They bent the frontier story of pushing west, taking land, and building communities into an inclusive process. In the past, they suggest, Americans came together through colonization. Missing were the people being colonized, a truth as inconvenient in 1984 as it was when Frederick Jackson Turner launched his frontier hypothesis in 1893. At the beginning of the twentieth century the assumption had been that Indians and their cultures would vanish, but during the post–World War II period they ranked as one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the country. The population of American Indians and Native Alaskans rose from about 350,000 in 1950 to nearly 3 million in 2010. What explains such growth? Individuals self-identify their race and ethnicity on the census questionnaire. “There’s been a clear trend,” says demographer Jeffrey Passel, “for increasing numbers of those people to answer the race question as American Indian.” Not only has the number of Indians grown, but several million Americans who otherwise consider themselves “white” or “African American” claim descent from at least one Indian ancestor—as President Bill Clinton did when he remarked in 1997 that one of his grandmothers was a quarter Cherokee. The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma receives several hundred queries each month concerning enrollment. “We have a lot of people who show up here who may be Indian,” the tribal registrar reports, “but they can’t prove it.” (Neither, it turned out, could President Clinton.)14
Applicants must demonstrate lineal descent from persons on the 1907 Cherokee allotment rolls, something few can do. Some may be grifters angling for tribal benefits, but mostly the numbers reflect the long practice of Euro-Americans who adopted Indian costumes and identities to enhance their “American-ness.” Wearing a headdress and enlisting in a fictional tribe—like the protesters at the Boston Tea Party—were ways Europeans in North America declared their independence from their homelands. By the 1990s the civil rights movements that emphasized the “power” and “pride” of racial and ethnic minorities further enhanced the cachet of Indian people. “It’s the Dances with Wolves syndrome,” says Rutgers University demographer Ross Baker. “It has sort of become neat to be an Indian.” By claiming Indian ancestry, whites drew on an impressive history of survival and improvisation. Like Reagan’s speech writers, they dipped into the frontier past to rewrite “our” past. Both the shared pioneer and Indian good old days could be equally fanciful, but in their revisions and mythmaking Americans reached to the margins to conceive of their place in their nation and its history.15
Actually living on the American margins was far more brutal than romantic. Native Americans fought daily to improve their lot in a country that repeatedly tried to turn them into mascots or make them disappear. During World War II, 25,000 Indians served in the armed services, including several hundred who acted as “code talkers,” using their native language as a means of secret communication ove
r the air waves. Another 125,000 native people worked in war industry. Pointing to this patriotic record, at war’s end the National Council of American Indians—a group including leaders from many of the nation’s 554 tribes—argued that the time had come for the country to make a fair reckoning with Indians for stolen lands and broken treaties. Congress responded positively, creating the Indian Claims Commission and empowering it to investigate tribal claims and award monetary compensation. By the time the commission finished its work more than thirty years later, it had heard and considered nearly four hundred cases and awarded more than eight hundred million dollars in damages (much of which remained in the hands of lawyers). There was, however, an important catch to these proceedings. The settlement claims, declared Commissioner of Indian Affairs Dillon S. Myer (the federal official who had supervised Japanese internment), would be “the means of removing a major Indian objection” for the termination of official relations with the federal government. That would mean the end of all remaining treaty obligations. The limited sovereignty guaranteed to tribes by the Indian New Deal would be revoked. This program, which became known as Termination, was made official by act of Congress in 1953 and became the primary goal of Indian policy during the Eisenhower administration.
Marine “code talkers” Preston (left) and Frank Toledo transmit messages in the Pacific theater, 1943. Marine Corps Archives and Special Collections.
INDIAN RESERVATIONS
Tribal chairman George Gillette weeps as Secretary of Interior J. A. Krug purchases 155,000 acres of the Mandan-Arikara-Hidatsa reservation in North Dakota for use as a Missouri River reservoir. Photograph by William Chaplis, 1948. Associated Press/World Wide Photos.
Termination worked in an insidious manner. Consider the example of the Menominee tribe of northern Wisconsin. During the nineteenth century the Menominees ceded millions of acres in exchange for a protected reservation, tribal exemption from state interference and taxation, and the continuing right to hunt and fish in their traditional territory. In the early twentieth century the tribe resisted allotment, retaining collective ownership of 230,000 acres of prime timberland, on which they ran a lumber operation that provided jobs and modest incomes for reservation residents. After the war the tribe filed a suit with the Claims Commission charging federal mismanagement of their trust fund, and in the early 1950s the Menominees won an award of $7.6 million, to be split evenly among tribal members. Then came the kicker: Congress appropriated the funds but made payment conditional on the Menominees’ agreement to termination. Tribal leaders opposed the settlement, arguing that maintaining sovereignty was more valuable, but a majority of members—most of whom lived off reservation—voted to accept the checks. The results were disastrous. The Menominee nation was abolished, replaced by a tribal corporation. Tribal lands became subject to state taxes, forcing the corporation to sell land and raise revenue. Lumber production fell and workers lost their jobs. Reservation schools and clinics closed. Hunting and fishing rights disappeared. Termination struck at the three foundations of reservation people—sovereignty, land, and culture.
Although termination obliterated only a few tribes, its threat hung over them all. “Fear of termination has poisoned every aspect of Indian affairs,” a federal study of the early 1960s concluded. Fear and anger led to a broad movement of pan-Indian activism. In 1961 the National Council of American Indians passed a “Declaration of Indian Purpose,” calling on the federal government to end termination and begin a new era of “Indian Self-Determination.” The declaration was endorsed by President Kennedy, then in turn by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. By that time western state officials had lost their enthusiasm for termination, concluding that the program would result in higher burdens for state-funded welfare programs. Johnson declared an official end to the policy in 1968, and in 1975 Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act. This measure strengthened tribal governments by giving them the opportunity and the funds to administer their own programs to promote education, welfare, the administration of natural resources, and the improvement of reservation infrastructure.16
Termination, meanwhile, accelerated the migration of young Indians to the cities. Indian reservations in the postwar period were some of the most depressed places in America, with a well-established litany of problems from unemployment to alcoholism, a situation that termination did nothing to improve. Like other rural westerners, Indians increasingly looked to western urban enclaves for employment. During the second half of the century the proportion of the American Indian population living in cities rose from 13 to 60 percent. Large Indian communities developed in all major metropolitan areas of the West, the biggest in southern California, which in the 1990s was home to at least a hundred thousand Indians from more than a hundred different tribes. Many Indians maintained their tribal identity by frequent visits to extended family and friends on the reservation, but at least a third claimed no tribal affiliation. A new pan-Indian identity grew. As early as the 1920s Indians in Los Angeles were organizing “Powwow Societies” that sponsored informal get-togethers and ceremonial dancing in an eclectic mix of tribal styles. “I knew I lost a lot when I left the reservation,” Joe Whitecloud, a leader of L.A.’s “powwow people,” told an interviewer. Powwows, he believed, enabled urban Indians “to pass on our traditions to the kids coming up.” Their exchange proved more important than the actual age of traditions, many of which were recent inventions.17
The best-known pan-Indian activist organization of the postwar period, the American Indian Movement (AIM), developed in the urban community of Minneapolis. In the words of Dennis Banks, a Chippewa who became the group’s most articulate leader, AIM was “a coalition of Indian people willing to fight for Indians.” The group patrolled streets to check police brutality, which captured the imaginations of young urban Indians (as well as considerable attention from the press) much as the Black Panthers inspired young urban blacks. In 1969 AIM organizers joined local Indian activists in occupying San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island. “We, the native Americans,” the occupiers announced, “reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery.” They employed the language of tribal sovereignty, but this protest was rooted in cities, not reservations. AIM with its “Red Power” slogan was thrilling, and Indian activism spread throughout the urban Indian communities of the West.18
Russell Means and other occupiers of Wounded Knee. Photograph by Richard Erdoes, 1973. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
An important recruit was Russell Means, an Oglala Sioux born on the Pine Ridge Reservation but raised in the San Francisco Bay area. Means proved himself a genius at confrontational politics. In one of his first AIM actions, Means led a group who for three days in 1972 occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. The next year he was instrumental in getting AIM involved in the internal politics of the Oglala reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the most impoverished place in the United States. Frustrated by a conservative tribal government, AIM activists and a group of reservation supporters armed themselves with rifles and shotguns and occupied a church at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, vowing not to leave until the tribal chairman resigned. It was a brilliant bid for national media attention at the site many Americans had recently learned about from historian Dee Brown’s best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). Besieged by FBI agents and federal marshals armed with automatic weapons, tanks, and helicopters, many Americans saw the incident as a replay of the nineteenth-century Indian wars—although this time opinion polls suggested that the majority sympathized with the Indians, not the cavalry. It was a public relations disaster for the government. After seventy-one days the occupiers finally surrendered with federal promises of negotiations. But afterward the FBI hounded AIM to extinction, and many tribal Indians considered the occupation a political disaster.
More effective change came through the struggles o
f tribal governments to regain lost lands or treaty rights. One of the most publicized efforts was the struggle of the Taos Indians to regain control of Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Seized by the federal government and incorporated within a national forest reserve in 1906, the crystal lake not only fed the stream that flowed through Taos Pueblo and gave it life but was one of the people’s most sacred places. After nearly a decade of petitions, protests, and bad publicity for the federal government, President Nixon finally returned forty-eight thousand acres, including Blue Lake, to the control of the Taos tribe in 1970. In the Pacific Northwest, meanwhile, Indians staged “fish-ins” to assert their right to fish despite state game laws. In 1974 they won a major victory when a federal judge vindicated their treaty rights to hunt and fish in “the usual and accustomed” places. Using the law, other tribes won an impressive series of Supreme Court cases that reaffirmed limited tribal sovereignty and exemption from state taxes. “What’s happening is that tribal governments are becoming a permanent part of the fabric of American federalism,” said John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund. “You have a federal government, state governments, and tribal governments—three sovereigns in one country.”19
Some tribes used their sovereignty to stimulate economic development on the reservations. At Laguna Pueblo, for example, the tribe created Laguna Industries, a tax-exempt entity that gave it an advantage contracting work with the country’s major defense industries. During the 1980s and 1990s tribal and Indian-owned businesses grew by a rate nearly five times the national average. Western Indian tribes control a vast resource base: 30 percent of the coal deposits west of the Mississippi, 50 to 60 percent of the country’s uranium, 5 percent of the proven oil and gas reserves, fifteen million acres of timber and watershed, and extensive fish and wildlife habitat. The problem is getting development capital. “We just need to develop more,” declared Laguna planner Nathan Tsosie. “People leave the reservation to get jobs. If there were jobs here, they’d stay.”20
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