Cover Photo: University of Chicago Library Staff, ca. 1895. From left: Josephine C. Robertson (head cataloguer); Clarence Almon Torrey (inspector of departmental libraries); Cora Belle Perrine (head of accession department); Minnie Jones (loan desk assistant); Charlotte Florence Coe (accession assistant); and Zella Allen Dixson (associate librarian). The photograph was a gift of Mrs. George M. Krall. Credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-05489], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Table of Contents p. 3
Letter from the Editor-in-Chief Hansong Li
p. 4
Letter from a Historian: History and Truth in the Age of Trump Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago
p. 5
Bio-History in the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Study on the Past and Present of Human Life Kyle Harper, University of Oklahoma; Lynn K. Nyhart, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Joanna Radin, Yale University; Julia A. Thomas, University of Notre Dame; Russell H. Tuttle, University of Chicago; Jonathan Lyon (moderator), University of Chicago
p. 20
Humanity and the Great Seas: Conversation with David Abulafia David Abulafia, University of Cambridge
p. 30
‘Seiknes Incurabill’: The Evolution of Literary Representations of Leprosy in Medieval and Early Modern English Narratives Alexandra Houston, Princeton University
p. 42
From Guslars to Garašanin: Comparing the Influence of Oral Folk Literature on Croatian and Serbian National Movements from 1830 to 1865 Anna M. Walker, Princeton University
p. 53
Savage Sagebrush and Christian Orchards: Reassessing Wilderness and Civilization on the Harriman Alaska Expedition Anna Davis, Johns Hopkins University
p. 69
Lift the Red, Stay in the Black: The Public and Private Economies of Race Ideas at the Carlisle Indian School, 1879-1904 Isaac Stein, University of Chicago
p. 90
Drinking the Sea Water: Franklin Roosevelt, Polish-Americans, Yalta, and the Downfall of a Civic Elite Matthew Schweitzer, University of Chicago
p. 111
Legitimizing National Identity through ‘Transnational Existences’: Post-war Kosovo and its Relationship with the European Union, 1998-2008 Mirela Kadric, University of Sydney
p. 119
Ideas in Context: Conversation with Quentin Skinner Quentin Skinner, Queen Mary University of London
Editor-in-Chief Hansong Li Senior Editors Chloe Hadavas Alexander Jarman Sarah Manhardt Michelle Shang Miki Takeshita Junior Editors Elazar Chertow Colin Garon Emelia Lehmann Darren Wan Sophia Weaver Designer Annie Cantara
Specialist Reviewer Kyuhyun Jo, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Chicago
Specialist Advisor Nancy Spiegel, Bibliographer for History, Art and Cinema at the University of Chicago Library Faculty Advisors Leora Auslander, Professor of European Social History, in the College, and Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization Dain Borges, Associate Professor of History and the College Jane Dailey, Associate Professor of American History, the Law School, and the College Jan Goldstein, Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College
Dear Readers, As the year of 2016 draws to a close, it is our great pleasure to present this issue of the Chicago Journal of History in expression of our gratitude for your readership and contribution. As editors, we regard the journal as not only a publication but also a collaborative intellectual enterprise, and it is our hope that it will continue to serve as a forum for the exchange of ideas, a platform for interdisciplinary dialogues, and a showcase for outstanding undergraduate research in the coming years. The Autumn 2016 issue features eclectic, rigorous and innovative research articles authored by Anna Davis (Johns Hopkins University), Alexandra Houston (Princeton University), Mirela Kadric (University of Sydney), Matthew Schweitzer (University of Chicago), Isaac Stein (University of Chicago) and Anna M. Walker (Princeton University). Some authors, such as Houston and Walker, engage with literary sources to answer historical questions. Houston, for example, traces the representations of leprosy in medieval and early modern literature. Walker, on the other hand, examines literature’s role in nationalist movements in the Balkans. Stein and Schweitzer both provide engaging lenses into marginalized racial and ethnic groups in the United States: Native Americans and Polish immigrants. Davis’ probing analysis of documents from the Harriman Alaska Expedition offers remarkable insights to our understanding of this period of environmental history. And finally, Kadric’s study brings us back to the controversial and complex question on the relationship between national identity and transnational politics. These articles address a wide array of historical topics, all of which arise from fundamental cultural, social and political concerns that are still relevant to this day. In fact, that this present issue of the Chicago Journal of History is, in the words of Lucien Febvre, the “daughter of its own time,” is apparent in its preface, “History and Truth in the Age of Trump,” authored by economic historian, Jonathan Levy. In this short essay, Professor Levy reflects on the status of the noble dream of objectivity in historical inquiry, and encourages undergraduate students to one day use the craft of history to contribute to the betterment of our shared human life. Indeed, convinced that historical research has a role to play in connecting the ethos and bios of human societies, we invited five distinguished scholars to our October symposium: “Bio-History in the Anthropocene.” We express our most sincere gratitude to Professors Kyle Harper (University of Oklahoma), Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Joanna Radin (Yale University), Julia A. Thomas (University of Notre Dame) and Russell H. Tuttle (University of Chicago) for their deep thoughts on the challenges and opportunities of our present historical moment and geological age, insights on how humanities, social and natural scientists could inform each other across disciplinary boundaries, and their encouragement for us to be not only students of history and biology but also human beings and citizens, in pursuit of a better understanding of the past and present of our own civilizations. In this issue, we have published the full transcript of this event, with the hope that those who were not present at this lively discussion may also benefit from the intellectual experience of discoursing with the panelists via the medium of the written text. The organization of this conference was not an easy task. For this reason, we would like to thank, first of all, Professor Jonathan Lyon for his critical role as the moderator of the panel. Our most trusted collaborator, Phoenix Biology, has made every effort to make this event a success. We are indebted to the University of Chicago Student Government for its generous support, and we owe thanks to Janie G. Lardner, for much help and assistance from the Department of Comparative Human Development. We are moved especially by Professor Jocelyn Malamy, Master of the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, as well as Kila Roberts and Marcia Gilliland-Roberts, for their enthusiasm and endorsement. At last, I would like to personally thank all of our editors for their creative and committed efforts throughout the past months. Emelia Lehman, Colin Garon and Chloe Hadavas have punctiliously edited the panel transcript, first prepared by Alexander Jarman, Elazar Chertow, Darren Wan and Sophia Weaver. Michelle Shang deserves credit for the advertisement of this event. In addition to the six aforementioned research articles, you will find in this issue two captivating interviews with prominent historians and intellectuals of our day. In “Humanity and the Great Seas,” David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge and a renowned maritime historian, reflects on his past scholarship in social, economic and political histories of the seas—the Mediterranean and the Atlantic—and offers an equally perceptive account of the current developments in the Pacific and elsewhere around the world. He then introduces us to his current project on oceanic history. Finally, as one of the founders of “Historians for Britain,” Professor Abulafia shares with us his insights on the relationship between Britain and the European Union near the end of the conversation. The other interview features one of the most influential intellectual historians of our day, Quentin Skinner. As a founder of the “Cambridge School” of political thought and intellectual history, Professor Skinner presents here a history of his own intellectual journey. In this interview entitled “Ideas in Context,” he clarifies some of the most important concepts associated with his academic approach, and responds to many critics of his methodology. Indeed, this article shows that there is as much speech as there is act in intellectual history. It should also be noted that both Professor Abulafia and Professor Skinner have offered some advice to undergraduate students, and we thank them wholeheartedly for their guidance and counsel. The Chicago Journal of History editors invite you to explore this issue and to join us in our future events. We are also more than happy to send you a copy of any particular issue by mail. We appreciate your feedback, be it afterthought or criticism, and we look forward to presenting to you an even more enjoyable issue in spring 2017. Sincerely, Hansong Li 3
Letter from A Historian
History and Truth in the Age of Trump Jonathan Levy When I was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the mid-2000s, I had the pleasure of helping a retiring professor, Peter Novick, pack up his office. A grand office it was—old, spacious, perched at the top of Harper Library, with a stunning view of the Quads and the Chicago skyline. I think that for me the grandeur of that view encapsulated the grandeur and dignity of the professional guild I then aspired to join. If I had shared that lofty sentiment with Peter, he would have made fun of me, mercilessly. Novick was an irascible contrarian. His best-known book was That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. In it, Novick told the history of the idea that historians should strive to objectively know the truth about the past. That was what history, in the end, was all about. Basically, while Novick admired much historical scholarship that resulted from chasing “that noble dream,” he concluded that the idea of objectivity was incoherent, if not naïve. He once told me, as I packed away endless shelves of history books, that one of the highlights of his professional career was when after presenting a chapter of what became That Noble Dream, two giants of twentieth-century American intellectual life—the philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn, and the philosopher Richard Rorty—approached him to say how much they enjoyed his attack on objectivity. Rorty, at the time—this was during the 1990s, I think—was famous (infamous) for calling for a temporary ban on the word “truth” in philosophical discussion. He thought the question of truth was distracting intellectuals from what really mattered—not chasing down some truth that was out there in the objective ether, independent of us, but rather searching for human possibilities in a shared democratic society. These are possibilities perhaps not yet glimpsed, let alone realized, so they cannot be out there yet for us to recognize as objectively true. My friend Peter Novick, a great historian, died in 2012. And I wish he were alive, for many reasons, but especially because I’d like to ask him what he thinks about the status of “that noble dream” today, given the contemporary political landscape. It is a landscape in which the public sphere has fractured, like so many hammers on a sheet of glass, and where individuals and groups retreat to their partial societies, their partial truths, their personal Facebook news feeds. As historians, are we today not at risk of becoming yet another partial society? Today, do we not need to reassert the facticity of truth, independent of political prejudice or advantage? Has democratic politics not swayed us too far from what might be for all of us a shared anchor of objectivity? Can history not be a useful corrective to these worrisome trends? I think the answers to these questions are: Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. But, with Peter, I still don’t believe that objectivity should be the primary, animating aim of historical scholarship. As historians, we know things about the world that non-historians do not know. About the surprising scope and varied qualities of human experiences, about how and why polities, societies, economies, communities and cultures evolve and transform. We know these things, our truths, not because the past is “out there” waiting to be discovered by us and objectively rendered to those outside our partial society. We know them because of the shared discipline of our practice. Because we read carefully and listen to our sources. Because we use our good judgment, born of our fidelity to those sources, in constructing honest narratives about change and continuity across time and space, which challenge and confirm our common humanity. We know things. When many historians of Novick’s generation lost their faith in objectivity, they kept on writing history, of no lesser quality, following the same practical rules of generations before—the same rules we still follow today. But I do think that many had their confidence sapped, that they stopped communicating what they knew, and why it was important, to a broader public, outside the partial society of professional historians. Not Peter Novick—he went on to write a great book, for a wide audience, The Holocaust in American Life. Before he died, he told me he had an idea for another book, which would try to explain why, every so often, a book by a historian caught the public’s imagination and made a difference in the wider culture. The working thesis was that such books caught on not because they achieved that noble dream, but because they used the craft of history to make people think about the present and the future differently. They opened up possibilities for better living. My bet is that someday a current undergraduate history major will write a book like that. Jonathan Levy is the Professor of History, Fundamentals: Issues and Texts and the College at the University of Chicago. After studying history at Yale and the University of Chicago, he taught at Princeton before joining the University of Chicago’s history faculty. Professor Levy’s wide-ranging research interests include 19th and 20th century U.S. economic history, global and comparative history, as well as legal and intellectual history. A dedicated mentor and acclaimed lecturer, he has taught classes on the history of capitalism, the rise of modern corporation and the popular Social Sciences Core Curriculum “Power, Identity and Resistance.” Author of the prize-winning Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012), Professor Levy is currently working on his next book, Ages of American Capitalism, a narration and interpretation of American economic life from colonial times to the most recent recession. 4
Bio-History in the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Study on the Past and Present of Human Life Kyle Harper, University of Oklahoma; Lynn K. Nyhart, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Joanna Radin, Yale University; Julia A. Thomas, University of Notre Dame; Russell H. Tuttle, University of Chicago; Jonathan Lyon (moderator), University of Chicago Bio-History in the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Study on the Past and Present of Human Life1 Panelists: Kyle Harper (University of Oklahoma) is a Professor of Classics and Letters. He studies social, economic and ecological history of the antiquity and the Middle Ages. He is the author of Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (2011) and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality (2013). He is also the founding director of the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the Vilas-Bablitch-Kelch Distinguished Achievement Professor in the History of Science. Professor Nyhart is known for her work in the history of biology: natural history and evolution, anatomy and physiology, ecology and marine science, as well as relations between elite and popular science. She is the author of Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (2009) and served as the president of the History of Science Society. Joanna Radin (Yale University) is an Assistant Professor of History and History of Science and Medicine. She is a historian of science whose interests and expertise encompass the history of biology, medicine, anthropology, biomedical technology and global health. Her research examines the social and technical conditions of possibility for the systems of biomedicine and biotechnology that we live with today. Julia A. Thomas (University of Notre Dame) is an Associate Professor of History who specializes in environmental and Japanese history. Professor Thomas investigates the concepts of nature in Japanese political ideology, the impact of the climate crisis on historiography, and photography as a political practice. She is the author of the award-winning Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (2001), and the essay “Photography, National Identity, and the ‘Cataract of Times:’ Wartime Images and the Case of Japan.” 1
5
The featured panel, “Bio-History in the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Past and Present of Human Life” was held at the University of Chicago on Oct. 13th, 2016. The event is organized by the Chicago Journal of History editorial board, and is co-sponsored by the Chicago Journal of History, the Student Government, Phoenix Biology, the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, and the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.
Russell H. Tuttle (University of Chicago) is an active Professor of Anthropology, Evolutionary Biology, History of Science and Medicine and the College at the University of Chicago. Professor Tuttle is one of the leading figures in the field of evolutionary biology, and is known for his pioneering discoveries, extensive field work, and countless undergraduates and graduates he has mentored in the past fifty years. He served as the Editor-inChief of the International Journal of Primatology and the book series Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects. Moderator: Jonathan Lyon (University of Chicago) is an Associate Professor of Medieval History and the College. He studies medieval European political and social history and the history of the family. He is the author of Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100–1250 (2013). Jonathan Lyon: Welcome to “Bio-History in the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Past and Present of Human Life.” Our speakers will have five to ten minutes to briefly address two broad questions: How has your research crossed the boundary of disciplines, such as biology, history, and anthropology, to gain new insights on the past? And what do you consider to be the greatest challenge and opportunity that modern biological sciences present to social scientists, and how could social inquiry in turn inform and influence the development of natural science? Julia A. Thomas: Thank you. Today I would like to talk about history and biology. I spend a great deal of time wondering what it is that historians do. And as I begin to think about this question, I look back at a man named Jean Bodin, who wrote a book informing us that we could do history very easily: Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, which sounds great to me. And when you read this very interesting book published in 1555, he says that of history—that is, true narration—there are three types: natural, human, and divine. And natural history he calls inevitable, human history he calls probable, and divine history he calls holy. So, I’m going to set aside the holy here, and look at this notion that there is natural history versus probable human history, and where those lines of thoughts have gone. And I think they have guided us for many centuries. Now, perhaps this guidance is leading us astray. Because I think for a long time historians really took this idea to heart. What we did was to separate from nature. We were interested in tracing the story of liberty, which is what Benedetto Croce
calls history. History is the story of liberty, so we didn’t want to have deterministic processes. We were interested in the idea of probability, which left open the room for free will and judgment. And that’s what made history a political practice, and that’s why we did history. And whatever the scientists did, since I wasn’t a historian of science and I didn’t have any idea really, they did it at the other end of the campus. And that was safe, and nice, and we’ve been trundling along in this way for a long, long time. But of course, things have changed. Now we are discovering that we can no longer separate nature and humanities in this neat way. And that in fact, our species is transforming the planet in extraordinary ways, that is now producing an age that the geostratigraphers are beginning to refer to as the “Anthropocene.” Indeed, on August 29, in Cape Town, they just voted to move forward with making that new geological age a formal proposition, to bring the evidence before their various voting boards. Do all of you know that term, the “Anthropocene”? Obviously, what this term suggests is that the human species is now transforming the natural processes on this planet to the extent that it is no longer as it once was. It is as hot now as it was 115,000 years ago. That is a very long time. We have also transformed the planetary system regarding nitrogen and phosphorous, not just the climate-changing gases like carbon and methane. And I won’t through that whole litany. But what this suggests is that humanity and nature are coming together. And this has got historians very excited. We are beginning to think about things like neuro-history, which is what Dan Smail talked about when he was here at the University of Chicago—he’s also talked about it at other places. Ian Morris has announced that history is a subset of biology, which is a subset of chemistry, which is a subset of physics. Edward Wilson has said that we could have consilience, so that history and nature come together. And in fact, the title of this panel today is “Bio-History”, as though those could be brought together. And I’m not so sure about that. I have real questions about whether it is possible to describe reality in all its many facets in one way, which incorporates all the many forms of understanding we have developed over the centuries. And let me tell you what I do to explore this question. I decided to look at three kinds of biology, and ask what sort of human being they produce, and then look at the kind of human being that emerges through historical practice. I first looked at paleobiology. So, I was looking at the great span of human existence, and it turns out that lots of people have done this, and that we can be seen as a species operating across the face of the planet. Some paleoclimatologists are beginning to say things like: yes, indeed human beings are changing the planet, they’re warming it up, and we’ve in fact delayed the next ice age, which was previously scheduled for 50,000 years from now. And this is a great thing, because now the next ice age won’t come until 133,000 years from now. This actually means that climate
change and warming are a good thing, because human beings will probably be able to survive much warmer climates much better than they would another ice age. And of course, it all depends on how you define “survive,” or “just fine,” or what it means to be human. But we’re getting that kind of image of human being out of paleoclimatology and paleobiology, and that’s really interesting to me. What would it mean to be thinking of ourselves as species operating over hundreds of thousands of years? What does that mean for who we are and what our values are? I also looked at two other forms of biology. One of those was about the microbiome, which of course we’re all reading a lot about these days. And it suggests that, if not ninety percent of our cells, then close to sixty percent of our cells, are not human cells but those of various bacteria. So, in fact we are not single organisms, or single species, but multi-species organisms. That’s a very interesting way of thinking of the human. But that suggests then that we are not a single species but many species operating together, and the question becomes one of human solidarity. Because although all my human cells and your human cells are quite alike, our microbiomes may be quite different. So, are we really the same species? —which says all kinds of awkward things for human solidarity. I also looked at toxicology, and the kinds of chemicals in the human body that are making us now not just biological but also chemical in various alarming ways. It used to be that we were able to separate out chemicals from ourselves, and those of us that were poisoned by chemicals often suffered a great deal, but there was a sense of the rest of us being ok. It turns out now that since the Second World War, we have had more than 60,000 new chemicals developed, and the FDA has only tested 200 to 300 of those, and not in combination. So, we have no idea what this toxic soup we swim in is doing to us, although the American Chamber of Commerce tells us that this is actually just fine, and that we can survive this as well. So, what I’m suggesting here is that biology doesn’t give us just one form of humanity that historians should then look at, but biologies give us many forms of humanity that are quite different from what we in history have thought of as the human. The question, then, to get to the second part of this talk, is how we go forward and focus on human history as we have been doing, and still do it in a way that is attentive to the actions that are central, it seems to me, to the historical practice? These are questions of evaluation and articulation—of what it is that matters in human life, not just what is in human life. It thus seems to me that as we join hands with biologists to try to describe the human being in ways that are more embodied than previous generations of historians could give, we are dealing with incommensurate views of the human. So, what I’m trying to do now in my work is to figure out how we might think of ourselves as embodied, and as a species, 6
and still be true to the political calling and history as a story of liberty. Joanna Radin: Thank you Julia, and thank you for the organizers for inviting me. It really is genuinely exciting to be here, especially because of what had not been able to be in my biography until this week: I have completed a book on this subject, and it will be out this March from the University of Chicago Press. The book is called Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood, which grows out of research that I’ve been doing for some time on archives made not of manuscripts, but of human bodies. So, in the way that Julia asked the question of liberty, I’d like to talk about justice and have that be the anchoring point in what I want to say. In thinking about how to prepare my comments, what I think might be easiest to do, through tracking my disciplinary commitments, is to do it a little bit biographically, or from a perspective of craft ask: how does one come to a history of biology that has a freezer at its core? This research journey began when I worked in public health, where I started out before I became a historian—I was working for the CDC, Centers for HIV, STDs, and TB, dealing with their large-scale databases in the early years of the millennia, and trying to make sense of how messages about risk and sexually transmitted infections got created. And it was spending time with the epidemiological data that I started to ask: why do we know this? And how do we know this? And why did we collect data about x and not about y? And how come the messages that I’ve received have not been the messages that other people have received? Why were the public health messages about HIV in this country uniform, even though we had evidence that people experienced the illness differently in different communities? That was what led me to try to go back and get a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science, which I did at the University of Pennsylvania. And that was the same year that National Geographic’s Genographic Poject was launched. This was an effort to sample and archive human diversity to track man’s journey. We can set aside the gendered issues, since man is at the center of a lot of this. But what I found fascinating about this project was not only the effort to tell humanity’s deep history—where “we really came from”—but that it had a public participation component where people could send in a swab of your cheek and find out where you came from. I was interested in how is we, humanity, and you, not the same? I started scratching at that question and it drew blood. Specifically, it drew blood of people whose bodies were purportedly going to help me understand who I was, but who were not me. These were blood samples from indigenous people around the world who were cast as vanishing or disappearing. And I got interested in why these bodies and DNA were part of my history. So, digging into the history of why these blood samples came 7
to be collected led me to an earlier project called the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) from the 1990s. When the Human Genome Project was created, DNA was collected from only a small number of people, so the “human genome” was only the genome of a few. So, some scientists argued that we needed to represent more of humanity’s diversity in this project, let’s sample the DNA of peoples who are vanishing—who represent “our” evolutionary history--in order to construct this. The project was derailed due to a pan-indigenous movement that said, “Wait a minute, what are you going to do with these samples? Are you going to make money off of these bodies?” And the project faltered. It didn’t achieve the impact that it wanted. But this turned out to be not historical enough, so I had to go back to an earlier iteration called the International Biological Program (IBP), which ran from 1964 to 1974. It was a large-scale project to sample and archive all types of biological materials, and in particular, it had a section on Human Adaptability, which involved sampling and archiving the blood from indigenous peoples who were disappearing. And so, I’ve told this story in reverse. There is a recreation of the indigenous person that seems to be ever disappearing (we could go back centuries), but this is where I decided to start my history—in the immediate postwar period. Along with the bomb, it was a moment of reckoning with how the planet had changed, and how the nuclear era had brought new kinds of risks that could only be measured over very long periods of time. People had detonated the bomb, but it was unclear as to what effects this would have. Some of the scientists who were very active in the project, including one called James V. Neel, who was a very influential human geneticist, were working in Japan on the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), looking at the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a kind of “natural laboratory” on the effects of radiation. And it was around this time that Neel became interested in seeking out humans that he imagined as untouched by modernity, people who could serve as controls, who were baselines, to use the language of the time. This led him into the Amazon and to working with groups that he viewed as pristine and optimally adapted to an environment in which they had purportedly lived for millennia. It wasn’t an explicitly racial program, for it was supposed to be a moment of moving past race. After all, this was the period of the new physical anthropology, a time when we would move from racial categories to populational thinking: there were no races, only climes. And there was a sense in which, by dividing human communities into “Stone Age” and “Atomic Age,” they, as cosmopolitan civilized scientists, would be able to track the extent to which they and other members of their societies had become maladapted to a techno-scientific world. Scientists collecting blood in the fifties and sixties did so from around the world. What enabled them to do this? This is the first time that they could collect blood and store it at low temperature, in a biodynamic state.
So, when I went into the archive I thought I would be looking for certain kinds of things about human difference and human history, but lo and behold, in all the archives, there are anxieties about the freezer: the freezer will serve as a time machine; the freezer will allow us to suspend animation; the freezer will let us to save this priceless resource and have it for the future as yet unknown. Biological anthropologists working with the administrative infrastructure of the newly created World Health Organization (WHO) created a massive tissue-based infrastructure to get these materials from the most “remote” regions—remote from such places as Cambridge, MA, so it is a matter of perspective—and bring them back to their labs, where they could become literal human resources, serving as a resource for the future. I should point out also that in this period no one was talking explicitly about DNA. Nobody said that we were going to sequence the DNA. People were looking at serum, protein variants, looking for immunological history and blood groups. But it turns out that the ability to preserve the materials into the present and future allowed them to be mined for purposes that were unanticipated at the time. Now this is considered by many to be a remarkable success. What are these being used for? When HIV became an epidemic or pandemic, scientists went to these freezers. It was in these freezers scientists found the first evidence of HIV-1 from blood collected somewhere near the Congo in 1959. In part, the blood had been collected not for HIV—no one was talking about it then—but for blood group research. Now there have been studies of flu and the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918-19. The thought has been that if we can get blood from people who have immunological signatures of these viruses, maybe we can understand why they were so deadly. And most dramatically, when I spent time in a biological anthropology lab, where I was learning how biological anthropologists were using this old blood to ask historical questions, I was fascinated that they were actually not especially interested in the human. Although I thought that in such a lab we would be talking about human variation, these scientists were in fact more interested in what was called “Mosquito Anthropology,” because it turned out that some of these blood samples that were collected in the fifties and sixties contained malaria, whole plasmodia that hadn’t developed drug resistance—organisms that can’t be found today. The idea was that if you could go back and understand this early malaria, uninfected by modernity so to speak, you could rejigger the structure of chloroquine, heal the world and save the world. And maybe you can. They haven’t done it yet. But it was that kind of research that fascinated me. To see efforts to discover whole biomes within these human blood samples that were collected for one purpose, that continued to reveal and unfold their as yet unknown story. This sounds great and is exciting to learn. However, here is where justice comes in, and what I consider to be one of the greatest challenges. It turns out, and it would not come as a surprise to any one of you in this room, that indigenous peoples have not disap-
peared, and in fact, more and more are claiming indigenous identity. And certain groups of indigenous people want their blood back. They argue that although many of them agreed to participate in these studies at various points in time, they didn’t agree to have their blood stored for reasons that no one could have known about. There have been several high-profile cases of repatriation, including of samples collected by Jim Neel in the sixties. They just went back this spring to members of the Yanomami on the Brazil-Venezuela border. And there are other members of the community saying, “We want to know why these samples are persisting, and who is getting to define the questions.” So, these are where the questions of justice come in. What I wanted to highlight in my research is that this isn’t a question of science versus religion, science versus history, biology versus history, or anti-science versus pro-science. Instead, this is about what gets to count as an object for science, whose bodies are the materials upon which knowledge of what it means to be human is generated, and how we should think of research questions that get asked when the human is the object, subject, and research material of study. What does it mean to ask research questions that benefit the widest array of lives? We see new innovations being made related to indigenous genomics, science, and justice, especially efforts to enroll research subjects at the beginning of research, asking: what would you like to know? This has been a big challenge in the realm of consent. What does it mean to grant consent to something when the future use is unknown? Therefore, the most important questions that I’m struggling with and working towards in my research is to write a history of science and a history of these practices to help all the various groups who have a stake in these projects understand the circumstances that have brought them together. In the service of asking new questions, I think there is enormous potential for historians and biologists to share their knowledge practices. Samples that may not have been intended for me to write about have made me think really differently of my obligations as a historian, of whose histories I want to tell, and what kind of histories serve which kinds of audiences. Lynn K. Nyhart: When we think of the different entanglements of biology and history, the one I work on is pretty straightforward. I use the methods of history to study ideas about nature by people we call biologists. I mostly work on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mostly on Germany, but my teaching comes up to the present. So, the challenges and opportunities that I want to talk about have to do with some present-day things. In my recent work, I focus on two things: how scientists before Darwin thought about the transformation of species—and I might come back to this topic in my later discussions on challenges and opportunities—and also, as was mentioned in the introduction, the circulation of ideas between the realms of the 8
social and the biological, particularly in the organization of nature and of society. So, for example, the notion of the division of labor, as is well known, comes out of political economy and was transferred into physiology to talk about the physiological division of labor in the early nineteenth century. It was then re-exported back in lots of different ways into social theory in the later nineteenth century and put back into politics, too. Interestingly, those moves in both directions were pretty noncontroversial. The idea of division of labor is so completely naturalized into the vocabulary of science that nobody ever thinks of it as a term of “political economy” about five minutes after it happens. By contrast, ideas about how an organism is governed are much more contentious, and remain so throughout the nineteenth century. Increasingly, there is an effort to use models of nature as the model of the state. And the question of whether a state is an organism, or in what way the state is like an organism and therefore should be subject to the same kinds of analyses, is something I’m very interested in. Maybe in the discussion, if people are interested, I can tell you fun stories about the satirical work that I’ve read from the radical zoologist, Karl Vogt, who both participated in political activism and worked on problems about animal societies and organismality. But what I really want to talk about today are current challenges presented to historians and all of us by biology. And the one I picked actually has to do with the big speed-up of genomic manipulation allowed by new techniques like CRISPRCas9. How many people have heard of CRISPR in the room? This is a technique that allows scientists to cut and paste bits of genome in ways that are much more efficient and accurate than they had been before. And that will likely result eventually in pretty good changes in organisms that we have introduced. So, when people talk about the Anthropocene, they don’t talk about this, but I see it as a piece of the same thing. For these are ways in which we are fundamentally changing our biological surroundings, or about to be able to. So how is this a challenge for historians? Well, before we do that, I forgot to mention the Zika issue. How interesting it is! If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you have CRISPR, then you think: can we create something so that, if you just put in a few mosquitoes, it will cause them to reproduce this feature to the extent that, eventually, malaria- and Zika-carrying mosquitoes will just die out? Sounds like a good idea, though those mosquitoes are pretty rotten things. What will that do ecologically? What will that do evolutionarily? These are pretty hard to know right now. CRISPR is also one of the tools being used to reconstruct extinct organisms. For example, there’s a big project to reconstruct the passenger pigeon. Another famous and interesting and quixotic project aims to create and to engineer a very large hairy elephant that’s going to be mammoth-like (because you can’t actually reconstruct a mammoth, but you can get close, maybe). Fortunately, velociraptor DNA are really too decayed to be reconstructable. And then of course there’s the spectre 9
of human germline editing as well, which could mean changing what in us gets passed on to the next generation—and we might again think about which “us” we mean. So how does this present a challenge for us as historians? Well, one of the challenges is that new history is being written about this already. Most famously, in the case of CRISPR there was an article in an issue of Cell last January which appears to credit a lot of different people for their contributions to the CRISPR technique, but which conspicuously omitted the two people who happened to be women, and who were also engaged in a patent dispute with the institute run by the author of this article. So, you can imagine the layers of objections that zipped through the blogosphere in the week after this amazing article came out. This also, of course, represents an opportunity for historians. We can watch participant histories in the making, and we can see how they are involved in the telling of their history. It’s different from, say, if you work on the early nineteenth century as I do, in which case all of your actors are dead. Then of course they can’t disagree with your interpretation, which is nice. It’s also easy to forget all of the things that surrounded their version of history during its making. And I think seeing that happening now gives us a sense of how these future primary sources are constructed in the first place. And then we still have the opportunity to put them in longer trajectories. One of my favorite things to do in my teaching, and the reason that I always bring my history of biology course up to the present, is that the present is always changing, and it always changes what the history is that I teach every year. Because even those same stories feel different if they end up in a different place. So, we can do that with CRISPR as well. We can connect it up with longer histories of genetic manipulation. We can connect it up with longer histories about eugenics. We can connect it up with the history of patenting. We could connect it up with the history of globalization, which after all is a story that’s been going on for many hundreds of years. How in turn might historical inquiry inform and influence the development of biology? I think the way that I want to answer that is to suggest that it’s about getting budding biologists to think more broadly about their science and its social aspects, and to make those things part of the doing of biology as well. Let me just give this example. I was at a talk last week about creating international policies to regulate human genome editing, and about the problem of getting public input into those policies. Everyone says there should be public engagement. But it’s very hard to figure out how to get it, and how to get people interested. Because if it’s not affecting you immediately, it’s hard to be involved. So, here’s where the historians and other humanists might enter. There are lots of possible futures here that we could imagine. And scientists aren’t well trained to imagine those kinds of possibilities. Bioethicists tend to be caught up with legal and philosophical issues, and sociologists generally work in the
now. But there’s also a very long history of imaginative thought about the future of society as manipulated by biology. And I think it would pay us all, not as social scientists so much but as humanists, to look back at that history and think about how people have imagined the future based on social and scientific manipulation of human bodies. So you can think of writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to H. G. Wells and Andrew Niccol, who was the writer and director of Gattaca, to somebody like Scott Westerfeld, whom some of you may be familiar with, just to name a few. I think situating those works historically and getting scientists to read that kind of writing from a broader perspective is one way to expand the imagination and ways of thinking about what should be involved in doing biology. I also think that it offers some greater hope, maybe, for different imaginative futures than the scary ones that we see represented. So, I guess, if Julia’s keyword was liberty, and Joanna’s was justice, mine might be imagination. Russell H. Tuttle: I am a four-field trained anthropologist from Berkeley: linguistics, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology and biological anthropology. I chose to be more biological than anything else, which is why I’m connected to a number of biological groups at the University of Chicago. History is probably the most important endeavor by which humans can try to expand their education, particularly the history of whatever project one is conducting. I mean deep history going as far back as possible. Often, you will find that things have already been said, etc. The great tragedy of our species is we don’t learn from history. Current events now confirm this. And we are capable of much better. People who are highly educated in the best universities in the world seem to forget a lot of their history when they get in power. They keep repeating the same old things. Not being a formally trained historian, I am freer to say what I want about events and persons of the past. I don’t have to follow the current practice or the older practices of historians. For instance, should one blame eminent people from other eras for the mistakes and the problems they cause for people right now? I think we should, especially if they continue to be sources of harm to current and future generations. I’m aware of Darwin’s contributions to changing the world, probably making it seem more about nature. But I am also aware that he was racist, sexist, elitist and classist. He invested his inherited fortune in railroads at the outset of the Anthropocene in the 19th century. Anthropocene is a very current concept. It’s useful, but it’s heavily based on technological innovation and change, and we have people today who protest about how it’s affecting nature and justice and many other things, which is a very worthy enterprise. Some aspects of the talks that I’ve heard evidence a phenomenon called emergence, for which I will give a simpler example. Hydrogen has its properties; oxygen has its properties. When you put them together you get water, which has very different
properties from either. Humans are recurrently emergent. We are a distinct species. The entities that people hypothesize—in some case demonstrate—are made up of chemical components and many other factors of various kinds bound together. Yet we’re incredibly similar to one another. It is fashionable to say we’re 98% chimpanzee so we’re just another chimpanzee. This is entertaining as cocktail party conversation. But we are in fact quite different from the apes, especially behaviorally. I like to think that we live in a novel niche—call it the Anthropocene, if you wish, though it extends much further back in time. Our niche is very different from that of any ape. Indeed, available genomic samples of wild chimpanzees show that there is more genomic variation in one community of about 100 to 120 chimpanzees than in all of humanity. They all know each other to some extent, and they come and go in different subgroups. But they do not evidence the myriad variety of emergents that humans have exhibited and will undoubtedly continue to display. Nonetheless, humans are also incredibly similar. Superficial things that you see, can be sorted out. Genomics helped to debunk the idea of human biological races. Global travelers see clines of phenotypic variation, generally gradual variations in traits that do not cluster enough to bound populations. The problem with human genome projects is that they were spot sampled. If you put a grid over the globe, especially some years ago, and went from point to point at regular intervals, you would not get variations of traits that would all come together in clusters evidencing that people are significantly different from others. To the second part of the question, I think one of the things that biologists and social scientists should combine to do is get totally rid of the biological race of human beings. It has no place in our societies. The 2020 census is going to be changed, hopefully they’re going to stop “white” from being a meaningful category. Note that the 2010 census form has no selections after “white” that specifically say what your white group is. Of course, if you’re darker skinned, they’re very interested in what that means and kinds of “black” are proffered. Current groups are actually statistical races, often determined by the doctor or loan officer or schoolteacher, minister et al. listing you by your physical appearance, which can be very misleading. And they can also lead to harmful decisions. Many medical researchers, and other kinds of researchers, must report their samples by race. Sometimes in their papers in the PNAS or specialty journals, they can write as if they didn’t really conduct the study with regard to race, but they usually have to report it that way, if they’re going to get government grants. Our country is much too preoccupied with race, especially given that it is merely a biologically unfounded belief system. I’ve complained at the hospital and other institutions for years: don’t put me down as white for race and ethnicity. I’ve never checked white on a census. I’m a mongrel! In fact, in terms of ancestor tracing, you can trace your ancestry, if you have written genealogies or other records, but otherwise forget it, because you don’t know really that you have the 10
DNA of people 300 years ago, of somebody you might see the name of, because it keeps changing. It changes through generations. Because of the way it works reproductively, a lot gets left out from each parent. For those of you who are into bingedrinking, stop it: it can alter your DNA according to a recent study, and you’ll pass that damaged DNA off to your children, so think of the future. Healthy kids are challenging enough. My chief take-home message: get rid of race. Kenneth Prewitt, who was with our political science department, wrote a book called What is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (2014). Apparently, he tried to get some amendments when he was head of the census, but he didn’t get very far. They simply wouldn’t listen to him. His prediction over the next several generations is that the problem will work itself out because society is changing. But do you see us becoming more and more post-racial? I think not. Politicos are going to find some use for it. And it has to go back to biology, because that’s how ignorant people identify people: by how one looks. It’s their way of justifying us versus them, which came up in one of the talks here. As to genetic modification, especially in the food we eat. Humans have engaged in selection for millennia —ever since domestication came along. It’s called artificial selection as opposed to natural selection, but we’ve been selecting for what we want in terms of traits for a very long time, so maybe going in and snipping and crisping up this and that might not be harmful to consumers. Another point I’d like to make is that biologists need a lot more social science—history and anthropology, especially. Many biologists don’t study whole organisms. Organismal biology is passé. Genomics is all we are supposed to need. Yet the science is really in very early stages of development. To the extent that you actually can read a human genome for physical or behavioral traits we are off to a slow start. E. O. Wilson was mentioned here. I have great regard for him in many ways, but… he is the founder of sociobiology, now called evolutionary psychology because sociobiology fell into disrepute. It seems now the key concept of kin selection (a special form of inclusive fitness), in which from time immemorial close kin groups that were key to survival of a species doesn’t work for humans. The regression formula that was supposed to be predictive isn’t. They found this out a few years ago. Wilson has a new book, actually an essay, called The Meaning of Human Existence (2015). It’s a reiteration of jumping from ant biology to human beings. While he dabbles in humanities along the way, he skips over the social sciences. When Wilson, to his credit, discovered that the regression formula for inclusive fitness doesn’t work he and his colleagues wrote a paper that finally got published. But Richard Dawkins got 50 other eminent people to sign a petition to block its publication. Kin selection theory, which prevailed in scientific circles for 50 years, did not serve humanity So if you want a project on social justice, here’s one to trace historically. 11
It’s interesting how people accept an idea and won’t let go of it and whole schools, develop around it. We know that inclusive fitness and kin selection do not and probably never did operate historically. In apes, if a key member of a small group dies in an accident or by contacting a virulent disease how do you replace her or him? Does the whole group die off because they lost this member? No, you have to have some mechanism to replace them. That requires sharing resources and cooperating with one another, to an extent, which has been characterized human groups as far as we can tell, and still is with certain hunter-gatherers. Further, now that we can identify the DNA of group members among apes, there are usually fewer close kin than kin. Kyle Harper: I’d like to start by reiterating my gratitude to the organizers and their great work. It’s an honor to be joining this event, and I am really enthusiastic to talk about the ways that history and biology intersect. It’s something that’s become a passion of mine, and I thought I would approach the problem—my mind’s been kind of blown by these really thoughtprovoking approaches to it—a little bit differently, which is to ask a specific question about a specific example of how an understanding of biology can help me in my workday practice of being a historian. I’m really just a full historian who wishes he had been a biology PhD. It’s too late once you get to a certain point, but you can still, whatever discipline you’re in, try and be in conversation with other disciplines. I’ve found being in conversation with different parts of biology to be really informative, enlightening, helpful, and enriching, for solving some of the problems historians are interested in, like what causes historical societies to develop in certain ways. Specifically, I’m a Roman historian, and so I’m interested in things like: why has the Roman Empire become a huge political formation that stretches across three continents, stretches over massive parts of western Eurasia, the entire Mediterranean, from these really continental climates in Northern Europe to subtropical climates in southern Egypt? It’s a pretty extraordinary political formation. I’m also interested in why it disintegrated—more poetically, more classically: why does the Roman Empire fall? If we go back to the second century—the Roman Empire is at its absolute apex in the middle of the second century—it has 70 million people. That’s a quarter of all human beings alive at the time. It is dominant over its neighbors, it has military hegemony. In fact, in 165 AD, in really just one year of campaigning it crushes the Parthian Empire in battle, which is probably along with Han China the other most sophisticated state at the time. So, the Roman Empire is this huge and very powerful political formation. The very same year that the Romans crushed the Parthians in 165 is the beginning of something that historians have long known and called the Antonine Plague, the eruption of a disease event that was really different from the kinds of disease events that the Roman Empire was familiar with. And the Roman Empire, of course, in the early first millennium, is
what we would maybe today characterize as an underdeveloped society: life expectancies in the Roman Empire are in the twenties, probably in the early twenties. Sometimes you go to Rome and you see the extraordinary monuments, and that can leave an impression of what the civilization’s like, but by today’s standards it’s actually an underdeveloped economy with very high rates of mortality. And I would even argue—I am currently arguing—that it has a very, very bad disease ecology. That the endemic disease pool in the Roman Empire places a very high disease burden on its inhabitants, which is one reason why life expectancy is so low. I think it’s important to ask what kinds of diseases caused these kinds of demographic outcomes, like low life expectancy. I remember when I was, I think, out of graduate school and one or two years into being a faculty member (before I really turned to work on these kinds of questions), I asked a medical historian, “What do you think most people in the Roman Empire died of?” And he said probably just little diarrheas. And that was almost heartbreaking to me, because the Roman Empire this grand political formation, and its worst enemies were, you know, not even the glamorous super-killers like plague and ebola, but in fact really run-of-the-mill gastroenteric pathogens. That conversation actually planted this fascination in me—how did the Romans die? It led me to pay attention to all kinds of different aspects of what we know about mortality in the Roman Empire, and it really has helped me see that the plague that breaks out in the middle of the second century is really different—it’s different in nature, it’s different in scale— from anything the Romans had faced before. We’re unbelievably fortunate that one of the contemporaries of this plague was the second-century physician Galen, who’s one of the most insightful, certainly one of the most prolific, ancient medical writers. He’s a very good clinical observer, and his notes are very important for understanding this disease. And they have led most people who work on it to believe that the pathogenic agent of this disease event was smallpox. That in itself is tremendously interesting. I agree that it’s smallpox; I actually think that until it’s sequenced from an archaeological sample of a victim—which could be done, it’s a double-stranded DNA virus, so it’s theoretically possible (I know at least two labs that have tried. I don’t think that they have samples from the second century, nobody has sequenced it yet)—I think that until we do this, we have to be open-minded about what the pathogenic agent of this disease event is. But it’s probably smallpox, and it’s estimated to have killed anywhere between two and fifty percent of the population of the entire Roman Empire, which I say to try to underscore the challenges of studying ancient disease events. It either killed a few million people or 30 or 35 million people. I argue that it probably is ten percent of the population. It’s a huge disease event in scale. It strikes over three continents in the space of a couple of years, which is really extraordinary and requires a certain kind of pathogenic agent. It happens all across the Roman Empire.
And so, I approach this question, and say, what kind of event is this? Is this a historical event, or is this a biological event? I don’t think you can possibly divide the two. It clearly is a historical event, in any way you want to define that; you have to be able to read Latin and Greek in order to begin to approach it, you have to understand inscriptions, you have to have a feeling, a finesse, for the cultural outlook of Galen to really understand what he’s saying. So almost any way you define historical—you’re interested in its causes and effects, what causes this plague to break out, what’s the role of nutrition, what’s the role of social formation, in fostering this outbreak—it’s historical in its consequences. What happens when a society undergoes a smallpox pandemic? This is also a biological question, and here’s what’s really started to interest me, and the focus of my current work, because historians have sort of acted like: well, it was probably smallpox, now back to the historical questions. But I think that leaves out really the most important things. The analogy I like to use is: if aliens came down from outer space and killed ten million humans, people wouldn’t just say, “Ok, on to looking at the consequences.” They’d say, “Wait a second. Who are these aliens, where did they come from, what kind of weapons did they have? How did they just kill seven, ten million people?” And we should be asking those same kinds of questions about the microbes that are responsible. The understanding of this event really requires some understanding of what the pathology of smallpox would have been, the medical dimensions of a smallpox infection, and, by extension, the epidemiological dimensions of a smallpox pandemic. Diseases can only do certain things depending on the biological properties of the pathogenic bacteria, the virus, and so on. They cause it. At the population level, those properties are studied as epidemiology. And trying to look at the Roman sources through an epidemiological lens—to say not just what is this virus doing to individuals who are victims of it, but what is it doing to the entire population?—I think are biological questions. Then at even deeper levels, we should be asking: what are the ecological contexts for this kind of disease event, and ultimately what are the evolutionary contexts for this kind of disease event? I would argue (and I do argue in a forthcoming book) that this is actually the first appearance of the smallpox virus in the Roman Empire and Western Eurasia, and in fact this relies deeply on—specifically, we’ve been talking about genomic sequencing—phylogenetic evidence. It’s now become apparent that the closest relatives of smallpox are other orthopoxviruses, like what is called taterapox virus, which infects this very cute little gerbil called the naked-soled gerbil that only lives in Central Africa and the savannas of Africa—that’s its closest genetic relative. That’s really important. The phylogenetic history of the orthopoxvirus family tells us a lot about how smallpox evolved, where it evolved, what its properties are, and what makes it like or unlike other kinds of viruses. And so, the knowledge that smallpox evolves very recently in the African savanna tells us, as historians, something. It tells us to look for: how did the Roman Empire connect to Africa? It turns out 12
simultaneously, by people totally uninterested in the history of disease, we’ve become aware of how connected the Roman Empire was through its commercial links with the east coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean world, with the ivory trade, with the gold trade, and with the slave trade. And to me there’s a very strong case to be made that smallpox is a virus that evolves very recently, a few thousand years ago, in the savannas of Africa, and passes over the trade routes of the Red Sea or the Nile into the Roman Empire, and strikes the Roman Empire as a really emerging infectious disease. And this is the final thought that I’ll make. We live in a world where emerging infectious diseases are a huge issue. We’ve heard that Zika—I don’t know if we’ve mentioned Ebola, SARS, MERS, HIV—all of these are emerging diseases. This means that they somehow sit at the intersection of evolution and human societies. And when that process starts is a great question, and most people who are studying emerging infectious diseases, most of that literature looks at the last hundred years. But in fact, emerging infectious diseases have a much longer time horizon. We’ve mentioned that if human domestication of animals inserts a kind of artificial selection, it also creates ecologies for the evolution of infectious diseases, and so many human diseases are of a zoonotic origin and have their origins around the time of agriculture, but not all of them. The Roman Empire sits as a part of a very long story of how humans have reshaped the global environment, in ways that create conditions for new pathogens to evolve, and then of course to establish themselves in human populations. To me, maybe the most interesting thing about the Antonine Plague is that it’s really the first appearance of smallpox in Eurasia. And what would have happened if the Roman Empire had not existed? If there hadn’t been a major economy that was interested in extracting gold and ivory and slaves? Smallpox would have been an emerging infectious disease that none of us had ever heard of, because it would have not established itself, and it wouldn’t have been one of the two or three most vicious killers in human history, down to its eradication in 1979. I think even to approach the kinds of problems that we might think of as most historical—like what caused the plague, how many people did it kill, what were its consequences—we can’t even begin to separate them from what we might think of as traditional fields of biology, including ecology and evolution. So, that’s my spiel, and I look forward to your questions. Lyon: Thank you, all of you. That was breathtaking in scope, I have to say. Just a few notes to think about, then we’ll see if you want to respond to each other, and then I’ll open to the floor; we still have time. To give you a sense of the scope of what we discussed here, some of the fields and terms that I found myself writing down about the relationship between biology and history are terms like paleoclimatology, toxicology, public health, human genetics, pharmacology, human germline editing, the CRISPR technique, race, regression formulas, demographics, disease ecology, phylogenetics. Obviously raising questions 13
about the relationship between biology and history lets us go in an awful lot of different directions. I don’t know if anybody here wants to respond to anyone else on our panel—if there are any comments or questions for each other, or if you just want to throw the floor open? Tuttle: I did want to think about smallpox for the sake of it. Most viruses I believe are rapidly changing, so the smallpox you might find—one wonders what happened. Did the people become immune? Were the survivors able to go on and have children to resist that strain of smallpox, and then it went into some other host and developed and then erupted again in more modern times? I don’t know if the blood had smallpox bugs or not. Harper: Great questions, and I think very open questions. The mortality of smallpox over the last 2000 years, down to its eradication, is so significant that it would be a candidate for something that could have exerted selection pressure on human populations, and vice versa certainly. But it’s also easy to overstate the importance of inherited or other kinds of immunity; acquired immunity is always really, really important. I think one of the really big open questions in the history of disease will be: can we find ways that the history of disease has shaped human selection in recent times, particularly the immune system? Radin: One of the reasons that the human geneticists that I was looking at were collecting all this blood in the fifties and sixties is that they were looking for evidence of natural selection. This was a resurgence of a neo-Darwinian paradigm. It was the era of human biogeography, and James Neel, in particular, was really convinced that he was, following a single exemplar of sickle cell anemia and its link to resistance of malaria, going to find the selective disease relationship for all of these different things. He used this argument to marshal evidence to collect all of this blood for selection, even though there was resistance from within the anthropological community. People like biological anthropologist Gabriel Lasker were like, “I’m not convinced.” A neutral theory of selection was emerging, saying that we can’t actually assert that all mutations are going to be the result of selection. And so even by the seventies this paradigm was falling apart a little bit. There was a lot of concern around selection and the kind of determinisms that could then be fed back into racial ideas of biology. So, I think this is an interesting tension, how do we take disease seriously, and these agents and entities seriously—not even as diseases, but as organisms in their own right, without falling into risks of reifying difference? So, it’s an interesting conundrum. Thomas: I’m very eager to hear what everyone else has to say, but I was very interested in what Lynn said about asking biologists to be conscious of their own practice, and how very difficult it is to be conscious of one’s own practice, as historians and historians of science. And I wonder, Kyle, I know how exuberantly your work has been celebrated. And so, it’s interesting to
me to see that, for instance, when malaria was proposed as the reason for the fall of Greece around 1900 with Malaria Jones, this was treated as an absolutely ridiculous idea. And yet now it’s an acceptable idea, and I think this reflects on the kind of practices that we as historians do—that it is now possible to say these things without having rotten tomatoes thrown at you, which is a very good thing. Harper: Sometimes I get rotten tomatoes thrown at me. No, I mean I think it’s very interesting. Maybe I can briefly answer your question, and then pose it to the rest of the panel. I worry a lot about being accused of biological determinism, partly because I actually think determinism is a good thing. I want to know what determines what, and the role of biology as a causal factor in human history. What I never want to be called is a reductionist. So, I think biological determinism is a good thing, whereas biological reductionism is a bad thing. But I think it depends on what corner of the field I’m in—as a historian or a classicist. For some people, it’s all biology, it’s all kind of reductionist… Tuttle: Which has minimal explanatory value. Harper: Right, which has minimal explanatory value, for you’d be collapsing the real complexity and the real factors. But what do others think? Nyhart: Well, I think the issue about determinism is really interesting. You mentioned agency, I think, and the question of freedom. If I had been answering this question about the greatest challenge of biology for historians in my first stab at this 20 years ago, I would have said biological determinism because of the rise of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, and the challenge that that made, less to biologists than to a lot of people who enthusiastically took up evolutionary psychology and weren’t paying a lot of attention to the biology. But that might be an overstatement. Even as I was writing that out, I thought, “Well, there are plenty of historians in the past who have also...”—I mean, let me go back. My concern about that is that individual agency gets squashed by biological determinism. But individual agency is also squashed by social- and economic-determinist historians, right? So, I’m just being a person who really wants to say individuals count. Tuttle: I think economists have found that out. They have these wonderful models to explain human behavior, and then they find out that humans are not rational. We’re not rational actors, we’re suckers for almost anything. So, if you’re going to look at any model, if any disciplined field proposes a model, be sure that you read the assumptions that are necessary for it to work. And usually if there are five assumptions, you’ll be stopped at one or two, and you’ll say, “That cannot be met.” You know, it just can’t. It simply won’t work. Lyon: Okay, why don’t I throw the floor open? Let me just begin by saying in all honesty that as a college student–organized
event, I do hope that all of the undergraduates in the audience will feel free to ask questions of the people you all have invited here. So, I hope everybody who does have a question feels free to ask it. Question: Hi, all of you were talking a lot about biology and how it’s very apparent that there is a lot of interplay between biology and humanity. I was wondering, because you brought up agency, what does history or anthropology or humanistic inquiry tell us we should do when we are shaping our world that we now have the power to shape? What should we strive for when we eventually end up editing the human genome, or we’re deciding what species to eradicate? What should that tell us? Nyhart: Can I just jump right in on that? Because this talk that I went to last week was by this guy who was working on the international policies about human genome editing. He works in a law school, and he took as the example some of his law students, who come to him, and they say, “I know my classmates are all doing enhancements to get their brains to work better. And I am not, but I feel disadvantaged.” And he said, “You know, it’s really true that people who can sleep fewer hours in a night and get more work done and cram more into their brains will get the better jobs. And it’s true that, you know, that there’s only a certain number of people who will get into the top 20 law firms.” And I was just appalled by his acceptance of all the assumptions that went into that. I said, “Right, so if you want to select for the enhancement of the ability to sleep less and be more aggressive, that’s something that we could choose, but let’s not assume that everybody will pick that. What about if we chose to enhance for cooperation and kindness? Just for example. Maybe we would find that we would have a society that was, you know, more feminist (sorry) or something else!” But, you know, he kind of laughed when I said this because it was so absurd that anyone would select for this. So, I think as soon as you talk about that, what you are immediately talking about is, What values do you want a society to cherish? And that always comes back down to that. And so, as a humanist, tolerance, kindness, I mean those are values we need to know how to cherish and to enhance, and that’s why I actually think some of the science fiction stuff, less the dystopian stuff... Radin: I was just going to jump in on that. I’ve been teaching for the last two years a seminar at Yale that I call “Bio-Medical Futures,” where we read... Nyhart: I want your syllabus! Radin: I’m happy to send it out to anyone who wants it because I’m interested in suggestions! What I’m kind of gambling on is this idea of imagination and thinking about these temporal possibilities, of biology and history, which also gives us a way to think about time travel in different kinds of ways. What would it mean to take science fiction, and not just contemporary science fiction, but historical science fiction, and put it 14
alongside science that was contemporaneous from the time? It has been a real experiment, but it’s been very exciting because I have students, many of whom are from the sciences and engineering, and then we have history majors, artists and humanists. What’s been interesting week after week is that there’s this sense that the science sometimes seems a little bit more out there, the historical science, than the fiction. And what we keep coming back to, or what the students keep coming back to in the fiction, is the role of emotion. I thought they would want to argue the technical points, but they’ve become very interested in the ways that emotions guide us and ways of imagining how values in emotions play out when a new technology or innovation is made. So, I think—this is just to double down on Lynn’s point—that this is a different way to think about how we can collectively imagine what the values of science are. What science fiction has been doing for a long time is destabilizing everyone’s assumptions, so nobody gets to feel like the authority. And then there’s this opportunity to come together around what is the affective response to these transformations. I mean, it’s not even necessarily hard science fiction. A book that has been very affecting for my students is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and that’s a story that is very much about agency of clones who are made to be organ donors to another class of humans. The students ask, “Why don’t they revolt?” And sometimes the question is, well, why don’t you revolt? Why doesn’t anybody revolt? You know? It’s this question of agency, and do we realize we have choices and what are those choices? And how do you get outside certain kinds of assumptions? It’s been a really exciting way to experiment, so I’m very open to suggestions, but I’d be happy to share the syllabus. Thomas: I find your question very interesting, because it seems to suggest that we haven’t articulated the reason for humanistic studies well enough recently. And one of the things that has interested me, the article from which I drew this talk, is called “History and Biology: the Age and the Anthropocene,” which is part of a forum. And Kyle has a piece in it as well. At the end of this piece, I make an argument about what the humanities do, and what history does to articulate the kind of human being that we want to be, which echoes a lot of what Lynn just said, including a sense of humor. And it is amazing how people have quoted that. It was sort of this flag, and we’re going down with the flag, waving in this deluge of science that seems to be overwhelming the humanities. But there has to be a way of saying what the humanities are for. And yet, I’m worried that we need to do a whole lot more of that, and to do it more convincingly and less apologetically. I don’t know how to—I often find myself feeling as though we also need tolerance, kindness, as though these are somehow a sort of garnish. And they are not. They’re central. Tuttle: Do you consider history to be humanities or the social sciences? Thomas: Well, you know, when I was here at the University of Chicago, it was both, but now I think it is just social sciences. 15
Lyon: It is, although that’s unusual. There are plenty of schools and universities around the country where it’s in the humanities. And it depends what type of history you are working with. Tuttle: There is quite a growing group of very talented people, anthropologists and sociologists, who go into genomics laboratories, using ethnographic methods, if you will, to study them. They can be quite informative. They have to watch what they publish, I think. It’s very interesting. Nyhart: I was interested that the wording of the question, as it got shorter in the version that we got last night, changed, actually, to social sciences. Which, well, it’s not exactly the same as it was before, and I had prepared my thinking and remarks assuming that history was in the humanities. Because although our history of science department is actually in all four areas [humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences], any individual can choose to go up in any of those four areas for tenure. All of us who are in it—since I’ve been there, which is a long time now—have chosen to go up in the humanities. Lyon: To quickly follow up, I was just thinking that, to a certain extent, despite your strong defense of humanities there, every one of you is talking about taking history in a direction away from the humanities. Or at least in the traditional way in which we understand historians doing the kind of reading of humanistic texts to understand the past. What you’re talking about, many of you, is a heavy reliance on social science, natural science–types of techniques, which on the one hand is historians reaching out to engage with these things, but in the process, does history risk losing some of its humanistic qualities? Radin: I think there’s a lot of ways into that question, and what’s interesting in this kind of parsing is what we call “objectivity.” You know, that “noble dream” of the objectivity question: how do historians validate their knowledge? What was interesting to me, as I got deeper into that sort of humanistic historical practice that took scientists’ works as its texts, was realizing that I was studying people who were creating and using an archive, and how remarkably little conversation there was about that in the history department that I joined— about what we might think of as the craft of history, or the evidentiary basis on which we make claims. And it’s all about the footnotes, right, and what evidence you have. So, I think there are some interesting questions there, and that’s what got me thinking differently about what it is that I am. What does it mean for me to make knowledge as a historian and to say I’m a humanist, and what are the ways we actually evaluate historical work and evidentiary claims that are there? So, that’s maybe a whole other rabbit hole... Tuttle: How will you conduct history in the future when everything’s out in the cyberworld? When it’s all in the cloud? There’s nothing like going into old letters and things that people had written to pour over and read from...
Nyhart: Well, remember too, just conversely, things like Google and other digitization projects have made accessible to people a huge...I mean, I’m a Germanist; I can do most of my work now without going to Germany. It is amazing. Tuttle: Let’s hope it lasts; that is doesn’t crash. Lyon: Other questions, on science...? Question: How do you convince biologists to introduce a historical perspective into their work? Radin: I think you have to be willing to talk to them. So at least for me, I think there are big statements to be made and then there’s a lot of personal work to be done—of actually wanting to approach things in a spirit of mutual curiosity. And so, that’s hard to do, but... Question (rephrased): Let me make it even more extreme— what have you done to convince biologists to put in a historical perspective on their work? Radin: I can answer that. I don’t know about me, but if any of you have other thoughts... Thomas: One of the things I did specifically was, in thinking about the microbiome and working on that aspect of this project, to look at a study that had been done by five Korean scholars, who had looked at gut biota from the U.S., China, South Korea, and Japan, and then had carefully drawn a map where Japan is way outside of Korea, the United States, and China. And they labelled it by these countries. When you think of Northeast Asian politics at this moment in time, it’s the map for the next war—or at least you can propose it for the next war—and you go to them and say, “Surely, we can express what these groups are with some other, more accurate way.” Because obviously, it’s related to diet and the nation-state is not directly responsible for the gut. And also, just ask them. For instance, in our roundtable conversation in the history of biology roundtable, we had a biologist respond to our papers and had some conversations with him.
brings together historians, philosophers, and biologists to talk about the issue of biological individuality. We were very careful about picking people whom we considered to be somewhat amphibious, who already had shown, in some aspect of their writing or in their work, that they would be willing to talk across these fields. And we were, my co-editor and I, extremely heavy-handed about making sure that everybody’s terms, everybody’s writing was at least legible to everybody else, which was a lot of work. Tuttle: Did you comment on each other’s papers? Nyhart: Well, no, we had two workshops and then we had a commentary by a biologist, a philosopher, and a historian on all ten papers. Question: Professor Tuttle, you have mentioned that the tragedy of our species is that we don’t learn from history. And then I believe it might have been Professor Harper who said something about biological determinism, so I was wondering if you think that there’s a sort of fate that our species is tied to, that is inescapable, and if not, how do we become agents of our destiny as a species? Tuttle: Well, there are people who are very selfish and who think they can cheat on history, and they can find other like people and form political groups and get power. And I don’t know if they care how long they last or not; there are certainly cases right now of people who just don’t care. They’re going to get theirs now, while they can, and they might have some ideal they’re trying to leave behind. So, again, people are irrational. It’s sad. Nonetheless, I’m very optimistic about human capacity, even ape capacity. How do you get it? Mobilize. Whatever field you go into—look really deeply into the history and the different perspectives.
Question (response): I have a frustration.
Harper: I think it’s a great question, and maybe one that a philosopher’s more equipped than I am to answer. But the way or the piece that I would want to add as a historian who thinks about the different ways human beings have experienced life and death, is that humans obviously have extraordinary capacities in the kind of cognition and culture that we have, but also the real kinds of material freedom. And self-determination that humans have is subject to different constraints and different ways over history. That’s a historical question, and so just to go back to what I was talking about earlier, people who live in societies with life expectancies in the early twenties have very different kinds of freedom and different kinds of constraints than modern persons do. I think that there’s something liberating, something very humanistic about understanding as well as we can the kinds of constraints that we have by being bodies that are subject to invasion, infection, and the different ways that members of our species have experienced that over time.
Nyhart: I have a book! It’s coming out in March from the University of Chicago Press that I co-edited with a biologist, which
Question: You talked about biologists and you brought up this example of looking at the microbiome and broader biol-
Tuttle: Part of that would be the educational system too. It would be nice if all universities had—and of course, ours is not perfect—a kind of CORE, two years of being exposed to all of the humanities, social sciences, the importance of history. And then should they choose to become a biologist, they could ask questions of those biology teachers and hopefully be treated nicely by those biology teachers. Thomas: Do you have an idea?
16
ogy, but what about biology involving biologists on the scale of the CRISPR discovery, where the labs they’re working in are mechanistic and, rather than studying populations, what they’re studying are proteins and mechanisms of proteins? Can they similarly be involved or should they similarly be involved in the making of history? Nyhart: They are! They’re already doing it! Tuttle: They’re in the news. Nyhart: And they’re also writing a history! I mean, that’s the thing. The history that I mentioned is by Eric Lander, who’s the head of the Broad Institute. Biologists write history all the time. In fact, anyone who ever writes a grant proposal writes history, and usually the history goes like this: there were these ten things that all led to me, and my work is going to lead to the future. We all learn how to write like that when we write grant proposals. That’s always writing a kind of history. When historians get at that history, then they have to kind of deconstruct it or compare it and say, “Well look, this person thinks all of these things led to him and his future, and all of these people say this story led to her and her future.” And who gets the patent actually may depend on who writes the more persuasive history. So, I don’t think that it is wrong to say that those mechanistic biologists are already writing history. I think that the effort comes in getting them to be more aware that there are also other kinds of history that they should be paying attention to. Question: Professor Lyon touched on this already, but initially, from an outside perspective, it seems that this approach to history errs more on the side of social science as opposed to the humanistic approach to history, and I was wondering if you could talk briefly about pushback you might have received from traditional historians to these approaches? Radin: I don’t know about pushback, but I was told that I shouldn’t write a history of the archive. And my sense of that was that to certain historians it was unseemly, or worse—banal—like looking at the plumbing or something, and so that wasn’t the “real history.” And so, I said, “Too late!” But I think in response to some of the questions—I wanted to touch back on the question of how you talk to biologists, or what you can talk to them about—I know that one of the real frustrations, and I don’t know if this is yours, is that historians and particularly social scientists tend to write in a way that is alienating, and that people find inaccessible, and there are ways in which our own sub-communities require us to do that. One of the things that I discovered, the deeper I got into my research, is when I started to focus on the craftwork and the practices that people use, how they come to and find their research material or how they manage the freezer as a kind of instrument, it gave us a common language to talk about practice, to talk about what was happening. And I’m one of those people who did wind up spending time in the lab. I didn’t think I 17
was going to be doing some ethnographic work, but I realized I needed to understand how people were making knowledge in order to write historically about this particular project. One of the really exciting things that happened was just by spending time without really having a preconceived notion of what exactly would come out of it. People started asking me questions like, “What do you know about these materials? Where do they come from?” And it turned out that a lot of the graduate students who were doing work with these old samples had very little insight into their provenance or the reasons why they were collected in the first place. Some really remarkable kinds of conversations and insights happened by me just telling the history that I had learned about where and how these materials—and you can think about this in terms of big data or anything—came into the research context. And what was really interesting was to see how these graduate students, through our conversations, started to think differently about what questions they might ask, knowing: “these came from these regions and were collected for these purposes, and that is the motivation, so that shapes why we have this size of a sample as opposed to that size of a sample.” Those kinds of conversations really inspired me to keep going. But I do think a challenge for us is to persuade people that this is history, too. This is history, and this is humanistic because science is done by humans. Science is done by people, and I think when scientists realize the humanistic heritage in their own practices is very powerful and fascinating. Tuttle: The problem between the two areas is how you structure just writing about something. There’s a lot of jargon that’s specific to particular experience, so people aren’t used to reading scientific papers. It sounds easy to read because they look shorter, but it’s not always. And then you get a superfluity of words in the humanities and social sciences. Do they really tell you what they are going to write about? Do they have a thesis that makes sense? Do they, and are they hedging their bets here and there along the way? Nyhart: I have to say, one of the most entertaining and instructive things about writing with a scientist is I feel like I’m constantly aerating his prose, and he’s always saying, “You can turn this into three sentence, and it will be clearer. And cut out one of them.” It’s good that way. Question: I have a question about the idea of progress. I think both history and biology share this sort of sense that we are moving forward. But I’ve also read in the past couple of years about health and the decline of health in America, at least in terms of nutrition and diseases that are caused by nutritional problems, and that for the first time we might be approaching a decline in life expectancy in America. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on this shared concept of progress between the two fields? Tuttle: There is for middle-aged white males committing suicide and whatever...
Thomas: I think that’s a very interesting question because it can be answered both biologically and as an intellectual history question, and I think that they actually are coming together in the same way at this moment. Many people are arguing now that history, that our sense of history as this grand narrative of progress, has come to a grinding halt, and that we are now mired in a kind of presentism where we can no longer imagine the future, to use your word there. And then, I think what the biological world is telling us, what this concept of the Anthropocene is telling us, is that those notions of probability, that someone like Jean Bodin was interested in, as being a way of going forward, because you can predict how the world might respond to us, can no longer be relied upon because of tipping points and sudden changes in the climate or productivity of soil or disease, or all those other things. And so, the notion that we can tell—progress is about a narrative, whether it’s in biology or in history—and that now we may no longer be able to tell the stories has become, I think, a really important node of conversation. There’s a book just out by Amitav Ghosh, the novelist, called The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), and this is a novel, but he’s talking about the limits of representation at this moment—that our modes of representation have been based on progress, as you suggest—but now they may no longer serve us. Tuttle: Who’s to benefit from the progress in medicine and nutritional science, etc.? These are problems, certainly for humanists, for social scientists and politicians—kind, gentle politicians, and whatever—to claim to resolve. Harper: I think with appropriate humility you can talk about something like biological well-being, and there has been some progress in some parts of the world at certain places for various reasons. But I’ll just quickly say that one of the categories that I used, emerging infectious disease, didn’t exist as an idea in 1980, but by 1990 it existed because people realized, scientists realized: oh crap, we got smallpox, we got polio, we got TB under control, and it turns out, first of all, those weren’t as under control (except for smallpox) as we thought. But also that AIDS and other new diseases were emerging or reemerging. And so, that’s maybe an example of hubris about scientific progress that took a step backward, or at least toward modesty—toward understanding the complexity of the ecology of microbes in our world. Tuttle: As long as you have a monospecies—for instance, in if one plants the same kind of tree along the parkways and maybe even in the lawns, some hordes of bugs might invade and harvest it. We’re similarly vulnerable. We’re the victim of microbes. When you get it in heavy populations of people, or sometimes an accidental introduction in a smaller population, it can just wreak havoc. There is progress now, internationally, to try to stop these with preventative medicine, if you will, which I think is a progressive thing.
Question: Several people have mentioned interacting with either historians or scientists, but have you seen any obstacles from outside academia? One of you mentioned Northeastern Asia; are there governments that don’t want to give you access to data or other things or don’t like the direction that your work is going? Tuttle: I wouldn’t try to study hunger in North Korea. And people want to guard their own scientists and their own resources. Thomas: You’re asking about government relations? Question (restated): Not necessarily government, but of people outside of academia. How do they react to your work? Are there people who don’t like it? Thomas: A few weeks ago, I was invited over by the South Korean government to consult on issues of climate change, and it was a very interesting moment for me because, obviously, on the one hand, you’re in the role of a guest and they’re treating you like a princess, and you get to fly business class—which, I don’t know about you guys, but that’s not usually how I fly! And on the other hand, I want to say to them: “What you’ve proposed for COP21 is absolutely unacceptable.” What they decided to do is that their commitment to fighting climate change is to take a notion of business as usual. Of course, as they say, it’s very, very hot, and they’re proposing to cut business as usual. This means they’re only going to emit 150 million more tons of carbon dioxide, which is not actually a decline in carbon dioxide. So, I didn’t get pushback in the sense that I was certainly treated very well, but I got very politely-expressed disagreement over French dinners and elaborate banquets and other things like that. It’s very interesting to try to engage with the people who are actually on the front lines of these political negotiations and to try to be effective and understand the fact that they are balancing factors that go beyond simply the knowledge that I have. You know, they’ve obviously got domestic considerations that they’re catering to. Tuttle: So, did they just want to cite you on the side of maintaining the status quo? Thomas: I think there were people in the government who wanted me to say the things they couldn’t say, but very marvelously, there’s a happy ending to this. I spoke to the group of younger people who were training to be the diplomats for South Korea, and they’re crème-de-la-crème, they’re extraordinary—in their mid-twenties, very well-educated and wellinformed, more than half women. They had no question that this wasn’t the central issue; one of them immediately raised her hand and said, “Don’t you think it’s absolutely fabulous that our population is now declining in South Korea”— which is of course not their government’s position—“because now we can become a model for the way the world needs to 18
go?” I think it was very useful for me to say, “Yes, that’s a very good way of looking at it.” I think we can speak outside of academia, and it does require a different idiom in terms of how we speak. Lyon: I think that’s a wonderful way to end. Just to quickly wrap up, there’s one thing that stood out to me, as I sort of commented on running through that list of fields. Personally, as another faculty member, I was in awe of the range of knowledge that we saw on display here, trying to think about how one even goes about beginning to explore so many different fields. And Kyle, you made that wonderful point of how simply it can start, by asking a medical historian, “How do you think those Romans died?” That one simple question. That’s my takeaway from this: that as extraordinary as this range of knowledge is, you have to start by asking someone in a different field a simple question, and from there, that takes you to new places. So, let us thank our five panelists!
19
Humanity and the Great Seas: Conversation with David Abulafia Interview conducted by Hansong Li David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History and Papathomas Professorial Fellow of Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge. He was educated at St. Paul’s School and King’s College, Cambridge. As a maritime historian, he is known for works on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, culminating in The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (2008) and The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011). Professor Abulafia’s academic interests also include a wide range of social, economic and religious issues in ancient, medieval and early modern history. He is currently writing a history of the oceans, focusing on the longdistance trade and cultural interactions across the oceans from antiquity to modern times. On September 13th 2016, Professor Abulafia shared his historical insights with the Chicago Journal of History at the British Academy. Chicago Journal of History (CJH): Let us begin with a question on your career as a historian. From The Two Italies (1977) and Western Mediterranean 1200-1500 (1997) to The Great Sea (2011) and the The Discovery of Mankind (2008) you have expanded your inquiry on maritime history from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.1 Currently you are exploring oceanic history, having delivered a series of talks on ancient global trade at the Legatum Institute. It seems that the scope of your research has become increasingly larger in scale. What has been the engine and the guiding thread behind your research in the past thirty years? And what are some of the ongoing and upcoming projects that you have in mind? David Abulafia (DA): I think when one starts as a historian, obviously one is guided to some extent by interests derived from one’s teachers and so on, but in my case, without quite knowing what I was trying to do, I can now see, looking back to my very early work—my first book, The Two Italies was based on my Ph.D. thesis—how there are certain themes which almost
1
Abulafia, David. The Two Italies: Economic relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the northern communes, 1977; Italian edn., 1991. The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 1200-1500: The Struggle for Dominion, 1997; Italian edn., 1999. The Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean, UK and US edns., 2011; Dutch edn., 2011; Greek edn., 2013; Turkish edn., 2012; Korean edn., 2013; Spanish edn., 2013; German edition, 2013; Italian edition, 2013; Romanian edn., 2014; Brazilian edn. (Portuguese), 2014; other editions under contract. Updated Penguin paperback (UK), 2014. The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus, 2008; Spanish edn., 2009; Italian edn., 2010.
unconsciously prefigure what I was doing in The Great Sea and what I’ve also tried to do in some of my works on the relations between different religious groups. At the heart of this is an interest in the ways that connections across quite wide spaces— economic links but also cultural links—have been effected, and the interactions between these economic relationships and political developments. In doing this, I was very much influenced, as one can see in my first book, by the work of Braudel and the Annales School. But one can also see, if you look at my early work, that there is one very significant difference, and that is the amount of space I gave to political developments, to sometimes relatively small changes over time: the signing of treaties, the breaking of treaties, and the ways in which political decisions, political accidents, such as the death of a king, might actually determine quite significant outcomes. And it seems to me for a long time that the school of Braudel became so obsessed by structures, the longue durée and so on, but really failed to look at the role of individuals. It wasn’t interested in the individual. That was almost a sort of theology underlying it, which pushed individual choice and free will into the corner and laid such heavy emphasis on the permanent features—by which I mean particularly the geographical features—of the Mediterranean. So, the Mediterranean was my first area of concern. However, if you are working on the activities of merchants, you get used to a particular type of documentation—the trade contracts, the diaries, the narratives of voyages—and inevitably you get drawn to look at similar sorts of materials from different parts of the world. So, we have, for instance, the Cairo Genizah documents, most of which are actually at Cambridge.2 I’m not a specialist in that material, but quite a significant element among the commercial papers that survive from eleventh- and twelfth-century Cairo from the Jewish community is concerned with the Indian Ocean, trade down the Red Sea, and trade to the west coast of India. You also get inevitably drawn to the Genoese, and others setting up trading centers in Bruges, and therefore the history of Flanders and northern Europe, the Italian bankers in England, and so on. So even if you were focused for many great years, in my case on the Mediterranean, you always have to be aware of those comparisons and connections. What I am now really interested in is the connections between the seas: leaving the Med-
2
The Cairo Genizah documents are a collection of Jewish manuscript fragments found in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt. The Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library is the world’s largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts.
20
iterranean rather to one side, and placing quite a heavy stress on the three great oceans interacting with one another across a much longer period of time than we normally tend to think. We tend to date these interactions from 1492 (Columbus) and 1497 (Vasco da Gama), but it’s going right back in time. CJH: You are oftentimes described as a “maritime historian.” What do you think that term entails? What in your early years inspired your interest in the oceans? DA: Well, “maritime historian” is a term that I probably would not have used myself some years ago. When I was beginning in academic life at my college in Cambridge, we often dined together in the evening. I wouldn’t go every night, but sometimes, when I was quite junior, I would find myself sitting next to a guest, who would ask me, “What do you do?” Just to scare them off I would say I am an economic historian. I am not the sort of economic historian who is heavily engaged with economic theory, obviously. But interest in maritime trade has almost always figured in my works, perhaps with the exception of the book on Frederick II. It’s a sense of maritime history as people moving across maritime space. What I am not particularly concerned with (and what I don’t really have the expertise to deal with) are the technicalities of shipbuilding: the invention of navigational instruments, and so on, which tended to dominate maritime history, and indeed naval history in the strict sense of the contests for power on the surface of sea, which almost always comes into the history of maritime trade—just think of the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the English battling it out along the coast of India. But what has really dominated my understanding of maritime history are the ways in which pioneering merchants have spread out across seas and the ways in which it is not just goods they bring. Those goods, some of which still survive—you can go to museums and look at them—are part of the process of bringing cultural influences across great distances. Just to take a relatively modern example: the arrival of Chinese porcelain in Northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the effect that it had on people’s taste, and the whole life if you like, of the urban bourgeoisie. That’s the sort of issue that engages me very much. So, it’s not maritime history in the traditional sense. What has gratified me is the feeling that my type of maritime history is beginning to be practiced on a wider scale. Where I tend to be more critical, in terms of the current historiographical trend, is with concepts such as Mediterranean history, Atlantic history, Indian Ocean history, and so on. It seems to me that sometimes these terms have been bandied about and used in a rather uncritical way that have not necessarily engaged with the maritime dimension. There are grounds for doing that. Sometimes, of course, when writing the history of the Mediterranean world, which encompasses the landmass and the sea, how far you go into the hinterland is a question. So, that’s something that people are perfectly justified in doing. What I have actually tried to do is to see whether it is possible to write a human history of the sea as a space on which people cannot live in a normal way, but which they do inhabit in a process of 21
motion back and forth across it. I think that is a fascinating aspect of human existence, and something that has had enormous impact on the development of civilizations across the world. CJH: Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (1988), which you just mentioned, is not a work on Frederick’s maritime influence on Sicily, Malta, and Cyprus, but an interpretive work on the vast empire: the land and sea, the enigmatic emperor, his court, and his legacy.3 What prompted you to write this work on Frederick II, which is not a history of the sea? Have you drawn any criticisms in book reviews for reassessing Frederick II’s Christian piety and conventional wisdom, and challenging his status as the Stupor Mundi in a scholarly atmosphere that appreciates extraordinary kings? How well was your point accepted by other medieval scholars? DA: I had originally intended in my Ph.D. years to research and carry on writing through the reign of Frederick II. I’ve always been interested in him. In fact, I was taught about Norman Sicily and Frederick II in school (it’s very unusual, and kids don’t always get that advantage). I simply had too much material, so I drew the Ph.D. to an end at around the time he was born. But I continued to do a bit of work on his grand admiral, a very interesting character who became the count of Malta. This drew me into the historiography of Frederick II, and particularly the work by Ernst Kantorowicz, who was one of the most celebrated—I wouldn’t say most talented—historians of the twentieth century.4 His work on the life of Frederick II is very controversial. So quite early in my career, I wrote an article about what Kantorowicz had been trying to do, and particularly his links to rather extreme right-wing views in Weimar Germany. And this came to the attention of J.H. Plumb, who was a very famous Cambridge historian.5 By then he had retired, but he had taken on the responsibility to commission lots of titles for Allen Lane and Penguin. So, he approached me and asked whether I would like to write a life of Frederick II. I wasn’t quite sure whether I really planned to do it at that stage—I was in my late twenties, and I was probably just planning to plow on with my Mediterranean merchants, which might be very boring stuff. But he gave me that opportunity, and it was only as I began to write that I began to realize how radically different my own view of Frederick II was from not only that of Kantorowicz—everybody knew that Kantorowicz had greatly exaggerated this idea of Frederick being the Stupor Mundi, which was much influenced by the thoughts of Nietzsche and other philosophical positions. I began to see Frederick much more as a creature
3 4 5
Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. London and New York, 1988; third English edn., 2001; Italian edn., 1990; German edn., 1991 Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig (1895-1963), German-American historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, and the author of Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (1927) and The King’s Two Bodies (1957). Sir John (Jack) Harold Plumb (1911-2001), British historian
of his own time, partly because I insisted on doing something that the existing scholarship had not done: I put him into context by going back to his Norman predecessors and also to his German ancestry, which was obviously much less of my area of specialty. So, I came out of this—as I got to the sections on culture, and also on his political relations with the Papacy that were bound up with his view of Christianity—with a very different view from Kantorowicz’s, and from that of an American historian called Thomas Van Cleve (who had published a book on Frederick II when I was a graduate student).6 And I realized that there were all sorts of presumptions, particularly about cultural life, which seemed to me to be based on the mythology of Frederick II. Anyway, I wrote this book. My children were quite small, and I felt in some ways it was a rush job. Obviously, I wish I had provided a full apparatus of footnotes, and so on, but that was partly a space problem. So instead I had these commentaries on each chapter. The reactions of professional historians tended to be, “Well, of course, yes. Thanks for saying it. That’s what we wanted somebody to say,” which was encouraging. Putting Frederick in place as a thirteenth-century ruler—and indeed in some respects even as a twelfth-century ruler, as a conservative rather than a tremendously progressive and advanced figure—actually worked. Because it was published by Allen Lane, I also got reviews in the newspapers. Some of them, of course, didn’t particularly like the idea that Frederick was a much more conventional person than the mythology allowed for. But one would expect that the reviews in a Sunday paper would have their own views. What really encouraged me, however, was not so much the reaction in England, but the reaction in Italy. The Italians have very much bought into this idea of him as a great cultural hero. They published a translation which is still in print. It continues to sell very well, actually, and we just signed a new contract renewing the publishing arrangement with my Italian publisher. There are many people out there, friends of mine, indeed, who will sometimes say, “Oh no, we think contrarily that the direction Kantorowicz was taking, allowing for all his exaggeration, was actually as a whole better.” I respect that, because one is at least engaged in serious academic argument. But mine has become quite an accepted view of Frederick, particularly in Italy, given that the emphasis was much more on Italy than on Germany. I think that’s right. In Germany, I can’t really remember how people responded to the book (there was a German translation, which was terrible, because they actually abridged it without my permission). But I think again the academic community thought it basically was the right way to think about Frederick, although there was still a school of thought that drew on Kantorowicz’s approach. The problem in Germany was, of course, 6
Thomas Curtis Van Cleve (1888-1976), American historian, professor at Bowdoin College and the author of The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: Immutator Mundi (1972)
that this sort of book, which aims at both an academic readership including both students and one’s colleagues as a sort of long essay reassessing Frederick, and also the general public, is something the Germans don’t tend to write. The academics in German universities, at least in my area, tend to be more interested in writing very focused examinations of the sources. CJH: Especially given that half of your pages aren’t covered with footnotes. DA: Yes, but on the other hand, when the German scholar Wolfgang Stürner published his two-volume life of Frederick II in a series on the medieval German emperors that came out not terribly long ago, it was unreadable and indigestible.7 What really disturbed me about it was the failure to engage with big questions about Frederick: his attitude toward the papacy, his cultural interests, and the whole myth about Frederick. It’s basically one thing after another. One German historian, a man called Houben, did publish a very short book on Frederick in German and in Italian, because he teaches at an Italian university.8 And at the very end of the book, he very interestingly says, well, we have to choose between Kantorowicz and Abulafia, and I would choose Abulafia. CJH: In The Discovery of Mankind, you situate the discovery of the new world into a Renaissance culture in which Europeans reflected on their own culture and identity. You say, for example, that “the discovery of man in the Atlantic transformed the world...But it also jolted renaissance Europe” under the banner of the Abrahamic faith and the high level of civilization.9 What is the relationship between the
7
8 9
Wolfgang Stürner (1940--), German historian and the author of Friedrich II (= Gestalten des Mittelalters und der Renaissance). 2 Bände. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1992–2000. 1. Die Königsherrschaft in Sizilien und Deutschland 1194–1220. 1992; 2. Der Kaiser 1220–1250. 2000 Hubert Houben (1953--), German medieval historian, author of Federico II: Imperatore, uomo, mito. 2010 (Italian); Kaiser Friedrich II. (1194-1250): Herrscher, Mensch, Mythos. 2008 (German) Abulafia, David. Discovery of Mankind. New Haven: 2008. P. 313. “The age of the Renaissance did, then, see another ‘discovery of man’ than that which has been identified in the culture of the Italian Renaissance. In one sense, it was an incomplete discovery, for not all observers accepted that the newly discovered peoples were fully human. Often, they drew sharp lines between good people who could be redeemed by being shown the arts of civilization, and (importantly) by becoming Christian, and bad folk who were fundamentally evil, ignorant, bestial. And yet it was precisely the demotion of some or all of these peoples to a lower status than Europeans that moulded European relations with the wider world. The discovery of man in the Atlantic transformed the world, laying the basis for the great empires of Spain, Portugal and eventually England, France and Holland. It transformed the Americas, by mortality and conquest, and Africa, as demand for slaves to work mines and plantations in the Americas grew exponentially. But it also jolted Renaissance Europe: Christians, Jews and Muslims were only part of God’s Creation.”
22
Renaissance in the sense of the art, science and city-states of the Italian Renaissance, and the Renaissance as in the discovery of the new world? How did they happen together and affect each other? DA: It is a tricky question because some of the literature—if you go back to the work of John Elliott, a very respected and great British historian10—tends to argue that we shouldn’t overestimate the impact of these discoveries, particularly the discovery of the New World, on the way people thought or acted within Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. I approach this from, I think, an unusual perspective, because what I was first interested in, before I got to the New World, was the relationship between Jews, Christians and Muslims in, first of all, Sicily, and then Spain, which is where my ancestors actually came from. So, I had been writing a bit about that on and off. I did a particular study of the Catalan kingdom of Majorca as my first major foray into Spanish history. The last independent king of Majorca dreamed of conquering the Canary Islands. I felt I had to think about a very simple point, which is that in 1492, just as the Jews were being expelled from Spain, including my ancestors, and just as the Muslims were being conquered— they weren’t expelled at that point but conquered in southern Spain—the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, were becoming rulers over, first of all, the inhabitants of the Canary Islands (they only conquered Tenerife in 1496) and then also at the same time rulers over non-Christian peoples in the Caribbean, in Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). There is a sort of interesting paradox there. On the one hand, they are purifying their own kingdom of Jews and Muslims, and on the other hand, they are becoming rulers over a substantial non-Christian population. So, I got interested in the whole question of how the Canaries provided the model for what happened in the Caribbean, on which one or two people, such as Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a well-known English historian, have done a bit of work.11 But it seemed to me that there was much more to be done, looking through, let’s say, the eyes of Columbus. The first thing he said when he arrived in San Salvador, in the Caribbean, the first island he reached, was: these people looked to me like the inhabitants of the Canary Islands.12 So the whole question of how they judged the religious practices, how they judged the degree of humanity that these people could possess, seemed to me something that really deserved much closer investigation. 10 Sir John Huxtable Elliott (1930--), British historian, Regius Professor
Emeritus at Oxford University and Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge. 11 Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1950--), British historian, author of The Canary Islands after the Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century (1982) and Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 1229-1492 (1987). 12 The Journal of Christopher Columbus (1492). “Thursday, 11 October”, “Saturday, 13 October”. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1893. P. 38-39.
23
Because even allowing for the work of Elliott, a historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and of others like Anthony Pagden—a very fine historian and former colleague of mine now at UCLA,13 who had written an excellent book which touched on a lot of these issues to do with the attitudes toward these newly discovered peoples—one after another these historians did not engage with the late 14th and 15th centuries. They weren’t familiar with the materials or the mental world out of which Columbus and his contemporaries emerged. So, for example, Pagden is excellent on las Casas, but his las Casas is a mid-sixteenth century figure,14 so of course we have to ask ourselves about the very early stages of engagement with the native peoples in the Caribbean. That took me towards this topic. First of all, it was a course for my final year undergraduate students, which went well. And then I transformed it into a book. I have to say that this is one of my favorite books—that and The Great Sea, I think, are the two books that I’m proudest of. And it’s something which also, of course, relates to what I’m doing now: the big history of the oceans. It has a very interesting relationship to that project, because I was looking at specific attitudes to unknown peoples. I’m still dealing with the whole issue of the opening up of the Atlantic, the opening up of the unknown shores of North and South America, Africa, and beyond. So, this has fed into my current interests and work. CJH: The next question is rather abstract. As a region that connects Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Mediterranean Sea has witnessed trade, migration and wars. And when we study the history of the seas, it often seems that trade and war operate in the same space. If you have to generalize, what is the relationship between commerce and warfare? We have been talking about trade’s mitigating effect on wars since the time of Montesquieu. What is your opinion on the historical role that trade has played in geopolitical conflicts, from a maritime and economic historian’s perspective? DA: It’s a very interesting question, because this is actually what I’m writing about nowadays. What I’d really like to do is to contrast the Mediterranean with, let’s say, the Baltic and the North
13 Anthony Robin Dermer Pagden (1945--), British historian, professor of History and Political Science at the University of California in Los Angeles, and author of such books as European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (1993), The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Anthropology (1983), Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (1990) and Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (2001) 14 Pagden, Anthony. “Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas” in Representations, No. 33, Special Issue: The New World (Winter, 1991), pp. 147-162; “introduction” to Bartolome de Las Casas, Nigel Griffin (trans.) A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1999)
Sea, what the historian Roberto Lopez15 called the “northern Mediterranean,” or the “Mediterranean of the north”: the complex of lands and seas all the way from England right up to Estonia, which formed a trading area that has many characteristics in common with the Mediterranean.16 There’s the whole question of the interplay between luxury goods and raw materials, and the rise of towns and all such issues. And then in the Mediterranean world, trade could actually be the source of violent conflicts. If we think of the Venetians and the Genoese, the Genoese and the Pisans, the Genoese and the Catalans, there is a history in those cases of outrageous attacks on one another, bloodthirsty episodes to read about. And yet on the other hand there is also the history of quietly carrying on business across political boundaries, both Christian and Muslim lands. One case I wrote about, the Almohads that ruled northwest Africa in the 12th and early 13th centuries, effectively suppressed Christianity and Judaism in most of—though not all—the areas they ruled. But they actually encouraged the Pisans and Genoese merchants to come and operate trade in their cities. So, the Christians penetrated into the lands of the Almohads, whom today we would call “Islamists.” They had space for the Christian merchants—of course they were foreigners, but the business was something they valued for, no doubt, fiscal reasons. The merchants were able to cross political frontiers, say, during the crusades, supplying the Egyptians even though they were enemies of the crusaders, whom the Genoese were supposed to be supporting. There are these long histories that sometimes led to scandal. But taking the history of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, we do find, of course, a succession of very bitter conflicts between competing powers, and it’s not just Christians against Muslims by any means, but rather Christians against Christians, again and again. The interesting contrast is, therefore, with the Baltic and the North Sea. Here with the Hanseatic League, although it went to war in the 15th century with the English and tried to suppress the expansion of Dutch trade (there were any number of episodes of naval conflicts), the fundamental principle was to bring together cities into not a union—some people in the European Union like to compare the EU to the Hanse and it was nothing like that—but rather a very loose and informal sort of arrangement. One of the effects of the creation of the Hanse was to help reduce, not to abolish, conflicts between members and to create an open sea in that area of Europe. So, I have always been struck by the ability of the northern Europeans to create a functioning network based on the principle of harmony, 15
Roberto Sabatino Lopez (1910-1986), Jewish-Italian-American historian, the former Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and author of many books on medieval European economic history, such as The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1971) and The Shape of Medieval Monetary History (1986). 16 Abulafia, David. “What is the Mediterranean?” in The Mediterranean in History, edit. Abulafia, David. P. 18. Los Angeles: 2003. Abulafia, David. “Mediterraneans”, in Rethinking the Mediterranean, edit. W.V. Harris. P. 64-93. Oxford: 2005
whereas what you had in the Mediterranean was a more competitive ethos. If you move into the wider world, in the modern period, looking at the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and even the Danish who turned up in India, this instinct to try to push out one’s rivals, and thinking of them as rivals rather than trying to create cooperative mechanisms for trade, is very characteristic of seventeenth-century European merchants trading with India and China. CJH: Speaking of the peace and war dynamic in maritime history, many feel rather nostalgic about the concept of La Convivencia, especially given the dire situations in the past few decades. What is your assessment of the historical memory of ethnic diversity and harmonious coexistence of religious communities in the Mediterranean? And how do you compare multiculturalism in the past and in the present? DA: I think sometimes in what I have written I have been a little bit too romantic, though not always. Actually, when writing about Sicily I think I tended to stress the way in which during the twelfth century, what harmony there was at the start of the century had very much broken down by its end. In the case of Spain—as I say for almost personal reasons, for it has to do with the history of my family—partly I like to engage with this idea of Christian rulers having Jewish ministers at court, and Jewish writers drawing on Muslim theologies, which had a major effect on the way Judaism developed in medieval Spain. I think what one has always to do, and I’m aware of this starting in Sicily, is to draw some important distinctions between what happens at the very highest levels of the society and what happens lower down the social scale. At the court in Palermo, Toledo, Barcelona, where the king’s wish to employ Jewish astronomers, or Muslim astrologers, whoever it may be, is the decision he personally makes, the king helps undoubtedly to define certain aspects of cultural life. But when we reach the countryside, do we see the same harmony? Well, in some respects we might, as we see that it happened in so many medieval societies, like Sicily, where Greek peasants and Muslim peasants lived side by side. Gradually the Muslims were absorbed into Christian society, beginning to take Christian names. That slow process of osmosis took place. But it was a different sort of process than that which we see in the top levels of society. And in the middle, we often find in the towns, for instance, the outbreak of pogroms in Spain and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. We always have to be alert to the fact that under the surface there are tensions and people who wind up the dominant Christian population against Muslims, Jews and other minorities in the period that I am interested in. So, beware of the romantic notion of Convivencia. But I think there is a certain value in the concept all the same, especially when you compare what’s happening at certain points in the history of Spain with what is happening in some other parts of Europe—in Spain, for example, the tenth century under Muslim rule and the early thirteenth century in Christian To24
ledo—but one has to be very careful not to assume that this is the general state of things. There is an American historian who prefers to talk about conveniencia [convenience] instead of Convivencia, and I think there is some truth to that, for it was a very pragmatic idea of tolerance. If you happened to be king over all these religious groups, it was certainly a pragmatic approach to the existing minorities and the mixed populations. For one of your first concerns was to keep order, always. CJH: Let us briefly move to modern times. In much of the twentieth century, the Mediterranean Sea was divided along the Cold War’s ideological lines. But since the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, what now accounts for the divisions and conflicts in the Mediterranean? Is it religion? Economy? Or the perceptions of the past? DA: I think the Mediterranean nowadays is at a critical juncture. I wrote my book The Great Sea and talked in terms of five great periods of Mediterranean history, and my fifth period seems to be coming to an end after a very brief amount of time, beginning more or less with the building of the Suez Canal and the first steamships in the mid-nineteenth century. But we are now at a juncture where the Mediterranean has actually, in a certain sense, ceased to exist. Because since the middle of the twentieth century, the interconnection between the north and the south has been very much reduced. And there is an irony in this, because the development that lies at the start of this process is something which was a very welcome development: decolonization—the fact that the French left Algeria, the Italians left Libya, the English lost their hold over Egypt, and so on. But one of the results of decolonization at the time when the Soviet Union was trying to extend its influence in the Mediterranean was that an external power came in and helped to break the link between countries like Algeria and France (obviously, there was a long history of resentment toward the way the French treated the Algerians and other peoples). So, what one is actually looking at in the middle of the twentieth century is already a process of political fragmentation of the Mediterranean, which was accentuated a little further by the fact that the Soviet Union, having helped to set up Israel in the first place, then decided that it could use Israel by creating an anti-Israel alliance among the Arab nations. So, you already have a divided Mediterranean. And then the creation of the Common Market, later known as the European Union, accentuated that, as it began to take in more and more of the Mediterranean countries on the northern shores. Those countries looked towards Brussels, Strasbourg, and indeed Frankfurt as the financial center of the German economy, and looked away from the Mediterranean, seeking to model themselves as far as possible on the vibrant German economy. In doing so, they sought a more European than Mediterranean identity. I don’t think there is nearly as much initiative to develop commercial ties across the Mediterranean between the north and south. And one can understand why. One can understand, for example, that the Libyans might not have wanted the Ital25
ians to interfere in their affairs after they had disastrously ruined the country. And now, of course, we have further crises both within the Eurozone and with the “failure” of the Arab Spring. Or it should be said that the Arab Spring has not produced the dividends that many people perhaps expected when the revolutions broke out. The war in Syria and the migration crisis, the whole big question about the role of Turkey and whether we should try to restore its role as the focal point of a sort of neoOttomanism. All these issues I think make the Mediterranean a much more dangerous place. CJH: We have discussed the shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Are you under the impression that our attention on politics, trade, and culture is currently shifting toward the Pacific? And what is the role of the Pacific in your present study of the oceans? DA: I think we are, and one sees that through the policy that the American president has adopted—well, he comes from Hawaii. Realistically, one has to take into account the phenomenal developments taking place in China, but one also has to beware that the Chinese are in a much more fragile economic and political position than perhaps British businessmen and British universities trying to do business are aware. Perhaps we underestimate the ethnic tensions, which could really be quite explosive in the long term. It is already clear that economic growth has slowed, and it is clear, too, of course that there is an enormous gulf between the success stories of the big cities such as Shanghai and what is happening in some of the remote rural regions. But we have to take China very seriously into account, for we are looking at the sort of situation in which China itself is beginning to look outwards, which is important because there has been a long period of time in Chinese history where China hasn’t tended to look out through the sea, periods in which officially maritime trade by Chinese merchants was forbidden—it is a bit exaggerated, for they carried on some activities nonetheless. But now we have China building merchant fleets, we have the attempt to rebuild the two silk roads—the maritime silk route, and the overland trade routes across Asia, which is having a very important role in the formation of Chinese foreign policy towards countries such as Iran. Bear in mind that Japan, even though its economy has weakened considerably, is still one of the major economies in the world. South Korea, of course, plays an enormous role now as a producer of exported goods, and potentially some of the countries around the South China Sea But the question of the South China Sea is one of the potential flashpoints in the Pacific. So, I think there has been something of a shift to the western Pacific, to the particular part of the Pacific, such as the South China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Japan sea, for that is a strategically important area which is sort of Mediterranean in its own right. CJH: What is your opinion on the freedom of sea? There is a long tradition, from Thucydides to Grotius and Montesquieu, of appreciating the freedom of navigation. Thucydides gave credit to Minos and others for eliminating pirates and
allowing free movement of merchants across the Mediterranean Sea. Grotius praised the Romans for similar reasons. As a maritime historian, what is your assessment of our notion of the free sea today, in light of international maritime laws such as the UNCLOS? Do you think it is a pragmatic goal or a romantic fantasy? DA: The question of piracy has been a major issue in the coast of Africa for some years. Grotius, of course, asserted in the Mare Liberum (1609)—although it is not as if it is a tremendously elaborate argument—the freedom of the sea with the help of some classical sources. But when Grotius was asked, on the other hand, to defend the Dutch right to hold certain territories in the East Indies, somehow the concept of the free seas sort of evaporated and turned into the idea of European powers establishing themselves in a particular territory, forbidding others to invade their territory without permission. So, Grotius is not quite as consistent as one might like to think. On the other hand, this very short tract obviously set up an absolutely vital principle. It is very interesting to look at the ways in which countries in recent times have been trying to define the maritime limits of their control: Britain finding rocks somewhere way out in the Atlantic where we can drill for oil, which are almost as close to Scotland as is to Iceland; and notably, of course, the Chinese claims to these islands. CJH: I have several questions on methodology. To understand the past, you use a vast number of literary sources. On the one hand, you study them as primary materials: poems, travel accounts, journals of Pigafetta, Magellan, Cabral and Columbus, and the Arabian Nights.17 You also evaluate literature to make historical arguments. For example, in Frederick II you point out that most of the court poetry was written to entertain the emperor’s close group of familiars and “not intended to mark the creation of a great European literature, though Italian literary scholars can be excused for reading it in such a light”18. In general, what is the relationship between your historical scholarship and literature?
the problems with various German schools of historical writing is excessive dependence on charters and chronicles without taking on board the literary creations and artistic creations of the time. Nowadays, people tend to be very passionate about the need to take material objects into account: the “material turn” as my colleagues call it. I don’t like the term “turn”, but I have always used material objects and have been fascinated by them. And in writing nowadays about the East Indian trade, nothing gives me greater pleasure than to go to the museums and to look at the pieces of porcelain taken from the shipwrecks—that’s not about literature but about the ways in which historians need to latch on to the full range of sources. When you are using literary sources, of course, you have to be very careful that you don’t mix fictions, which may be rooted in established literary traditions, with descriptions of reality. That could be a problem with some of these travel narratives, like Marco Polo. But so long as one is aware of those difficulties, it seems to be that these sources are of absolutely fundamental importance, because even if they don’t tell you what happened, they tell you about how people visualized certain types of journey, for instance, whatever they might be. CJH: In The Great Sea, Part I: “The First Mediterranean, 22000 BC-1000BC” and Part II: “The Second Mediterranean, 1000 BC-AD 600”, your historical narrative features a vast number of ancient sources, from Homer to Herodotus and Thucydides. For example, you pay special attention to events such as the fall of Troy in your historical inquiry.19 As a modern historian, what do you think of ancient Greek historical writers, and how do you use them in your own research?
DA: As a historian, I have always regarded it as axiomatic that one should, if—for the sake of the argument—studying twelfthcentury Sicily, take on board all source materials. I think one of
DA: Thucydides, I must admit, I find rather boring. He is always regarded as somebody who has this amazing understanding of political relationships, himself being bound up with what was happening at the time. The one I have always been more open to is Herodotus, precisely because we have this interwoven account of events—how accurate they are, is not for me to say—and attention to traditions, myths, and so on. I am fascinated by his sort of “anthropology.” I always remember the passage in which he talks about the Persian soldiers who have been killed, and how their skulls are much thinner, and this is because they wore hats all the time.20 We say to ourselves, this
17 Alonso de Ercilla’s epic poem on the Spanish conquest of the Araucanian
19 Abulafia, David. The Great Sea. London, 2011. Chapters I-II; Interview:
Indians of Chile; Theodore de Bry. 18 Abulafia, David. Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. Oxford: 1992. Piero della Vigna: “the author of excruciatingly leaden verses”; Frederick, “delicate handling of a beautiful language” but “not at all original”; “poems thought to be the work of his sons Manfred and Enzo rise to greater heights”; Giacomo da Lentini and Rinaldo d’Aquino “seem to rise to the greatest heights…because they show a sensitivity and rhythmical handling of Italian.” P.273-77 “It is poetry written to entertain the court, or rather the emperor’s closed group of familiars; it was not intended to mark the creation of a great European literature, though Italian literary scholars can be excused for reading it in such a light.” P. 273-4
20
“Eine Brücke zwischen den Kulturen”: “Das große Thema in meinem Buch ist, wie sich im Mittelmeerraum zusammenhängende Regionen herausbilden und wieder untergehen. Der Untergang von Troja ist ein Ereignis in einer Serie von Krisen, die das Erste Mediterrane Zeitalter beendeten.”— https://www.buechergilde.de/interview-mitdavid-abulafia Herodotus, Book III 12. “τοῖσι δὲ Πέρσῃσι ὅτι ἀσθενέας φορέου σι τὰς κεφαλὰς αἴτιοντόδε: σκιητροφέουσι ἐξ ἀρχῆς πίλους τι άρας φορέοντες. ταῦτα μέν νυντοιαῦτα: εἶδον δὲ καὶ ἄλλα ὅμ οια τούτοισι ἐν Παπρήμι τῶν ἅμαἈχαιμένεϊ τῷ Δαρείου διαφ θαρέντων ὑπὸ Ἰνάρω τοῦ Λίβυος”
26
is scientific nonsense. But it actually reveals this extraordinary inquiring mind. So ἱστορία means inquiry, and it’s something that he was definitely practicing. It may not be the history that I try to practice, but as a pioneer in investigations, who went beyond simply an account of political events and warfare. It is an extraordinary piece of work. CJH: One of the challenges that face today’s historians is to balance depth (the amount of details and degree of precision required by the discipline), and breadth (the macroscopic grasp and generalization of a historical period that would enable us answer questions about our past). As a historian of both rigorous methods and broad interests, how do you marshal intricate pieces of materials to construct large narratives? How do you identify yourself within the historical discipline? For example, you treat the Mediterranean as a whole, creating a theater in which different people come and go, and play their parts, rather than giving readers a list of Mediterranean countries and devoting a chapter to each country. In this regard, how do you see yourself in relation to the traditional historians of nations and countries? On the other hand, what do you think about the current practices of world history, comparative history and international history? DA: What I was trying to do was actually to write the history of the sea, and really to battle with the practical difficulties that are involved in such an endeavor. It’s a history of the sea and the shores around it, but in writing that, one has to engage with the territories inland. Let’s say one is talking about the trading of grain, which is very important in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, and ancient Mediterranean as well. Obviously, one has to know something about where it comes from, and sometimes it comes from some distance inland. But to actually try to write a history of, in the first place, the Mediterranean, which isn’t simply an accumulation of regional or national histories, seems to me a very important objective— not because I ever use the word “transnational”, which I hate. I hate the word because of what it assumes, which is that one can talk about the nation-state well before it comes into existence or before the concept’s been articulated. And if one is going right back to Neanderthals, as I do, then it’s unworkable. I think it has become one of those fashionable words that is just thrown into every historical conversation, sometimes without really being applicable. Situating myself in the community of historians, I think one thing which I’ve never particularly been keen to do is simply attach myself to the latest trend. Rather, I’m always sort of depressed when I see very talented historians who want to be part of the material turn or the cultural turn or whatever turn it might be. It’s part of a herd instinct, and they gather together and often indulge in a sort of impenetrable jargon, which is something I’ve always tried to avoid. I don’t think it’s necessary; I think sometimes it’s actually a way of papering over weaknesses in one’s understanding of what’s going on. Now, inevitably, the work of an historian involves simplifying, reducing extremely complex series of events. With 27
what I’ve just been writing about, which is to do with the Danes establishing trading forts in West Africa and the West Indies and in India, it’s actually a history of places that are occupied, conquered by rivals, reoccupied, reconquered, etc., and it goes on and on and on; and clearly one has to simplify that, one has to try to demonstrate what the overall characteristic of the relationship between, in this case, the Danish trading companies and these forts from which they operated was. So, that’s part of the task of an historian. Part of the task of the historian is also to do this in an accessible way which raises the question of good writing, and I’m not saying this is true of all my books (perhaps my early books less than my more recent ones), but I do pay an enormous amount of attention to style. So, to write concisely, to write without lots of jargon, to write in a way which is saying something useful and perhaps even slightly original to fellow scholars but at the same time is going to engage and interest a wider public is the historian’s task. I think it is so important that academic historians reach that wider public. We cannot, in the English-speaking world, allow what has happened in Germany to happen, which is this divide between the academic historians who write for one another and popular historians, the quality of whose research is often very poor. We really have to bridge that gap. With regard to balancing breadth and depth, it is difficult. I mean, in writing The Great Sea or my current book, again and again, I would sometimes get drawn into a very rich literature on issues which actually, I began to realize, I was only able to devote about three lines to. When I was writing about the Peloponnesian War, and now in writing about these Danes and Swedes and their trading world, there is a very rich literature in other languages. Some of it, in this case, is in Danish and Swedish, which I can sort of make sense of, but it’s very hard work. You have to say to yourself, “Well, you can achieve a certain depth, but you simply cannot pursue these things, at least within the context of this book. You might for other purposes, for a research article or whatever, but you always have to be aware of the limits, in this sort of book, of how deep you can go.” CJH: And what is your opinion on comparative histories? DA: What I’m much more interested in is talking about “going global.” In Cambridge nowadays, the great fashion is this sort of global turn, and I’m certainly a part of the global turn. But it’s not something I’ve really made a conscious decision to latch on to, and I take the view particularly in the context of the attempt, which is now becoming quite widespread in Britain, to start talking about the global Middle Ages. So, you have a conference where experts on, say, Yuan China speak alongside experts on Valois France, and so on. To me, it can be quite interesting just from the perspective of thinking about different fiscal systems, for example. It gives you some ideas about how you might approach the one you’re actually working on by looking at another one. But much more importantly it actually allows you to think about connections. What really matters is the history of connections, and that is where what I’m doing with maritime
connections—right across the globe and across the three major oceans, plus the Arctic Ocean when it comes into play in the sixteenth century—is really worth doing. It is about the way in which these civilizations interacted across global space, and from that perspective, about the role of trade, and also the role of empire building and things like that. But the role of trade is of fundamental importance. CJH: The last question is on contemporary politics. We have mentioned Braudel in the context of historiography. The French historian was about to finish his Identité de la France by the time he passed away, a book in which he presents his insights on the basis for an enduring French consciousness. I would like to pose a number of questions on national identity and international politics to you. You have said, in the article, “The EU is in thrall to a historical myth of European unity,” that “our ancient institutions – our monarchy, system of law, our parliament – have survived more or less uninterrupted, while those of our European neighbors have had to be rebuilt time and again. This has given Britain a unique identity, distinct from a continent whose divided history has been characterised by revolutions and written constitutions.” You have noticed that since the 1970s, the European community has promoted rhetoric of a historical past of a common Europe, and those who speak against this understanding of history are brushed aside as being on the wrong side of history. 21 You helped found the “Historians for Britain”, an organization that seeks to clarify the European myth and informs the public of the implications and consequences of Britain’s troubling relationship with the EU. What do you think is the English identity? Is there a character of the Mediterranean form of life? Is there a European identity? And now that the British public has voted to leave the EU, what is your vision for a new dynamic, a new status quo between the UK and the European continent?
British public would have supported if it had been made available. The problem was that the Prime Minister came back with a package which hardly scratched the surface of the problems, and so we were in this very difficult situation where we all had to think very hard about whether we thought that the reforms were sufficient, because it does seem to me that the ideal position for Britain is to stand somewhat apart but also to be able to engage with the EU. Now, personally I don’t think I’d mind being part of the single market; I’m not as worried about the problem of immigration as many people—that’s not really what has motivated me. On the other hand, the question of restoring sovereignty to our parliament is something that has interested me very much. And what is, of course, the ultimate paradox is that this has happened as a result of popular vote. Now, we know that the majority of the members of Parliament is actually against leaving the EU. The Conservatives have agreed to be bound by the outcome of the vote, but it’s a rather messy situation. I’m the first to admit that. I think that with Brexit having won not by a landslide, but by a respectable but not overwhelming majority, it is absolutely vital that the government—and I think this government will do it—takes into account the views of the sensible people who opposed Brexit. Just as there were
DA: I’m not sure everybody really has understood what I was really campaigning for. If they actually read the article I wrote, it was there right at the beginning. But of course, they got wound up, and they took a very different view. I should say, the article was published just at the time when David Cameron won the general election a year ago. If you actually look at the signatories of the counter-article, in the same magazine History Today, you will see that they were all people, I would say at least 90% of them and perhaps 99% of them, who were clearly rather upset at the outcome of the general election. So, I don’t take that very seriously, and I don’t think that they actually understood, or wanted to understand, what was being said at that point. The position that “Historians for Britain” originally took was that we wanted Britain to play a role in a reformed EU, a radically reformed EU. And I think that that is a view which the wider 21 Abulafia, David. “The EU is in thrall to a historical myth of European unity”, in The Telegraph, Feb. 26th, 2015. See also “Britain: A Part From or A Part of Europe?” in History Today, May 11th, 2015.
Photo by Hansong Li
28
sensible people who supported Brexit—I mean, there were also some weird racists—there were some people who didn’t understand the issues. In fact, the quality of the debate was so lamentable on both sides. The public was not given the information it needed about what the European Commission is, what the Council of Ministers is, all these things. We were left in a state of ignorance about the fundamental issues. CJH: Is that what Historians for Britain is trying to address? DA: Well, when Cameron came back, the majority of the members of “Historians for Britain”, though not all of them, decided that they really supported Brexit. Some of them were a bit taken aback. One defensible position was that if the public voted for Brexit, we should continue to negotiate, which was what Boris Johnson had aired at one point—that a Brexit vote would be an opportunity to go back to Europe and say, “Come on, put more on the table.” So, as I say, it’s a messy outcome, but I really have the gravest reservations about the way that the EU functions. I mean, the issue of the so-called democratic deficit, the way in which Mr. Junker and the commission are able to generate legislation which has not actually been produced through a democratic process, is something which concerns me very much. So, too, does the way in which our own parliament could be overwritten by European institutions. But I think there’s always been in this country a degree of Euro-skepticism. It’s unusual to meet people who are real Europhiles. I did actually meet somebody today, someone I know quite well, who was wearing a little badge which combined the Union Jack and the European flag. And I said, jokingly, “I admire your badge (well, I don’t really).” A real passion for the European Union as it is, is something that not many people in Britain seem to me to feel. Even those who supported remaining in the European Union were very rarely enthusiastic about the way that the Union functions. CJH: Just quickly to go back to the question on national identity: English, Mediterranean and European. Is there such a thing as European identity, and in what ways are you critical of it? DA: I think what worried me about the concept of European identity was the amount of literature trying to promote the concept, trying to present European identity as something which may not exist but needs to be created. I mean, that is more or less a quotation, and I find that deeply disturbing. Many people may say that they feel European, and that there’s an emotional attachment to Europe. There’s a very strong sense, I think— particularly as a result of many years of membership in the European community, of a relationship with Europe—of Britain as a European country, and of the gap between ourselves and the United States. The political culture of the United States is actually more remote in many ways from that of this country than this country is from its European neighbors. But being European isn’t the same as being part of a European Union, which is planning to integrate more and more closely. That seems to me to be a fundamental error among the Remainers; they talk 29
sometimes very emotionally of how European they felt, but that is not the issue. We all feel European. I have mainly worked on European history. I travel to Europe endlessly. But I do feel, even when I’m in France, that I am from another country. We come from another political tradition, and particularly, legal tradition, and the difference between our legal tradition, based on common law, and the Napoleonic legal systems of most EU countries, is something of considerable importance. This has meant that it’s very difficult for us to fit into the process of integration. It could actually have a very damaging effect on the future development of our legal system. CJH: Thank you, and let’s end with your words to history students. Do you have any advice and comments for students who are interested in Mediterranean history, medieval and early modern history, and any other field that you have worked on? Do you have any suggestions on how they should approach the subject, and are there any things that you’d caution against? DA: Well, I have a very simple piece of advice, which is—learn languages! Because what we’re finding in Cambridge nowadays is that students are beginning graduate work with a very limited range of languages and the days are gone when you could actually expect undergraduate students to have wide linguistic knowledge. It’s really rather sad that all of that is gone, that even French, which tends to be the first language of choice in schools, is now not taught to the sort of level where people can cope with, say, Braudel in the original. CJH: And what in your opinion is the reason? It would seem that most people expect to see the opposite trend? DA: It’s extraordinary in this country that in the days before the Brexit vote, you might have expected people to want to increase our sense of being European by spreading knowledge of major European languages. Various governments came up with the idea that every school child should learn another language, but it doesn’t seem to have resulted in very much. I think that the sort of very high-level French and Latin, which I studied in school, and which involved reading a play of Molière in the original when we were 15 years old, is something that has completely vanished. And the study of languages has become very utilitarian, very much directed to, perhaps, knowing how to order a quiche in a French restaurant.
‘Seiknes Incurabill’: The Evolution of Literary Representations of Leprosy in Medieval and Early Modern English Narratives Alexandra Houston, Princeton University Abstract This paper examines the use of leprosy as a literary motif in poetry, narrative literature, and homilies from England and Scotland between the 1200s and 1500s, the time period during which a shift in leprosy’s literary connotations is visible. It tracks the changes in leprosy’s meaning, as it moves from a disease signifying holy suffering and nearness to God to a physical representation of a diseased and sinful soul. Examining predominantly narrative works, rather than focusing on medical or encyclopaedic documents, this paper attempts to pinpoint the perception English society had of leprosy and the times at which this perception changed. The advent of the plague cycles in the early 1300s, and their corresponding changes in medical theory and legislative precautionary tactics to keep populations healthy, is suggested as a major factor in the change n societal and thus literary perceptions of leprosy between the late 1200s and early 1400s. Introduction He is a leprous man, he is unclean: the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean; his plague is in his head. And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. Leviticus 13:44-45 King James Version Medieval descriptions of leprosy offer conflicting viewpoints on the disease. The Bible instructed lepers to remove themselves from their communities and live “outside the camp”, away from healthy society, until their illness left them, suggesting that their uncleanness incited real fear.1 However, lepers in medieval England and Scotland, the context that I will focus on in this paper, were also considered to be in some ways much closer to God than other laypeople. Accounts from eleventh and twelfth century England and Scotland describe the very devout praying to be afflicted with leprosy, so that their sufferings, reflective of the passion of Christ on earth, might shorten their time in Purgatory and bring them closer to Heaven.2 In recent years, a great number of historians of different disci1 2
Leviticus 13:46. Rawcliffe, Carole. Leprosy in Medieval England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2006. 59. Print.
plines have expounded upon the situation of lepers in medieval England, approaching their analyses from medical, scientific, social, and literary standpoints. These authors have created an interdisciplinary and comprehensive understanding of the reality faced by those afflicted with leprosy in medieval and early modern England. I wish to apply this new understanding of medieval leprosy to some well-known literary texts that use lepers and leprosy either as fully realised characters or as metaphors. By revisiting these texts, I attempt to determine a definite trend in how leprosy is represented in English literature between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and extrapolate the changes in societal perceptions of leprosy that this literature reflects. Many accounts of lepers early on in the medieval period are reverential, using the leper as a Christ figure representing righteous suffering. By the 16th century, leprosy more often represented corruption and even evil. Important modern scholars on leprosy, such as Carole Rawcliffe in her book Leprosy in Medieval England, have suggested that there may have been an observable negative shift in the literary depiction of lepers, but her book does not pursue this line of analysis in great detail. In this paper, I will revisit some of the sources discussed by earlier scholars, most notably Nathaniel Brody, to see if this decline was indeed a traceable trend, and if so, what social and medical factors could have influenced it. Although such a study cannot be comprehensive, I will attempt to isolate a few possible reasons for a change in popular feelings toward lepers through my analysis of these literary sources. Although medical writings reflect changes in how physicians and other medical professionals understood leprosy as a disease, literature in the vernacular harnesses the non-medical opinions of the laypeople, illuminating how a medieval English person would view a leper in their community. This popular opinion will help to determine whether lepers truly did experience a degradation of reputation in England at this time. Historiography of Leprosy Carole Rawcliffe’s 2006 book Leprosy in Medieval England is one of the most comprehensive academic works on medieval lepers. In the book, Rawcliffe explores not only the experience of life within leprosaria, institutions designed specifically for their care, but also the general attitude of medieval people (medical, religious, and lay) toward lepers. I discuss her work here to contextualize the reality of lepers’ lives in medieval English society and trace the complexities of their reputations. 30
Rawcliffe points out that both learned and popular medieval English viewpoints on leprosy were variable and complex. In fact, Rawcliffe makes a compelling argument that the modern popular image of the universally reviled and avoided medieval leper actually originated in the nineteenth century, and it is this image that has remained in the general imagination despite its departure from the actual experiences of lepers in the medieval period. The nineteenth-century medical writers Rawcliffe discusses characterized the disease, which had begun to return in the West, as an epidemic only contained in the medieval period through carefully enforced orders to “segregate and govern the afflicted and dangerous part of humanity”.3 Albert Ashmead, an American physician who wrote a succinct article for the scientific journal Janus in 1897, warned, “no charitable regard was had to the victims of the scourge… [isolation] was necessary”.4 Though he admits that leprosy will not affect those “who are clean in their habits, well separated in their families… living in sufficient remoteness from the inferior animals”, he stresses that “some danger still exists, and the spread of leprosy in various parts of Europe… proves that the disease has not lost… its vital stamina”.5 His tone suggests a pressing and immediate issue, and he declares the tactics of the Middle Ages to be both necessary and incredibly successful to its eradication. Ashmead and other nineteenth century authors regarded leprosaria and their often-restrictive regulations on the movement and actions of patients as evidence that medieval lepers were carefully and completely removed from healthy society. Connecting leprosy’s reappearance in northern Europe with the closure of several medieval leprosaria in Iceland, these doctors maintained that strict segregation of the kind facilitated by leprosaria of the medieval period was the best way to prevent the spread of the illness; however, they failed to engage with any written records on leprosy from the period. In response to these authors, Rawcliffe points out that there are often “yawning discrepancies” between historical scholarship on a period and the picture revealed by original sources on the material in question.6 Rawcliffe sheds new light on the “complex, often contradictory” medieval English attitude toward leprosy through her detailed analysis of original sources. Rawcliffe confronts the nineteenth-century understanding of leprosaria by pointing out that they were, crucially, religious institutions based upon a monastic model. Rawcliffe points out that growing late medieval interest in the life and Passion of Christ, led to the formation of the thirteenth-century cult of Christus quasi leprosus, which described Christ himself as being “like a leper” during his suffering on the Cross. This growing interest, and the increasing connection between the experience
of lepers and the experience of Christ, led to the founding of numerous leprosaria in the thirteenth century. Founders and patrons believed the foundation of such hospitals benefitted not only the lepers, whose sufferings paralleled those of the Son of God, but also their own spiritual purity.7 Reverence for the leprous body and its sufferings complicates the nineteenth-century understanding of the medieval leper as a creature despised and rejected by healthy society. The Third Lateran Council, which took place in 1179, did suggest the creation of a ceremony by which the leper was separated from “the company of persons”, implying suspicion around the disease in spite of these developments in popular opinion, but implementation of this segregation decree was fairly lax in England.8 Rawcliffe further questions the notions of medieval lepers as universally rejected by examining the structure of leprosaria themselves, determining that the strict regulations on patients’ comings and goings were a result more of monastic influence on the hospitals than communities’ unwillingness to mingle with the leprosaria’s inhabitants.9 Far from being careful about inhabitants corrupting others, the religious leaders of leprosaria were concerned about the sins of the outside world corrupting the lepers. They carefully oversaw rights to overnight trips, and most leprosaria allowed these journeys only for groups, for to travel alone was to invite temptation and possible sin.10 The officials at St. Thomas’s Hospital in Bolton ensured that residents’ souls had as much exposure to the word of God and as much chance at redemption as possible by holding thrice-weekly Masses in the hospital chapel, and required lepers to confess at Edlingham parish church three times a year besides.11 These highly regulated schedules of penance were not construed as punishments for sinners stricken with disease: rather, penance was thought of as a curative measure, a way for the penitential soul to move toward salvation.12 Rawcliffe argues that these thirteenth-century institutions and the increasing religious importance of penance elevated lepers’ social position—their suffering brought them closer to God and created the possibility for redemption. Leprosaria reached their height during the 1200s and earlier 1300s, when at least three hundred and twenty institutions were founded in England.13 By the time the Black Death appeared in England, most of these leprosaria were abandoned, repurposed, or operated with significantly reduced numbers, but an influx of donations continued. In Norwich in the 1300s
3
9 10 11 12
4 5 6 31
Ashmead, Albert S. “Leprosy Overcome By Isolation In The Middle Ages.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association XXIX.15 (1897): 738. Web. Ibid., 738. Ibid., 738. Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 14.
7 8
13
Ibid., 108. Grigsby, Bryon Lee. ‘“The Doctour Maketh This Descriptioun”: The Moral and Social Meanings of Leprosy and Bubonic Plague in Literary, Theological, and Medical Texts of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance.’ Diss. Loyola U Chicago, 2000. N.p, n.d. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses [ProQuest]. 68. Web. Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 304. Ibid., 308. Ibid., 338. Frantzen, Allen J. The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1983. 4. Print. Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 106.
and 1400s, leper houses remained popular charity recipients amongst testators, even though the foundation of new leprosaria had ceased almost entirely after 1400.14 Despite the decline in actual sufferers and the continued donations, royal courts of the l400s saw those afflicted with leprosy as far more dangerous to public health than they had before the Black Death. In 1427, the Scottish Parliament threatened banishment for any leper who did not report their condition to their parish church, which tracked the number of lepers in the region.15 Parish churches guarded the numbers of lepers and their whereabouts more closely in the fifteenth century than they had in earlier years, which suggests increasing concern about lepers’ effect on public health. The discrepancy between continued patronage of leprosaria and increased legislative action against lepers in the 15th century points to a lack of popular consensus on the disease’s implications, though changes in policy do indicate that lepers were certainly no longer thought of only as Christlike sufferers. Despite the popularity of opening leprosaria in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for the spiritual benefit of the patrons, a diagnosis of leprosy still seriously affected how the leprous person was allowed to interact with their community and could as easily be used to slander the name of a troublesome community member. As early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, rumours of leprosy tainted political figures’ images with suspicion of evil activity. In 1205 the Bishop d’Aigueblanche of Hereford was accused of having contracted leprosy, sent as a punishment from God for his treatment of English people.16 The dual capacity of leprosy to point toward both divine punishment and the touch of divine grace reveals the lack of consensus over its causality in medieval England.17 These viewpoints coexisted in the earlier medieval period: a record equated the Irish saint Finian Lobhar to Job for taking on a leprous child’s leprosy in his place.18 However, Rawcliffe clearly indicates that this understanding of leprosy as a “religious vocation” chosen by the devout in order to atone for their worldly sins and achieve grace did not survive beyond the middle of the thirteenth century.19 Chronicles of saints assuming the burden of leprosy disappeared after the 1200s; however, the idea of patient endurance of physical or spiritual suffering as method of spiritual purification remained popular in English devotional literature until the Reformation. Rawcliffe concludes that the standing of those who contracted leprosy was ambiguous throughout English history; there were always contradicting perceptions of the disease. Rawcliffe’s modern re-analysis of how lepers truly lived and were perceived in medieval England obtains a crucial distance from earlier leprosy scholarship, which did not discuss the
14 15 16 17 18 19
Ibid., 109. Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 183. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59.
contradictions in how they were perceived and written about. Whereas Rawcliffe uses court and town records as her main sources of historical evidence to argue for the reality of their situation, the twentieth-century scholar Saul Nathaniel Brody focused primarily on works of literature to analyse leprosy’s place in medieval imaginations. His seminal 1974 text on leprosy, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature, analyzes many of the literary sources this paper will re-examine in the context of Rawcliffe’s findings. While Brody discusses literature from France, Germany, Italy, and England from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Modern period, I focus particularly on the English literature he analyzes. Brody argues that leprosy overwhelmingly represented corruption and evil to medieval people, and that medical accounts of the disease heavily influenced literary portrayals. He argues that learned medical authorities set aside “the evidence of [their] senses because prevailing theory could not accommodate it”: in other words, tradition rather than empirical observation provided the basis for medical description of leprosy.20 Brody asserts that these physicians, echoing one another’s descriptions, do not have an accurate grasp of leprosy as modern medical authorities understand it, and that “descriptions of leprosy usually are pictures of combinations of [our modern medical understanding of ] leprosy and other diseases”.21 His arguments exemplify the way that twentieth-century academics understood medieval literary depictions of lepers and what they revealed about popular opinion; later in this paper I update this viewpoint through reference to Rawcliffe’s work on how lepers really were perceived. Brody’s argument for the derivative nature of medical work is grounded in the tradition of medieval academic writing: authors revered previous authorities, and adhered to ancient treatises rather than recording new information that contradicted them.22 Chaucer’s verse praising “the olde Esculapius… Haly and Galyen… Razis and Avycen” exemplifies the traditional veneration of medical antiquity.23 Chaucer’s great physician “knew the cause of everich maladye” from his close study of the greats.24 Indeed, two respected medieval medical authorities include extremely similar passages on leprosy: Gilbertus Anglicus (who Chaucer mentions in his list of authorities) in his Compendium Medicinae and Theodoric of Cervia in his Chirurgia. Since the chronology of the two men’s works is not entirely clear, who plagiarised whom (if either did) remains uncertain.25 Brody uses the “little sound information available” to the medieval medical writer to argue that he “[achieved] the 20 Brody, Saul Nathaniel. The Disease of the Soul; Leprosy in Medieval Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974. 38. Print.
21 Ibid., 41. 22 Grigsby, “Leprosy in English Middle Ages”, 54. 23 Chaucer, Geoffrey, and David Wright. “Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. 429-34. Print.
24 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 419. 25 Handerson, Henry E., and Leon Banov. Gilbertus Anglicus: Medicine of the Thirteenth Century. Cleveland, Oh.: Pub. Posthumously for Private Distribution by the Cleveland Medical Library Association, 1918. Print.
32
appearance of wisdom by calling upon the authority of tradition… copying authorities without citing them”, amplifying the exaggerated understanding of leprosy that he believes infiltrated literary descriptions of the time.26 According to Brody, medieval medical writers’ “capacity for combining fact and fantasy” in their uncritical deference to older writing manufactured an inaccurate conception of the disease, which in turn formed an attitude of fear and loathing toward the disease itself and its victim.27 As Brody points out, the medical theory at the time was based on the Hippocratic humoral theory, that the world was made up of four elements and the human body functioned on four corresponding elements: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. The medieval authority Brody analyses most closely, Theodoric of Cervia, accepts humoral theory and uses it to explain the four corresponding types of leprosy: “elephantic, which has to be produced from black bile infecting the blood; leonine, from bile corrupting the blood; tyrian from phlegm infecting the blood; alopecian from corrupt blood”.28 Brody sees the humoral theory’s influence in Theodoric’s work as evidence of the medieval medical writer’s dilemma: the dominant pre-existing theory took precedence over empirical observation and produced inaccurate symptomatic descriptions that would not occur in “true” cases of leprosy as modern physicians record it.29 He argues, essentially, that the medieval hatred and fear of leprosy he diagnoses stems from how medical authors believed the disease was caused. Brody looks at how lepers appear in vernacular literature in order to examine medieval English lay society’s true perception of leprosy. This analytic approach certainly may prove productive; however, because Brody’s book, with its harsh conclusions, was written before Rawcliffe’s more recent investigations into the complex reality of English lepers, his analysis of English sources can and should be revisited in light of the new historiography. In this paper, I will reconsider “The Testament of Cresseid” by Robert Henryson and the medieval romance “Titus and Vespasian”, which he discusses only briefly, to see if these fit into a larger unchanging canon of opinions on leprosy, as Brody argues, or if they instead suggest a gradual shift in opinions. I will also consider English material Brody does not, in order to better determine whether his argument holds true in England specifically, or, if it does not, draw a more accurate conclusion from the documents examined in light of more recent scholarship. As Andrew Cunningham argued in 2002, a disease is necessarily a social phenomenon more than simply a biological one: humans look for the causes of or reasons for their ailments, and this emphasis on etiology ensures that diseases are not experienced simply by what they do to the body, but also by how the affliction is described, how the description is heard, and 26 27 28 29 33
Brody, Disease of the Soul, 42-3. Ibid., 35. As quoted in Brody, Disease of the Soul, 37. Ibid., 59.
how societal norms process the end results.30 Because of this, every disease must be considered within its societal and historical context in order to be properly understood. No disease is historically constant, either in its biological or its social form, and social reinforcement of the understanding of a disease can change how it is perceived over time, both by medical professionals and by laypeople.31 Leprosy was a disease buffeted by opinions about both its causes and its implications, and in order to evaluate changes in lepers’ standing in English society, we must first examine what exactly being a leper meant to medieval English people. Leprosy: Definition and Connotations Modern physicians understand leprosy and its symptoms to be synonymous with the infectious bacterial illness Hansen’s disease. Hansen’s disease is caused by Mycobacterium leprae, which can enter the body through scratches in the skin, the mouth, or the nose, and causes disfiguring skin sores, nerve destruction at the extremities, and eventually, degeneration of facial features.32 Hansen’s disease, or lepromatous leprosy, is the most serious and extreme form of leprosy, though another strain, tuberculoid leprosy, also exists. Tuberculoid leprosy also causes nerve damage, but it can suddenly “self-heal” and leave the skin relatively intact, while Hansen’s disease does not spontaneously disappear.33 Even though it is highly communicable, the bacterium rarely successfully infects those exposed to it, and the incubation period necessary for symptoms to appear lasts between two and ten years.34 In pre-laboratory medicine, however, leprosy was a very different disease. It was not caused by any external pathogen, but rather had a range of causes, and was considered both hereditary and infectious. The symptoms understood by medieval physicians to indicate leprosy may, to us, indicate such illnesses as syphilis, scabies, psoriasis or even eczema.35 The medieval system for understanding diseases and afflictions of the body is entirely different from the modern microbial system, which is based on singling out and treating a causative agent. Medieval medicine was focused on symptoms, so all generally recognized signs of leprosy from medieval medical literature will be considered indicative of leprosy in the sources examined here. Since my aim is to understand how lay opinions of lepers shifted from the thirteenth to the sixteenth through examining literary sources, it is essential that my definition of leprosy is consistent with its use in the period under investigation. 30 Cunningham, Andrew. “Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting the Gordian Knot.” Asclepio 54.1 (2002): 14. Web.
31 Ibid, 14. 32 Brenner, Elma. “The Leprous Body in Twelfth and Thirteenth
Century Rouen: Perceptions and Responses”. The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture. By Jill Ross, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and Anna Lisa Taylor. 240-46. Print. 33 Ibid, 244. 34 Ibid., 242. 35 Brody, Disease of the Soul, 41.
A brief overview of the prevailing medical theory in medieval England is necessary prior to my discussion of the specific symptoms and causes of leprosy in order to understand where the bias against lepers came from. Humoral theory was the dominant medical theory to which physicians tailored their understanding of illnesses.36 In medieval medicine, there was no clear distinction between the symptom and the disease: even something like a headache was treated as a disease in and of itself. A person’s innate humoral composition was influenced by their habits, lifestyle, and environment, and made up the basis of their physical health. Excessive or inadequate amounts of the humors could render one more susceptible to an outside disease-causing force such as a plague, or cause an ailment within the body.37 When a person began to feel or act strangely, the feeling was interpreted as a sign of illness, and physicians treated the signs and symptoms a person exhibited that made them conspicuously ill. The theory stresses internal equilibrium: the four humours, each corresponding to one of the four elements of the world, must be kept in the correct balance within the body through eating habits, exercise, lifestyle, and, significantly, a moderate and rational mindset.38 There were also five “non-naturals”, factors existing outside the body that the individual could still manipulate to ensure physical and spiritual health, according to the hugely influential Greek physician Galen. These were diet, air or environment, physical exercise, sleep, evacuation of waste matter (which included superfluous amounts of any of the four humours), and “accidents of the soul” or psychological wellbeing.39 In medieval England, the Greek emphasis on rationality and a moderation of spirit to create wellbeing was channelled into Christianity, and immoderation became sin. The soul had to be in good health, free of guilt or wickedness, for the body to be healthy, and an unhealthy or debilitated body suggested a corrupted soul.40 In later medieval medical theory, the presence not only of sin but of fear, anxiety, rage, or any unbalanced emotion could cause illness in and of itself, and render the individual more susceptible to miasmic infection.41 Leprosy could be contracted through extended and unchecked fear or wrath as well as through miasmas or humoral imbalances, making it seem acutely threatening, particularly after the plague was introduced in England in 1348.42 In the early medieval period, the administration of medicine was often the jurisdiction of the priest: as the keeper of the soul’s health, it was logical that he should be responsible for assisting in physical health as well due to the close con-
36 Wear, “Knowledge and Practice”, 167. 37 Wear, Andrew. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 155038 39 40 41 42
1680. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 106. Print. Ibid., 166. Rawcliffe, “Leprosy”, 67. Getz, Faye Marie. Medicine in the English Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998. 54. Print. Rawcliffe, “Leprosy”, 239. Ibid., 240.
nection between the two.43 In the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Pope Innocent III decreed that every Christian should not only confess annually, but also confess at the outset of receiving medical treatment, officially solidifying the connection between priestly duties and medicine.44 At the same council, Pope Innocent forbade all members of the clergy from participating in surgery, which may suggest an attempted separation of the priesthood and medicine, but this ordinance was in fact put in place because blood was thought of as unclean, and clergy members were supposed to avoid contact with impurity as much as possible.45 Surgery was an altogether different jurisdiction from medicine, handled by barber-surgeons who were regarded within English society as craftsmen rather than doctors. Humoral knowledge and the subsequent capacity to treat illnesses remained in an elite, literate realm dominated by the priesthood. As a result of the close relationship between the soul and the body’s health, a definite burden of responsibility was placed on patients for their own ailments. If a patient did not care for their body or soul properly, they would continue to worsen. The extreme deterioration of a person afflicted with late-stage leprosy drew great suspicion, for his condition hinted at a very unwell spirit. However, physical suffering such as that associated with leprosy was not simply indicative of sin: it could also be seen as an opportunity granted to the sufferer for redemption, or even an indication of divine grace, depending a great deal on the moral standing of the sufferer.46 As discussed above, there was controversy around whether the leper was indeed leprous due to his sinfulness or leprous due to his being chosen by God: accounts of holy lepers and the particularly devout praying to be afflicted with the illness cluster more toward the early medieval period, and a few of these will be examined below. First, the symptoms of leprosy as they were recognised in medieval England must be clearly laid out. The best way to do this is to look at how medical literature from the period described the disease. The thirteenth century Franciscan scholar Bartholomaeus Anglicus gives a comprehensive description of leprosy in his encyclopaedia De proprietatibus rerum. “Lepra, meselrye [leprosy], is an universall corruption of members and of humoures”, he writes, attributing a corruption of each humour to a different type of leprosy.47 This division of leprosy into humoral subtypes originated in the tenth century with the Islamic scholar Albucasis, who also stressed that all four subtypes were both highly contagious and hereditary.48 Bartholomaeus’s writing echoes these sentiments, and though he does not ref-
43 44 45 46 47
Getz, “Medicine in English Middle Ages”, 13. Rawcliffe, “Leprosy”, 132. Grigsby, “Leprosy in English Middle Ages”, 57. Rawcliffe, “Leprosy”, 47. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. “De Proprietatibus Rerum.” 1582. TS 1538. Henry E .Huntington Library, London. Early English Books Online [ProQuest]. Web. 48 Brody, Disease of the Soul, 54.
34
erence Albucasis directly, he draws on older medical sources to substantiate his description. He uses the much earlier writings of Constantine the African to corroborate his view on the disease’s causation: Bartholomaeus writes that “Constantine sayth” lepra (leprosy) is caused by humoural corruption and repeats his name twice in the first three sentences of the section on leprosy.49 The type of leprosy widely recognized as the most dangerous and severe was Elephancia, which “commeth of pure Melancholia”.50 Bartholomaeus called it “a full great beast & large” noting that “this evill… is more harde and fast, and worse to heale then other”.51 Bartholomaeus does not shy away from calling the illness by the name “evill”, revealing even in medical literature a deep-running bias that internal corruption was its root cause. By calling it an “evill” and a “beast”, Bartholomaeus suggests that the disease is not only the cause of great suffering in the afflicted, but also a sign of their internal state: the moralistic aspect of humoral theory meant that a leper could be scrutinised for the reason behind his affliction, and a leprosy diagnosis had the potential to cast suspicion on the morality of the sufferer. In a system of symptomatic diagnosis that defined a disease by what it did to the body, it is easy to see why the visually striking and often nauseating symptoms of leprosy suggested something intrinsically wrong with the patient. The unfortunate leper experiences a gauntlet of symptoms, as “universally this evill hath much tokens and signes… the flesh is notably corrupt, the shape is chaunged, the eyen become rounde… swelling groweth in the bodye… feeling is some deale taken awaye”.52 Bartholomaeus begins by listing the most notable, general physical symptoms, before delving into symptoms specific to each subtype of lepra. These are the most identifiable indications of a leper: the gnarled shape of the body, particularly the extremities, the deformation of the face, and the “stench” of the infected body and breath that results from the internal corruption. The terrible smell may also have suggested to medieval English people that lepers could have been stricken as punishment for evil: sweet and pleasant smells were thought to be signs of purity and goodness, while the smell of putrefaction signified corruption.53 A leper’s body seemed to be literally decomposing around them, a striking visual and olfactory signal that pointed to their once-hidden sinfulness. After listing the extensive symptoms of each subcategory, Bartholomaeus cautions the reader “lepra commeth of diverse causes besides the foresayde humours… for the evill is contagious, and infecteth other men”.54 There were many other ways one could “catch” leprosy, the most widely acknowledged of which was through sex, especially with prostitutes, as their cold, moist wombs were thought to hold onto leprous semen
49 50 51 52 53 54 35
Bartholomaeus, “Proprietatibus”, Liber Septimus, cap. 65. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 77. Bartholomaeus, “Proprietatibus”, Liber Septimus, cap. 65.
long enough to infect a healthy man. Women’s constitutions were considered colder and moister than hot, dry men’s, and menstruation was a by-product of their inability to produce enough heat to burn off or transform superfluous matter.55 Because of this incapacity, leprous semen could remain in the womb and the disease passed onto a healthy man who next lay with the woman. It could also be transmitted through the consumption of rotting meat, melancholic (cold and dry) meat, highly spiced meat, corrupt air, or even the milk of a leprous wet nurse.56 These myriad other ways of catching the illness in the humoral medical tradition, which include obviously sinful or immoderate behaviour such as illicit sex and gluttony, but also rather innocent ones such as corrupted breast milk, point to the medieval understanding of leprosy as extending beyond simply indicating a sinful soul. It could just happen to a person, and the suffering of a good person could be put to great spiritual use, allowing them to grow closer to God.57 Because humoral theory supported diagnoses that could be the sufferer’s own fault or entirely out of their control, its dominance in medieval England did not, as Brody supposes, necessarily turn people’s opinions against lepers. What, then, were the main connotations of leprosy? It could be a direct punishment from God, or a sign of His grace, but it could also be passed from parent to child or through an unhappy accident. Early on in the medieval period, it was viewed as a punishment for sinful behaviour, but during the twelfth century a diagnosis of leprosy began to more commonly suggest that God was inviting the leper to embark on a religious life and attain salvation, at least in religious writings of the period.58 This conception, springing from the increased association of the suffering of Christ on the cross with the physical suffering of lepers, allowed for the popularity of donations to leprosaria to build in the thirteenth century, remain strong through the fourteenth century and continue even into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.59 Lepers in leprosaria collected donations from patrons on the basis that both the donation itself and the prayers the lepers pledged to complete for the donor would speed the donor’s soul to Heaven. The Seven Comfortable Works, a Christian doctrine that instructed good Christians to care for the sick, feed the hungry, and clothe the needy, weighed heavily during the medieval period, and leprosaria in many townships in England did not only receive monetary donations, but shipments of weekly produce and food items as well.60 Caring for the infirm was thought not only to be an 55 Goldberg, Jeremy. “Women.” Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions 56 57 58
59 60
of Society in Late Medieval England. Ed. Rosemary Horrox. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 114. Print. Bartholomaeus, “Proprietatibus”, Liber Septimus, cap. 65. Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 55. Touati, François-Olivier. Maladie Et Société Au Moyen Age: La Lèpre, Les Lépreux Et Les Léproseries Dans La Province Ecclésiastique De Sens Jusqu’au Milieu Du XIVe Siècle. Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 1998. 188-201. Print. Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 32. Ibid., 258.
act of religious devotion but also a path to individual spiritual transformation, making the process of donation and charity to leprosaria and other hospitals a symbiotic relationship. However, medical and encyclopaedic texts produced during this same period, such as Bartholomaeus’s, stressed leprosy’s origins in humoural corruption above all other causes, and the suffering lepers underwent just as easily signified well-deserved punishment as it did divine reward. Perhaps lepers were serving their time in Purgatory on earth through their suffering, and perhaps their past actions were so evil they had been stricken with the disease. Both options were equally plausible in the complex theory surrounding the disease, but analysis of the period’s literature may determine whether the popular attitude toward lepers shifted from reverence to suspicion from the 1200s to the 1600s. Leprosy in Medieval English Literature Why can we trust literature to be a guide if even the medicine was informed by a host of traditional archetypes rather than attempting to reflect current reality? Simply put, there is an argument in modern literary scholarship that greater trust can be put in the literature of medieval and early modern England, particularly after 1350, than earlier English literature, because the tradition of basing characters on established archetypes fell by the wayside during this time and narrative literature began to comment directly on aspects of contemporary society. Many of these literary sources coincide, particularly in their treatment of the peasant class, with more quantifiable evidence from governmental, judicial and seigniorial records, suggesting that the image of society they paint is one that can, if carefully examined, be trusted.61 Though literary works are not intended to document historical events, they offer insight into medieval cultural practices and opinions that historical records often cannot. Of course, the authors and audiences of the literature being analysed must be taken into account, as no one piece of literature represents any society as a whole. Read carefully, with due attention paid to their context, vernacular English literature can provide an entryway into how leprosy was perceived, and how these perceptions changed over time. The analysis portion of this paper will be divided into examination of sermons and homilies, and examination of narrative literature such as romances, as both these forms had different aims and methods for achieving them. Sermons, written to educate the general, Christian public, were much more accessible to unlearned masses both in content and availability. Narrative literature, on the other hand, such as the works of Chaucer, were most often produced by the highly literate elite for the highly literate elite, making them more dangerous to use as examples of “popular opinion”. However, the poems and romances studied here make specific use of leprosy, which was a widely recognisable disease, largely as a result of its prevalence
in religious literature. Leprosy was so well-known and used so often in the literature, both accessible (religious) and elite (narrative), in the three-hundred-year period I am investigating, that I am choosing to study the narrative sources as suggesting a generally accepted viewpoint on the disease’s connotations. However, I do not claim that any of these sources, including sermons and homilies, represent a unanimous understanding of leprosy in their chronological contexts, as contradictory views of what it represented existed throughout the examined period. Several of these documents will be examined in translation, but wherever possible the original source material will be quoted and analysed. Piers Plowman, a narrative poem written between 1370 and 1390 by William Langland, only mentions leprosy three times, but the way it is used in these instances is useful to this analysis. The most telling mention of Leprosy is in Passus 16. Will, falling into a dream within a dream, is shown around the Tree of Charity by Piers the Plowman, who tends to the tree using the Power of God the Father, the Wisdom of God the Father, and the Holy Ghost to protect its flowers, leaves and fruits from the devil.62 This image of a Christ figure as a gardener, protecting sacred virtues such as Matrimony and Maidenhood from being collected by the devil, is quickly followed by the revelation that Piers can also teach people “leechcraft [medicine]… life for to save”.63 Here, “the sick and the sinful” both are “salved” by Jesus whom Piers taught the art of medicine. Piers separates the notions of a sick body and a diseased soul, but reinforces the idea that both can be repaired with the same thing: goodness and faith.64 This passage is where lepers are first mentioned: “both measles [lepers] and mute, and in the menison bloody” were healed by Christ, “the leech [doctor] of life”.65 The role played by Christ in this section is one of physician to physical and spiritual wounds and sicknesses, and lepers are an example of His capacity for miraculous healing. These lepers, categorised among those suffering from muteness and dysentery, are not necessarily sinners, but are instead simply ill: not entirely whole in body or spirit, and in need of ministrations from the perfect physician, Christ, in order to attain that wholeness. The image may be directly referencing the miracle of Christ healing the lepers in Matthew 8:2-4: a “man with leprosy” knelt before him and asked to be made clean, and Christ obliged with a touch. In the Bible, the man was described as “cleansed”, but this impurity was not explicitly tied to any sin of the man’s mind or past, instead presented simply as an affliction alleviated through faith. While the description in Piers also suggests no particular sin, it does place the leper in an explicit position of spiritual ill health, which requires a miracle of Christ to heal, a far cry from the uses of leprosy in the 1100s and early
62 Langland, William. “Passus XVI.” Piers Plowman. Ed. Derek Pearsall. Exeter, UK: U of Exeter, 2008. 30-46. Print.
61 Hatcher, John. “England In The Aftermath Of The Black Death.” Past and Present 144.1 (1994): 3-35. Web.
63 Langland, “Plowman”, 104. 64 Ibid., 109. 65 Ibid., 112-119.
36
1200s to suggest not just spiritual wholeness but uncommon closeness to God.66 The Middle English romance Titus and Vespasian, or The Destruction of Jerusalem, was written between 1375 and 1400. It tells of the journey of Titus, Vespasian’s son, and Velocian, his steward, to seek a cure for the king Vespasian’s leprosy through the healing powers of Christ. Vespasian is healed when he professes his faith in Christ and kisses the cloth that carries the imprint of His face, the Vernicle. From this point on, the romance concerns Vespasian’s quest to avenge Christ’s death at the hands of the Jews, and his eventual christening and anointing as emperor of Christian Rome. I quote here from a 1510 edition of the poem entitled “The dystruccyon of Iherusalem by Vaspazian and Tytus”. In the initial description of Vespasian’s predicament, Vespasian’s Seneshall Guy tells his host, Jacob, that Vespasian’s body is so “evyll apparaylled with leper [evilly stricken with leprosy] that he may not sustayne himsylfe” and that he is forced to lie recumbent day and night.67 The sight of him is “ryght pyteous”, and his men can “fynde no surgyens that can hele him”.68 As soon as Vespasian’s incurability is introduced, Guy mentions that he has heard of a holy prophet named Jesus, who, having performed many miracles in his life and after his death (including the curing of leprosy, as seen above), might cure the emperor through a holy object he had touched. Guy then reveals that to find this prophet is his purpose in Jacob’s home. Jacob asks if Vespasian believes in the holy prophet, and Guy answers that he believes instead in “the ydoles [idols]/ and wyll not leve it for nothynge”.69 Jacob makes it clear that if “he byleve not in the holy prophete” then he cannot be healed. He tells a story about a woman also afflicted with leprosy so severe “she durste not fynde herself amonge people”, but who believed wholeheartedly that Christ could cure her. This juxtaposition deserves a moment’s attention, between the leper who does not believe and has no hope of recovery without faith, and the woman allowed to suffer leprosy who has faith that she can be healed. It is clear that in this source, leprosy itself is not being portrayed as a punishment for any sin or faithlessness. It is the cure, or lack of it, that constitutes the presence or absence of divine grace. Only when Vespasian declares his eternal belief in and worship of Christ is he healed of his leprosy. This source uses the disease as a means by which those afflicted find or reinforce their faith. Here, it does not symbolize corruption of the soul or the presence of any particular sin: instead, it acts as a means by which the afflicted are guided toward accepting and following Christ, and their reward for their faith is recovery from their disease. The description of leprosy in Titus and Vespasian is similar to Piers’s description of leprosy and the original depiction of
66 Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 59. 67 Anonymous. The Dystruccyon of Iherusalem by Vaspazian and Tytus. 1510. TS STC 14518. British Library. Early English Books Online [ProQuest]. Web. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid.
37
Christ’s healing of leprosy in scripture; lepers in Titus are cured of their impurity through faith without the underlying suggestion that the illness is in any way a punishment for the impurity in the first place. This differs from later narrative depictions of Jesus’s interactions with lepers in one significant way. In later manuscripts, such as the one discussed next, the presence of leprosy is equated to the presence of sinfulness in the afflicted, while here the disease is more considered a means by which the afflicted finds their faith, not necessitating previous faithlessness (though Vespasian is originally a worshipper of idols, the woman in Jacob’s story is not). Written in the late 1300s, this source presents leprosy as a means by which faith is found without implying that its presence necessitates the internal corruption of the afflicted, giving a morally neutral representation of the disease while using it to illustrate Christ’s position as the perfect healer. Robert Henryson’s narrative poem Testament of Cresseid was written in the mid-1400s. Though not an English writer, Henryson’s perception of leprosy would have been shaped by a medical culture identical to the English one, as the two societies shared a medical tradition. Henryson is a Scottish poet and it is written in Middle Scots, but he is often considered a successor to Chaucer, both in narrative style and, particularly in this poem, in content.70 His Scottish citizenship is not disparate enough from the English identity to warrant leaving this important text out of this analysis. A thorough account of the reasons for and effects of a woman’s leprosy, it will here be considered in some detail. In the beginning of the poem, the narrator puts down Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which he just finished reading. He then retrieves another book, which tells the continuing story of Cresseid. By introducing the tale as something the narrator is reading, and an extension of a Chaucerian narrative, Henryson allows the narrator’s implicit biases to infiltrate the account subtly, without the reader being immediately aware of them. This structure is a common medieval narrative device, using a first-person speaker who relays an established story for a didactic purpose, but in doing so, manages to remain unaware of a crucial lesson the story itself reveals.71 “Lustie” Cresseid, who in the Chaucer tale abandoned the Troy-bound Troilus for Diomede (spelled in the Henryson poem as “Diomeid”), found that Diomeid has “had all his appetyte” and as a result “her excludit fra his companie [excluded her from his company]”.72 Henryson carefully frames their relationship around “appetyte” rather than anything resembling true love, so as to establish both Diomeid and Cresseid as lustful, and Cresseid’s abandonment by her former lover as something to be expected. Desolate Cresseid mourns her situation, and the narrator chastises her for changing “in filth all thy Feminitie” for “fle-
70 Mapstone, Sally. “Robert Henryson.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature: 1100-1500. Ed. Larry Scanlon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 243. Print. 71 Mapstone, “Henryson”, 242. 72 Henryson, “Cresseid”, 21.
schlie lust” that “maculait” (stained) her.73 His rebuke lacks the awareness that in fact, Cresseid in her loneliness is parallel to the narrator himself, who is also alone and too old for his “faidit hart” to be made “grene” and young with love again.74 The narrator, introduced as an outcast in a cold snap in the middle of summer, has more in common with the abandoned and “desolait” Cresseid. This implicit connection between the narrator and his subject, both rejected and alone, underlines the social implications of the leprosy that strikes Cresseid for her rage-filled rejection of the gods. The ridiculousness of his refusal to empathise with her despite their similarities critiques popular ostracism of a person for moral uncleanness. Cupid, against whom Cresseid blasphemed, declares that “hir leving unclene and lecherous… with pane we sulde mak recompence [should make recompense]” and asks Saturn to take on “this doleful sentence”.75 Saturn, the melancholic god, was known in late medieval England to control the melancholic humour and therefore to have elephantiasis (and in some sources, all subtypes of leprosy) under his jurisdiction.76 Saturn says to the sleeping Cresseid, “I change thy mirth into Melancholy… thy moisture and they heit in cald and dry”, the humoural imbalance of which was known in medical texts such as Bartholomaeus’s to be the cause of elephantiasis. Though the gods do not explicitly state they will give her leprosy, the choice of Saturn as the god who will inflict the punishment and his opening decree to fill her with melancholy brings the disease immediately to mind. When Cresseid awakes, she finds “hir face… deformait”, another word used often in descriptions of the effects of late-stage elephantiasis. Her father, on finding her, “luikit [looked] on hir uglye Lipper face… qhyte as Lillie flour [white as lily flour], [and] wringand his handis” in despair, for he know “that thair was na succour to hir seiknes”.77 Stricken directly by the gods, as punishment both for her anger against them and for her lusty, “unclene” behaviour, Cresseid is beyond the reach of a cure. The only option she considers for herself, which she suggests immediately to her father, is entrance to a “Hospitall” for the rest of her life, as is her “wicket weird [fate]”.78 Cresseid mourns, but accepts her fate as the correct punishment for her wrongdoing. In the poem’s section “The Complaint of Cresseid”, she bemoans her fate behind the hospital walls that shield her from “fresche flowers” and other pleasant things, and complains of the loss of her “cleir voice” which is now “full hiddeous hoir and hace”, another clear and widely recognized symptom of leprosy.79 From these symptoms described, along with the word “Lipper” used several times to describe
73 74 75 76 77 78 79
Ibid., 22. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 31. Brody, Disease of the Soul, 50. Henryson, “Cresseid”, 33. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 35-36.
her and her fellow residents of the hospital, it is clear that the disease of the gods’ choice to ensure she suffers suitably for her sins is leprosy. Cresseid’s experiences after being stricken with the disease reveal a complex viewpoint on lepers. In her lamentation she not only expresses regret for her new, permanent situation, without seeming to even think of an alternative to her seclusion, but she also admits without hesitation that “my Infelicitie, my great mischief quhilk [which] na man can amend” is the reason behind her plight.80 Once shuttered in a leprosarium, Cresseid turns to repentance as punished sinners are supposed to do, and re-evaluates herself under these new terms. When Troilus reappears and, not recognising her, but having a weighty sense of her presence in his heart, casts a “purs of gold” at her feet, Cresseid’s reaction to the unexpected interaction is archetypal of a repentant sinner. She falls down in despair, and declares her breast “wrappit in woe, and wretch full will of wane”, for Troilus’s “lufe, thy lawtie, and thy gentilnes, I countit small in my prosperitie [love, thy loyalty, and thy gentleness, I counted small in my prosperity]” while the two of them were lovers.81 She admits her own “wantones”, and decries her “self fickill and frivolous”: her lament here is her confession, her now-complete understanding of the reasons behind her divine punishment of leprosy.82 She declares that “all my gold the Lipper folk sall have” after her death, and dies very soon after.83 Cresseid’s remorse and complete acceptance of her fate, as well as her careful and traditional steps toward achieving repentance in the bequeathing of her earthly riches to the leprosarium, do not put her in the position of someone being punished wrongly, but rather give her a more elevated role. She has come to terms with her sins and, in doing so, spends the last days of her life attempting to repent as best as she can. Her leprosy is a rightful punishment for her behaviour that makes her miserable by but does not resent. Cresseid’s character, aware of her sins, is put in direct juxtaposition with the obtuse narrator of the tale. Oblivious to his similarities with the woman in the tale he recountes, he ends his narration by rattling off a brief morality lesson for “worthie Wemen,” declaring the entire poem to be made for their “instructioun”.84 This unwillingness to connect with the sinner in the tale reveals more about the social position of lepers who are regarded as being punished with the disease. The narrator is identified at the very beginning of the poem as a man trapped in the cold despite the fact that it is the height of summer. He laments his incapacity to feel true and passionate love like he used to when he was young: his old age and Cresseid’s abandonment at the hands of her new lover Diomeid and her incurable, segregation-worthy illness 80 81 82 83 84
Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 42.
38
put them in very similar positions, as both cannot access the love they crave. Both are outcasts in a cold world: Cresseid can no longer experience a garden filled with flowers, and the narrator cannot sufficiently warm himself. Their connection, which goes unacknowledged by the narrator, casts his judgement of her character in a new light. He dismisses her, at the end of the poem, as a cautionary tale useful only to teach other women virtue. However, as the reader follows the story of Cresseid, she grows to accept her ill behaviour, repent it and seek redemption at the time of her death, behaving in a way that shows her true status as a penitent sinner. Her leprosy puts her in the situation she needed to learn the true extent of her missteps and attempt to correct them in the remainder of her life, while the narrator remains in his cold home passing judgement on a woman who could have taught him a great deal. Henryson’s obtuse narrator gives the reader pause over continuing to judge the gentle, repentant Cresseid either for her past sins or for her subsequent illness. Henryson’s use of leprosy as a punishment is not put into an unjust light, but rather the opposite: the wiser figure in the story, Cresseid, does not reject the judgement of the gods who bestowed it on her. Her leprosy allowed her to repent properly, but it also was clearly given to ensure that she suffered a fate that would fit her sins. It was explicitly incurable, deforming, debilitating, and resulted in her neartotal exclusion from her society. Her leprosy was portrayed as a fitting penalty that eventually brought her peace with her past actions. Here, leprosy does act as an indicator of sin that distorts the body and punishes its recipient, though its recipient learns her lesson quite effectively, whereas the earlier texts discussed made no connection between leprosy and sinfulness. The narrative sources analysed above do change over time, from leprosy as a morally neutral means of leading sufferers to faith, to leprosy representing explicit corruption and sin and existing in the sufferer as punishment. Now, I will examine a few English sermons to see if a similar pattern exists in a more universally accessible (and thus potentially more indicative of popular understanding) literary format of the late medieval period. English Metrical Homilies from Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century is a collection of sermons compiled by John Small, none of which have definite known authors but all of which are written in the vernacular and originate from England. The first homily mentioning the disease is a retelling of Christ’s encounter with a leper who begs Him to make him “clene”. Christ answers, “I wil mac the of leper clene”, “and sone was na wem on him sene [soon was no blemish on him seen]”.85 The word “wem” has two possible connota-
tions here: bodily scars or blemishes, such as those which would afflict the skin of a late-stage leper, or moral stains, a definition implying corruption of the soul rather than the body.86 The sermon begins with a retelling of Matthew 8:28, Christ’s healing of the leprous man and soldier. When “Crist bad him that he suld hele” he stipulates that he tell no one “qua gaf him his hele [who healed him]”, but rather adopt a lifestyle of penitence and prayer as recognition of the miracle. This homily portrays Christ as a doctor, both of the body and the soul. The next segment of the homily from the late 1300s portrays him bestowing the same healing treatment upon a soldier who, with his knights, travelled a long distance to come before him and ask to be healed. Had Christ not made mankind clean, the homily warns, they would be consumed by sin, as represented by the “ugli, and lathe, and unherly” body of the leper, who Crist “clensed… of leper of sinne”, equating the disease and the sinfulness that led to its manifestation within the body.87 This “gift that God him gafe”, the gift of spiritual and physical wellness, is a different and much harsher representation of leprosy than is seen in the previous source, written only a few decades earlier.88 This source is a sermon, rather than a romance, attempting to quickly and effectively convey lessons about the will and grace of God to a lay audience, while the romance above, though still religious in intent, is narrative at its heart. The connection between the sickness of the flesh and the sickness of the soul is very purposeful, bringing to mind the extreme symptoms of leprosy to make a point about the state of a sinful soul. To be cleansed “of leper of sinne” as if they were synonymous makes a straightforward suggestion that to this author, the affliction signified sinfulness without ambiguity. In 1495, the Bishop of London Richard FitzJames wrote a sermon wherein he discussed Christ as a “perfyte physicyen” who healed the “Infyrmye of synne”.89 As an example, he recites Christ’s instruction to rich men to “selle all thy godes, geve them to poore men… and thou shalt have a tresour in heven”, to which the rich man responded “hevyly and soryly”, choosing to ignore Christ’s command.90 At this, FitzJames reminds his listeners of the chapter of John in which many men refused to follow Christ and chose instead to follow “the devyll / This was it of the leprous men of whom we rede in the xvij. Chaptyre of Luke / this was it of Judas the traytour to Cryste”.91 This sermon places the “leprous men” side by side with Judas, suggesting that the suffer-
85 Small, John. “Dominica Ii. Post Octabam Epiphanie, Secundum
STC 11024. British Library, London. Early English Books Online [ProQuest]. Web. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid.
Matheum.” English Metrical Homilies: From Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century, with an Introd. and Notes. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1973. 126. Print.
39
86 “Wem.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Web. <http://www.merriamwebster.com>.
87 Small, “Homilies”, 129. 88 Ibid., 131. 89 Fitzjames, Richard. Sermo Die Lune in Ebdomada Pasche. 1495. TS
ers had chosen to cast Christ from them and were lepers as a direct result of their refusal to take Christ the perfect healer into their hearts. Coming to Christ, FitzJames stresses to his audience, is to “be curyd” in both body and in soul, as Christ says “all ye ben chargyd wyth the burdon of synne / & I shall cure you”.92 Understanding Christ as the healer of both the body and the soul was common long before this late fifteenth-century sermon, but here the lepers are used to represent those who have chosen to turn from God rather than as an example of God’s healing strength. The lepers here are left leprous for their betrayal, as only those who follow Jesus will be cured of ailment and sin. This, like the homilies above, is a sermon, meant to be heard by many laypeople at a time, who came to the Bishop to be taught the path of Christianity. As a result, his deliberate placement of lepers alongside betrayers like Judas is meant not only to give a clear indication of spiritual betrayal and its consequences, but also a visceral reminder of the physical toll of rejecting Christ. Lepers are used in this sermon to bring up an image of suffering and decay, as those who refused to follow Christ were not healed of their ailments and were left to suffer. Christ is spoken of in the sermon as the perfect physician who can heal the soul and body at once if one chooses to abide by his preaching, and Judas and the lepers chose not to and were punished for it. Here, leprosy is clearly used to describe a punishment for deliberate sin, the choice of rejecting God and following the devil, and the physical toll a sinner’s soul takes on the body. Though he does not describe the fate of the lepers in detail, he uses the word “leprous” to bring up the well-known image of a sufferer. Lepers were commonly represented in religious art in the late 1400s, and their symptoms were widely known by members of the laity, making them an accessible metaphor.93 The lepers in this sermon are left with their disease, a direct result of their choice, and living with the illness is the punishment for their refusal to follow God. The earlier narrative sources and the sermons both draw from Biblical imagery of Christ healing lepers, presenting the healing as a morally neutral representation of innate human impurity cured through faith and the grace of God. Later sources, however, diverge from this neutrality, and use the disease of leprosy more viscerally as punishment for explicit sinfulness. Healing power of God is left behind in these sources, replaced with a more ominous moral of His capacity to discipline those who transgress by matching their physical bodies’ condition to the sickly state of their souls. Though these sources have different audiences and aims, their uses of leprosy change in the same way after the fourteenth century, suggesting that the two may have had influence over one another, or perhaps that the popular understanding of leprosy within English society was changing noticeably enough to influence its depiction in both genres. 92 Ibid. 93 Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 116.
What Changed? Conclusion and Further Questions The general trend seen in these sources is an increasing use of leprosy as an indication of sin in the leper, although not as a result of any particular sin, as Cresseid was punished for pride while Fitzjames’s lepers were punished for faithlessness. Leprosy after the mid-fourteenth century seemed to be invoked more commonly in English literature to represent the corruption that Brody believed it had represented all along, while earlier documents are less clear-cut in their use of the illness. Not enough sources have been examined in this brief paper to definitively argue that a trend in the popular opinion on lepers changed for the worse in medieval and early modern England. However, what has been studied here does suggest that such a shift may have taken place. By the year 1400, leprosy had all but disappeared in England: by the middle of the 15th century, it had become more a disease of myth than something confronted by English people on a regular basis. Perhaps this fade into legend was part of what allowed it to become more of a literary device than a disease evoking contemporary suffering. The first source examined in this paper dated to around 1370, when leprosy was in definite decline in England, and the last from 1495, decades after its essential disappearance. Through the sources covered, though some are narrative and others are sermons, there is a change in how leprosy is used. Earlier in the period, beginning with Piers Plowman, its presence in a body did not necessitate the presence of sin or evil in the soul of the afflicted, but rather symbolised a cohesive unit of body and soul that required the ministrations of Christ in order to reach a state of grace. Rather than placing all blame on the leper, these early sources seem to stress that after the Fall of Man all people are considered to be born sinful, and the extreme example of leprosy is used to convey the moral lesson that the only way to heal our inherent spiritual (and physical) inferiority is to have faith in Christ. As the decades passed, leprosy began to be used to symbolise a just punishment for specific sins or wrongdoings in the characters afflicted. This change suggests a general (but certainly not monolithic) shift in English popular opinion toward lepers, and one which not only pushed more responsibility on them for their affliction but also hinted that their leprosy necessitated the presence of evil or corruption in their very souls, rendering them less trustworthy. Though this trend is apparent in the few sources analysed here, it must be said that this is by no means a consistent change in all forms of writing: only narrative literature and sermons have been discussed here, from England and Scotland, in a very narrow period, and there exists a world of literary and non-fictional records that further explain the complex and ever-changing social position lepers held in England. That being said, there certainly was a change in the sources examined, and possible factors behind the change should now be briefly considered. The influence of the Black Death over how illnesses were perceived should be mentioned here as a potential major 40
factor in lepers’ literary decline. The plague cycles beginning in 1349 caused communities across England to become more vigilant about the spread of disease out of necessity, and theories about miasmas and contagion flourished after the Black Death’s introduction in England.94 The disease theory as it related to leprosy has already been discussed, and the increased emphasis on the miasmic aspect of leprosy’s spread would have caused medieval communities to increase their vigilance over how lepers conducted themselves. A leper who, through his or her own behaviour, exposed members of the community to the risk of infection, was a danger to public health. As it happened, those who were most likely to cause this risk were those most visible in the public eye for not following lepers’ customary seclusion anyway. The introduction of the plague, and the societal changes it brought, drew a firmer line between the danger of leprosy and lepers who refused to conform to the social norms imposed upon them for public safety. Again, not enough material has been analysed here to make a definitive conclusion, but the sources discussed here seem to suggest that the introduction of the plague and the resulting change in popular medical theories caused an upward surge in suspicion toward all serious illnesses, and leprosy, having always held a literary place as a dramatic and symbolic disease, was negatively affected by the changing perspectives. Leprosy was nearly eradicated by the middle of the fifteenth century, allowing its symptoms and effects to be taken up by literature and used metaphorically with a freedom lacking in the earlier centuries, when real experience with lepers may have constrained more fanciful depictions. There are a few ways in which the analysis begun in this short paper could be extended, first and foremost by studying English medical texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to track changes in the frequency with which contagion, infectivity and miasma theories were mentioned. A valuable source for understanding popular opinion that went nearly untouched here is official court records, ordinances, and writs, close inspection of which could verify whether the few remaining English lepers were put under increased surveillance by the government after the plague cycles began, as I posited briefly early in this paper. There are so many factors that influence changes in all aspects of history that to make a bold conclusion about what swayed a major change in popular opinion, or that such a major change existed consistently across a country at all, is dangerous for any historian. Even such a seemingly straightforward causal factor as the Black Death did not only influence medical theory but also the social and economic circumstances of every social status, particularly the poor, which would have had effects on beggars, almshouses, and leprosaria. Changing religious views and practices, so closely tied 94 Ibid., 255.
41
to medical ideas in medieval England, also had sway over how the diseased were understood, as did the social standing of the individuals affected and their behaviour within their own local communities. As a result, this paper does not point to any grand and previously unseen trend in the English popular understanding of leprosy in medieval England, but rather suggests that the literature of the late medieval and early modern period shows a general trend away from a balance between suspicion and reverence that dominated the twelfth and thirteenth centuries toward a more cautious, hostile view. It can no longer be said that lepers were always viewed in England with fear and suspicion, though it seems that as the disease itself waned in the English population, the more powerful it became in literature as a signifier of corruption.
From Guslars to Garašanin: Comparing the Influence of Oral Folk Literature on Croatian and Serbian National Movements from 1830 to 1865 Anna M. Walker, Princeton University In March of 2016, a United Nations tribunal sentenced former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić to forty years in prison for ten counts of genocide, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity during the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995. The white-haired Serbian nationalist, like his Serbian counterpart Slobodan Milošević, caused the deaths of thousands of non–Serb Bosnian citizens. At the tribunal, however, he declared that “the entire Serb people stand accused,” and he defended his actions as the “expression of the national will of a long-suffering people.”1 With this phrase, Karadžić, who evaded capture by international police for twelve years, invoked the Serbian people’s suffering since their defeat at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, more than 600 years ago. This battle and the ensuing Serbian subjugation to the Ottoman Turks is recorded in one of Serbia’s most famous and influential works – Vuk Karadžić’s four volumes of Srpske narodne pjesme (Serbian Folk Songs) produced between 1823 and 1833. These folk songs and epic poems recounted the trials and tribulations of the Serbian nation under Ottoman rule, led by traditional heroes such as Prince Lazar, Miloš Obilić, Marko Krajlević, Karadjordje, and Miloš Obrenović. By invoking these heroes and the Serbian past, Karadžić claimed to be the “spiritual reincarnation of Serb heroes of a bygone age … spinning new myths for his people to help propel them forward for generations to come, just as he had been borne aloft by the old legends of Serb suffering… .”2 Karadžić ‘s case may be newsworthy now, but he is just one example of Slavic political leaders who use oral literature to strengthen their cases for national Balkan states, often based on tenuous historical facts and in conflict with the national programs of other South Slavic peoples. Many historians have traced the influence of oral literature across the Balkans to the Romantic era of the early nineteenth century. Thus, in nearly every survey of nineteenth century Eastern Europe, the Balkans, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, historians mention in passing some variation on the theme of these legends providing
a “link to past glory and more importantly an inspiration for the Serbs in the nineteenth century… .”3 However, rarely do writers offer examples of how this literature concretely altered political mindsets or actions of the Serbs and other peoples in the 1800s. It seems that what historians generally agree to have occurred in the twentieth century – that epic traditions heavily influenced nationalist movements – has been retroactively imposed on the nineteenth century as well.4 However, by comparing Serbian and Croatian oral literature, such as the Kosovo cycle and the Death of Smail-Aga Čengić, with nation-building documents from the same states, it is clear that Serbian desires for an independent state outside the Ottoman Empire relied more heavily on the epic tradition to reinforce national memory, whereas Croatians relied less on their oral tradition after abandoning the idea of a unified South Slav state in favor of autonomy inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In short, I argue that by 1863 Croatian national desires relied on historical territory while Serbia invoked the national epic tradition. The oral tradition is a valuable historical source both for its long existence in South Slavic culture and for the telling malleability of its epics over time. As early as the seventh century, historical accounts record the Slavs’ penchant for singing as they moved across the Danube and into the Balkan Peninsula.5 While this singing was mostly oral literature until the spread of literacy in the 1800s, visiting Venetians, West Europeans, and clerical figures did record some of these songs in earlier centuries and their recordings offer a valuable insight into both the political and cultural context of the age. As Svetozar Koljević writes about the evolution of folk songs in his textbook, The Epic in the Making, “an epic is transformed to meet the needs of the later times – and the process is analogous to the shift of meaning of oral epic formulas of medieval literary origin.”6 Oral literature is more malleable than written literature, and its changes therefore reveal the political, economic, and cultural realities that alter the versions of traditional stories over time.
1
3
2
Julian Borger, “How Radovan Karadžić Embraced Evil,” The Daily Beast, March 24, 2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ articles/2016/03/24/how-radovan-karadzic-embraced-evil.html; For more information see “Radovan Karadžić Case – Key Information & Timeline | International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, accessed October 28, 2016, http://www.icty.org/en/cases/ radovan-karadzic-trial-key-information. Borger, “How Radovan Karadžić Embraced Evil.”
4
5 6
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, 3rd ed. (New Haven Conn: Yale University Press, 2009), 30. See claims of retroactive perspectives in Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, The Joint Committee on Eastern Europe Publication Series (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Judah, The Serbs. Svetozar Koljević, The Epic in the Making (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 11. Ibid., 23.
42
While nationalism did not exist in the Balkans prior to this time, by the mid-nineteenth century these songs had served to spread the history and points of pride in Serbian and Croatian culture that formed the basis of future nationalism in the region. Ernest Gellner defines a nation as: “when general social conditions make for standardized, homogenous, centrally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations … in which well-defined educationally sanctioned and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which men willingly and often ardently identify with.”7 Gellner also predicates the development of nationalism on a “modern ‘national’ educational system,” with professional teachers who train citizens outside of their local groups.8 But in the mid-nineteenth century, Balkan societies were still largely illiterate and rural, with only a small educated class of “high culture.” Predating a national culture or national education system, oral literature allowed the illiterate public to join in the early stages of cultural development that would later lead to nationalism in Gellner’s terms. Songs were sung by gusle players, the “traditional one-string instrument that typically accompanies the oral epic performance,”9 in local cafes and at celebratory events that gathered large audiences of all ages to hear the tales of mythic heroes and battles. Guslars, the singers of the songs, acted as trained teachers who facilitated the spread of shared culture by remembering and popularizing the oral literature central to South Slavic identities. They transmitted these stories locally because bards travelled and performed regionally, but as Vuk Karadžić and Albert Lord have shown, the songs they sang shared overarching themes, characters, and form that loosely functioned as the precursor to a national education system. Many of the epic poems and songs historians cite as inspiration for Balkan nationalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their roots in medieval literature and religion. As the legends grew over time, they evolved according to the contexts in which they were presented, but their “starting point of Providential interference in a national catastrophe has remained at the heart of their epic drama till the times of Karadžić’s singers.”10 The centrality of God, defeat at the hands of foreigners, and future hopes of empire are central to these songs (Kosovo Polje and others) just as the songs themselves are central to Balkan culture. Their specific influence on nationalist movements in the 1800s, however, is less clearly defined, and is the subject of this analysis. The most popular work of Balkan oral literature is the Battle of Kosovo cycle, which features the Serbian struggle for independence against the Ottoman Turks. Vuk Karadžić recorded the most famous version of the cycle in the early nineteenth 7
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, New Perspectives on the Past (Basil Blackwell Publisher) (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1983), 55. 8 Ibid., 34. 9 Aleksandar Pavlović, “Rereading the Kosovo Epic: Origins of the ‘Heavenly Serbia’ in the Oral Tradition,” Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 23, no. 1 (2009): 93. 10 See Koljević part 3, chapter I for an account of the evolution of the Kosovo myth, Koljević, The Epic in the Making, 158.
43
century. Though Karadžić was Serbian and later became a proponent of the Greater Serbian project,11 he credited some of his most well-known songs to Croatian sources, which complicates the comparison of the influence of Serbian and Croatian folklore on national movements and state-making. To partially address this problem, I have also used Ivan Mažuranić’s Death of Smail-aga Čengić as an example of epic poetry from Croatia written by a Croatian leader. However, it too shares many similarities with Serbian songs in its content and treatment of heroes and Turks, which will be further explained below. Their shared characteristics actually make their differing effects on state-making more significant in my analysis. When the similar content of oral literature is viewed as the constant variable in the development of nationalism in Serbia and Croatia, we can explain their differing national outcomes by examining the dependent variables of political circumstances under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. To judge the effects of the epic tradition on nation-building in the mid-1800s, I will study both public declarations of national plans and private letters and documents written by Serbian and Croatian leaders. Although limited by a lack of English translations in some cases, I unearthed translations of several important political documents to support my thesis. In the Serbian national movement, I will focus on the Načertanije (Draft) written in 1844 by Ilija Garašanin that was kept a government secret as the plan for a Greater Serbia until the twentieth century.12 I will also judge the effect of epic tales on Vladimir Jovanović’s 1863 article appealing to Western Europe and published in Great Britain, “The Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question.”13 On the Croatian front, I will use excerpts from Janko Drašković’s 1832 Disertacija (Dissertation) and Josip Juraj Strossmayer’s Letter of February 10, 1863 to contrast how each nation relied on and took inspiration from the oral tradition. By oral tradition, I refer to the wide array of poems, songs, and stories written, recorded, and sung by South Slavic peoples from the eighth century onward. I will use the terms oral tradition, oral literature, epic poems, and so on interchangeably. The term South Slavic encompasses those who today are the Bosnians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes. The oral traditions of these peoples each have their particular magnum opus, but in general they overlap in themes and structure to represent the experience of small ethnic groups living in a foreign empire. I will attempt to separate these groups based on their historical and political history, but, for example, Serbia and Montenegro share much of their history, as do Croatia and Slovenia. I will focus on Serbia and
11 Marcus Tanner, “Illyrianism and the Croatian Quest for Statehood,” Daedalus 126, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 53.
12 Ilijia Garašanin, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism: The 1844
Načertanije of Ilija Garašanin,” trans. Paul N. Hehn, East European Quarterly 9, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 153–71. 13 Vladimir Jovanović, “The Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question” (Bell and Daldy, 1863).
Croatia most closely and address the influence of other peoples where applicable. The term state-making document refers to any work that presents a plan or targeted desire for statehood, usually nationalistic in tone. Hence government documents, works by politicians published abroad, and private letters are all useful in articulating state-making motivations, aims, and plans. I will first contrast the history and development of the Serbian and Croatian nations alongside a comparison of the oral literature they produced. I will then analyze the effects of this literature and history on the Načertanije and the Disertacija, two documents produced before the revolutions of 1848. To illustrate the evolution of Serbian and Croatian national aims into the early 1860s – after the revolutions of 1848 and the end of Illyrianism – I will compare the use of oral literature in Jovanović’s “The Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question” to that in Strossmayer’s Letter of February 10, 1863. This research reveals how South Slavic peoples both used and neglected the epic tradition in their fight for nationhood long before Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević did the same in the 1990s. Folklore as History: Evolving Songs and Early Unrest in Serbia and Croatia The South Slavic oral tradition developed locally to record religious and historical events in a generally illiterate region. Heroic songs fell under two categories: the bugarštica (long-line ballad) and the deseterac (decasyllabic line), which was more common in nineteenth century written works.14 While not all epic poems follow this format – Mažuranić, for example, only used deseterac in parts of his Death of Smail-aga – the standardized form allowed songs to be memorized and transmitted more easily by guslars. There is not a song that provided the framework for singers to rely on, as Albert Lord describes, but each performance of oral literature is an original in and of itself based on stories of events or people.15 Songs are often alike in form because themes – “the groups of ideas regularly used in telling a tale in formulaic style of traditional song,” – tend to cling to one another to form patterns memorable to the singer and recognizable to the audience.16 As Lord and Milman Parry have shown, guslars could learn songs from their families, songbooks produced after the eighteenth century, and from listening to each other. Most of the early recorded songs available to us were transcribed by monks whose Christian perspectives heavily influenced the content and moral messages of the songs.17 More important than religious influences, though,
the public “considered these epic folk songs to be based on historical facts,” and the “historicity of heroic songs … survived well into the twentieth century.”18 Most of the Balkan population was illiterate at this time, so oral literature based on written stories or created by guslars themselves from known myths provided the public with an accessible historical record. Hence when political leaders invoked these legends they also partially invoked a supposedly factual history, making their statements and plans more credible to the public eye. Historian Bogdan Rakić provides one appropriate example of religious influence, history, and poetry. In 1756 a Franciscan monk, Andrija Kačić Miošić, wrote a “history book disguised as a collection of poems” in deseterac so that, in Rakić’s words, “the poor Slavic farmers and shepherds … could learn more about their national history.”19 As early as the mid-eighteenth century a Croatian national history had thus been catalogued by a religious figure in the hopes of educating the semi-literate public. As Miošić shows, these songs were more than entertainment, but rather were believed to be the history of a people with added significance from ecclesiastical culture. But before monks, Vuk Karadžić, or Ivan Mažuranić could record their stories and epic poems, historical events and political upheavals had to inspire oral stories passed down from the medieval period. In Serbia, Stefan Nemanja and his sons St. Sava and Stefan Nemanjić founded the medieval Serbian state on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire with territory in Kosovo and Montenegro, initiating centuries of Serbian preoccupation with the “Old Serbia” invoked in later songs.20 Medieval Serbia reached its height in the 1340s under the rule of Stefan Dušan, but fell into Turkish vassalage at the Battle on the Marica in 1371.21 Interestingly, Marko Kraljević, one of the most famous heroes of Serbian folk tales, was the first Serbian leader to become a Turkish vassal under Sultan Murad II in 1385.22 Although Prince Marko capitulated to the Muslim invaders and even died fighting for the Ottomans, his legend grew as a “disempowered hero, who nevertheless achieves his ends by great personal strength and cunning, and by whatever other means are at hand.”23 This ability to manipulate and gloss over contradictions between fact and fiction is common in the political use of these poems, which illustrates the importance leaders placed on medieval stories in the national period. Prince Lazar and his son-in-law Vuk Branković, both important figures in history and in song, were similarly defeated by the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and are recorded as the
18 Rakić, “Subverted Epic Oral Tradition in South Slavic Written 14 Bogdan Rakić, “Subverted Epic Oral Tradition in South Slavic
Written Literatures, 16th–19th Centuries,” Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 20, no. 1 (2006): 133. 15 Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), 101. 16 Ibid., 69, 112. 17 Pavlović, “Rereading the Kosovo Epic,” 89.
Literatures,” 135. Ibid., 136. Koljević, The Epic in the Making, 98. Ibid., 100. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Songs of the Serbian People from the Collections of Vuk Karadžić, trans. Milne Holton and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Series in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 161. 23 Ibid.
19 20 21 22
44
“greatest martyr and the greatest traitor in later heroic songs.”24 Even more than Marko Krajlević, Prince Lazar and the Battle of Kosovo are central to the development of national ideology, in Serbia especially, centuries after the battle occurred. The defeat at Kosovo is the linchpin of Serbian oral tradition because, in the words of Florian Bieber, it “establishes a historical continuity between the contemporary Serbian nation and the ‘Serbs’ of the Middle Ages, suggesting a perennial nation.”25 The exact words and phrases of the Kosovo cycle, drawn from Vuk Karadžić’s collection, are less important to this study than the overarching ideas they imparted and the ways they were used in the nineteenth century to create – in twentieth century lexicon – a perennial nation. Karadžić’s poems take the reader through the final meal of Prince Lazar and his men, the accusation of treachery first against Miloš Obilić and then against Vuk Branković, the overwhelming odds the Serbian army faced, the lamentations of Tsaritsa Milica and the mother of the nine Jugovićes, and finally, Lazar’s choice of a heavenly kingdom instead of an earthly one, which resulted in the Serbian defeat and subjugation to the Ottoman Empire for centuries. While the facts of the battle did not change, the tale itself evolved throughout the centuries as political circumstances increasingly became anti-Ottoman. The Kosovo cycle shifted from an early emphasis on Prince Lazar’s self-sacrifice to the nineteenth century focus on Miloš Obilić’s assassination of Sultan Murad. Records from medieval church manuscripts reveal that stories about Prince Lazar’s “spiritual victory” and martyrdom were enormously popular in the decades just after the battle.26 The focus on Lazar’s spirituality can be explained partially by the recorders of the stories, who were church figures and thus chose to emphasize a spiritual meaning, and also by the fact that the religious focus on the “promised heavenly kingdom”27 preserved the “dignity and self-worth of the subdued people.”28 By choosing the heavenly kingdom instead of the earthly kingdom, Lazar, and the recorders of the epic songs, could honorably explain Serbia’s inevitable fall to the then much stronger Ottoman Empire. In the years after the battle, church leaders and local political leaders tacitly swayed the public towards a more religious Kosovo story with the promise of future glory. In the nineteenth century, however, after more than four centuries of Ottoman domination, recorded Kosovo songs developed a much more aggressive anti-Ottoman theme with a stronger focus on Obilić’s heroism against Turkish rule. As Alexander Greenawalt and other Slavic historians argue, “only in 24 Koljević, The Epic in the Making, 101. 25 Florian Bieber, “Nationalist Mobilization and Stories of Serb
Suffering: The Kosovo Myth from 600th Anniversary to the Present,” Rethinking History 6, no. 1 (April 2002): 96. 26 Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Kosovo: Reality of a Myth and Myth of Many Realities,” in Serbien Und Montenegro (Vienna: Österreichische Osthefte, 2006), 137. 27 Karadžić, Songs of the Serbian People, 148. 28 Bakić-Hayden, “Kosovo: Reality of a Myth and Myth of Many Realities,” 137.
45
the eighteenth century … when anti-Ottoman sentiment grew within Serbia itself, did a more comprehensive Kosovo legend centered on the story of Miloš Obilić become an integral part of that land’s oral tradition.”29 Vuk Karadžić’s versions of the Kosovo songs published in the 1820s illustrate this shift.30 In them, Obilić stars in multiple fragments of songs and in “Tsar Lazar and Tsaritsa Milica,” while Lazar’s heavenly kingdom is the center of only one song, “The Fall of the Serbian Empire.” 31 As Ottoman power weakened and local pashas became stronger at the close of the eighteenth century, Serbian songs mirrored political developments to foster the beginnings of a movement against their Turkish rulers by the opening of the nineteenth century. Songs about the First Serbian Uprising of 1804 are one example of how oral literature changes over time and both influences and reflects the political atmosphere. In 1804 Serbian pashaliks rose up against not the Ottoman emperor, but the local Turkish dahijas – powerful Janissary leaders who exerted their power over the Ottoman periphery. Karadžić recorded this event in “The Beginning of the Revolt Against the Dahijas,” by blind singer Filip Višnjić. The dahijas had gained great influence at the expense of imperial power and planned to massacre Serbian leaders who objected to their increasingly violent rule. This plan triggered a Serbian revolt, led by Karadjordje against Janissary rule, which actually aligned the Serbs with the Porte against a common enemy. The poem recorded by Karadžić reflected this brief pro-Ottoman political atmosphere as it depicted the Sultan advising the dahijas to “not be harsh and cruel to the raja, rather be kind, gentle to the raja.”32 These words come from Sultan Murad, of Kosovo fame, on his deathbed after being mortally wounded by Miloš Obilić. He continues to discuss lowering taxes on the Christians and promoting religious toleration.33 This depiction of a sympathetic Sultan Murad contradicts the Kosovo cycle’s depiction of merciless Ottoman rule in the fourteenth century. The Revolt Against the Dahijas, like Mažuranić’s Smail-aga, was recorded during the early 1800s as events unfolded contemporaneously. It is one example of how oral literature can rewrite history to fit the political atmosphere and how parts of the literature could be completely ignored, as in the positive depiction of the sultan in the Revolt Against the Dahijas by later nationalists in the midnineteenth century. Unfortunately for the Serbs, great power politics among the Ottomans, the Russians, and the French hindered the Serbian cause as Russia declined to support Serbi-
29 Alexander Greenawalt, “Kosovo Myths: Karadžić, Njegoš, and
30 31 32
33
the Transformation of Serb Memory,” Spacesofidentity.net 1, no. 3 (October 1, 2001): 53, http://soi.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/soi/ article/view/8045. Karadžić, Songs of the Serbian People, 7. Ibid. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, “The Beginning of the Revolt Against the Dahijas,” in Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadžić, trans. Milne Holton and Vasa D. Mihailovich (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 283. Ibid.
an independence, effectively exhausting Karadjordje’s insurrection by 1813.34 Not until 1833 would Serbia’s skupština (parliament) declare autonomy and vestigial Turkish rule would not disappear until 1878.35 As we will continue to see in later decades, both Serbia and Croatia were frequently dependent on larger empires and states for political and military support. In this early period, even before romantic nationalism truly took hold in the Balkans, we see medieval Serbia and the Kosovo songs evoked by Karadjordje and his followers in speeches and emblems with the medieval Serbian coat of arms.36 Historian Roger Paxton argues that the First Serbian Uprising was provincially minded and not nationalist bent, but he does concede that “rebel chieftains sought moral and ideological justification for their revolutionary assumption of power by associating themselves with the symbols of the Serbian medieval state.”37 These symbols were most often associated with the Battle of Kosovo and the Nemanjid and Lazarević dynasties to inspire Serbian fighters. Along with the evolution of the Kosovo songs from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, this instance of leaders using the medieval tradition and Kosovo tales in 1804 to foment revolution is an apt example of the many ways folk tradition influenced early movements for independence. Even as contemporary poems were anti-dahija and pro-Sultan, Karadjordje and his followers used the medieval legacy to focus primarily on an ongoing national Serbian struggle that they were attempting to win. In later sections I will more concretely analyze the manipulation of oral literature by leaders of Serbia and Croatia to further their national goals developed in the 1830s and later. But before one can compare the Serbian and Croatian nationalism of the 1830s, we must take into consideration Croatian history up to the nineteenth century that explains a different national outcome than in Serbia. Like the Serbian medieval state, an independent Croatian state lasted only briefly – from the ninth century to the twelfth century – and reached its peak under Tomislav in the 910s.38 Tomislav united much of the territory today known as Croatia and Bosnia, but the Croatian state fell to Hungarian, Ottoman, and Venetian control in 1102. Although Croatia retained its parliament, the Sabor, and a viceroy, the ban, this early subjugation marked its last period of independence before the twentieth century.39 Croatia thus lost its independence long before Serbia in the fourteenth century, and unlike Serbia, it lacked a national church that could foster a national tradition during centuries of subjugation to the same degree as their Serb neighbors. While the Serbian Orthodox Church “preserved the Serbs’ strong sense of national
34 Jelavich, History of the Balkans, 195–202. 35 Karadžić, Songs of the Serbian People, 277. 36 Roger Viers Paxton, “Nationalism and Revolution: A Reexamination of the Origins of the First Serbian Insurrection 1804-1807,” East European Quarterly 6, no. 3 (September 1, 1972): 346. 37 Ibid. 38 Tanner, “Illyrianism and the Croatian Quest for Statehood,” 47. 39 Ibid., 48.
identity and ingrained in their collective memory a recollection of a great pre-Ottoman independent kingdom,” in Croatia, the popes of the Catholic Church “frowned on any attempts to impart a national, Slav tone,” especially by suppressing the use of the vernacular language.40 Memory of past statehood consequently had to be passed down through other channels – epic literature and oral songs. Intellectual elites kept historical memory alive during the Renaissance era by proudly writing histories, poems, and songs in the Croatian language. Authors in the 1500s wrote in the Croatian language41 and dedicated their texts to a “Croatian nation that transcended contemporary political boundaries.”42 Encouraged by contact with the French during and after the Napoleonic wars, language and literature continued to develop national consciousness in the nineteenth century.43 Some seeds of nationalism were undoubtedly planted by French influences and the French annexation of coastal territory in this period, as shown in the united but short-lived Kingdom of Illyria from 1815 to 1822,44 but Croatia always had to balance Austrian and Hungarian schemes for political and territorial domination. Magyarisation, the attempted Hungarian policy of teaching the Hungarian language in schools and suppressing Croatian traditions, threatened the growth of any early Croatian nationalism in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike Serbia, though, “Croatian nationalism principally relate[d] to territory,” and not to people.45 This Croatian emphasis on historical territorial rights remained an important part of Croatian nationalism, as we will see later in Drašković’s Disertacija.
40 Ibid. 41 The Croatian language converged over time to the štokavijan dialect
42 43
44
45
that the majority of Slavic speakers used based on the word što for “what.”; Marc L. Greenberg, “The Illyrian Movement: A Croatian Vision of South Slavic Unity,” in Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language Identity Efforts, ed. John A. Fishman and Ofelia García, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 364–80.”page”:”364-380”,”volume”:”2”,”source”:”kus cholarworks.ku.edu”,”event-place”:”Oxford”,”abstract”:”The article appears in a handbook that demonstrates the interconnection between language and ethnic identity, providing a systematic treatment of language and ethnic identity efforts, assessing their relative successes and failures, and placing the cases on a success-failure continuum. This essay focuses on the early nineteenth-century Illyrian Movement attempt in the framework of Pan-Slavism—an ideology intended to unite spiritually all Slavic speakers—to unify the South Slavs (Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Bulgarians Tanner, “Illyrianism and the Croatian Quest for Statehood,” 49. Ana S. Trbovich, “Nation-Building under the Austro-Hungarian Sceptre: Croato-Serb Antagonism and Cooperation,” Balcanica, no. 37 (2006): 204; Susana S. Macesich, “The Illyrian Provinces: A Step Towards Yugoslavism,” Southeastern Europe 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1974): 120. The Congress of Vienna created the Kingdom to slow the Illyrian movement by excluding the Military Frontier and Dalmatia while bringing Roman Catholic Slavs closer to the Habsburgs. Macesich, “The Illyrian Provinces,” 122. Trbovich, “Nation-Building under the Austro-Hungarian Sceptre,” 205.
46
In the minds of early nationalists, “Croatian statehood had never been extinguished,” since the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia in the Middle Ages.46 Despite this political atmosphere in the Habsburg Empire, Croatian oral literature tackled issues similar to those of Serbian poetry, such as Turkish scourges and anti-Muslim ideas. As early as the seventeenth century, Croatian writer Franov Gundulić wrote Osman, about the last years of Sultan Osman II’s reign, which established “the liberation of the Balkan Slavs from Turkish rule as the central aspect of the so-called Eastern Question.”47 Following in Gundulić’s footsteps, in 1845 fellow Croatian writer Ivan Mažuranić published an epic poem centered on the murder of a Turkish regional leader by a band of Montenegrins in protest against brutal taxation and treatment of Christians. Mažuranić’s epic poem, The Death of Smail-aga Čengić, was written more than a decade after Drašković’s national plan, but its topic and form are relevant to this analysis because it is the best representation of traditional Croatian epic poetry and one of the few Croatian epics translated into English. Similar to the Revolt Against the Dahijas, this poem was influenced by contemporary politics, but it also reflects traditional Croatian epic literature that influenced Drašković and other Croatians in the earlier 1800s. Mažuranić was so important to the Croatian tradition that he was chosen to write the last two cantos of Osman that Gundulić, his earlier Croatian poetic model, had not finished before his death.48 The Death of Smail-aga Čengić is less known to foreigners than the Battle of Kosovo songs, so I will first discuss the significant aspects of the poem for its national influence on Croatian politics. Smail-aga, like the Kosovo cycle, is based on a historical truth, but Mažuranić also retold the event with a more evil Turkish enemy so as to “stress the ethical aspect of this struggle,” that is, the “struggle of the Balkan Slavs for their freedom.”49 He was undoubtedly affected by the romantic nationalism of the 1840s, which helped foster an overall South Slavic nationalism until the end of the Illyrian Movement in 1848. But Gundulić, who wrote about the same struggle for freedom in the 1600s, also heavily influenced Mažuranić’s work. Religion and ownership of the land were central to Croatia’s epic tradition, relating to the belief in their historical right to the Triune Kingdom. In one of the most powerfully nationalistic stanzas, Mažuranić invokes the birthright and blood right of citizens to their land. Your grandfathers were born here, Your fathers were born here, And you yourselves were born here: For you there is no fairer place on earth.
Your grandfathers shed their blood for it, Your fathers shed their blood for it, For it you too are shedding your blood: For you there is no dearer place on earth.50 This section recalls the historical right of land important to Croatian people, as well as the image of blood soaked land so central to the Kosovo narrative. In Croatian oral tradition, this passage also harkens to Kačić’s work, Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskog (A Pleasant Discourse about the Slavic People), about which in 1759 Kačić wrote that he hoped, “the knights and warriors of our own time will look into these pages like a mirror and see the brave campaigns and famous feats of their grandfathers and grand-grand-fathers; then, emboldened, they will freely follow their ancestors’ example and confront our common enemy once again.”51 Mažuranić’s poem is thus more than a reflection of nationalism in 1845, but it also clearly has an antecedent in the 1750s. The Death of Smail-aga is further reminiscent of Razgovor in that Kačić included all Slavic peoples in his work and targeted the Turks as their communal enemy.52 The national focus in Smail-aga is not specific to the Serb or Croatian or Montenegrin peoples. The poem is about a Montenegrin triumph, but because a Croatian leader wrote it, we see the larger scale South Slavic unity that Croatian politics called for in the Illyrian Movement before 1848. In addition to land and blood, Mažuranić stressed the power of Christianity many times in his poem. As he wrote, “… to die for the holy Christian faith is not hard for those who fight for it,” and, “… such men who would stand and die for the holy cross by which they were baptized, for the holy cross and golden freedom,” are only two examples of many.53 Most explicitly, he claims that “… the Cross and the prophet, till one is destroyed; so much hatred burns their hearts!”54 Such a strong hatred of Islam is surprising when Croatia was largely under the rule of the Habsburgs and not the Ottomans. Surprising initially, but logical in the context of ancient Croatian history that saw, like Serbia, centuries of Turkish maltreatment of Christians in Croatian lands, such as the Military Frontier (Vojna Krajina). This ancient tradition drove the Croatian and Yugoslavian mentality as they shared in the outrage and suffering of their own and their fellow Slavs’ subjugation. The Illyr50 Ivan Mažuranić, Smail-Aga Čengić’s Death, ed. Ivan Slamnig, trans. Charles A. Ward (Zagreb: Association of Croat Writers, 1969), 14.
51 Andrija Kačić Miošić, Razgovor Ugodni Naroda slovinskoga/Korabljica, 46 Ibid., 210. 47 Zdenko Zlatar, “Slavic Epics: Gundulic’s Osman and Mazuranic’s
Death of Smail-Aga Cengic,” Sydney Studies in Society and Culture 11, no. 0 (October 9, 2013): 194. 48 Ibid., 198. 49 Ibid., 200.
47
Jakša Ravlić, vol. 21, Pet Stoljeća Hrvatske Književnosti (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska/Zora, 1967) in; Rakić, “Subverted Epic Oral Tradition in South Slavic Written Literatures,” 136. 52 Rakić, “Subverted Epic Oral Tradition in South Slavic Written Literatures,” 137. 53 Mažuranić, Smail-Aga Čengić’s Death, 5,11. 54 Ibid., 32.
ian Movement relied most heavily on this common history, but was eventually succeeded by a more territorial-based national plan in the later nineteenth century. These similarities between Serbian and Croatian epic literature make the contemporary political circumstances of each peoples more significant when comparing the developments of national plans and state-building in the 1830s and later. National Plans and Epic Influence, 1830-1848: Garašanin’s Načertanije and Drašković’s Disertacija Beginning in the 1830s, romantic nationalism in Croatia and Serbia developed in two national movements – the Illyrian Movement and Greater Serbia. Both movements found their political voices in the works of two Croatian and Serbian statesmen: Ilija Garašanin’s Načertanije (Draft) in 1844, and Janko Drašković’s Disertacija (Dissertation) in 1832, a state secret until 1906, the Draft drove Serbian policy throughout the nineteenth century and into the Balkan wars.55 Similarly, the Dissertation outlined the tenets of the Illyrian Movement in desiring an overarching partnership with Austria-Hungary that remained influential until 1848. I will first analyze the ways the Draft invoked Serbia’s medieval past – kept alive by epic literature throughout the centuries – to advocate for a pan-Serb ideology, as Paul Hehn dubbed it, and a Greater Serbian state. I will then turn to the Dissertation to explain the political and historical circumstances surrounding why Croatian nationalists leaned more heavily on a common language tradition with some reliance on communal Slavic enemies in oral literature to form the idea of an Illyrian nation inside the Austro-Hungarian state. While Serbia and Croatia were still proto-national, both the Dissertation and the Draft supported Gellner’s definition of nationalism by emphasizing the importance of education, literacy, and language in their national plans. The Dissertation itself was prompted by the compulsory imposition of the Hungarian language in Croatian schools in 1827.56 After attempts to Magyarise the public through the Hungarian language, the Illyrian Movement became further attached to a communal Slavic language that would protect Balkan peoples from the stronger national forces of the great powers. The Draft equally recognized the importance of the printing press in spreading, in Garašanin’s words, the “spirit of the Slavic people,” and 55 Judah, The Serbs, 56; Garašanin, “The Origins of Modern PanSerbism,” 157.
56 Greenberg, “The Illyrian Movement,” 3.”page”:”364-
380”,”volume”:”2”,”source”:”kuscholarworks.ku.edu”,”eventplace”:”Oxford”,”abstract”:”The article appears in a handbook that demonstrates the interconnection between language and ethnic identity, providing a systematic treatment of language and ethnic identity efforts, assessing their relative successes and failures, and placing the cases on a success-failure continuum. This essay focuses on the early nineteenth-century Illyrian Movement attempt in the framework of Pan-Slavism—an ideology intended to unite spiritually all Slavic speakers—to unify the South Slavs (Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Bulgarians
especially the Serbian people, to surrounding areas to grow their state and influence beyond traditional Serbian borders.57 Although neither group had a modern education system or industrialized society required by Gellner’s definition, these works supported his idea that literacy and education were central to national development. While historians agree on much of Gellner’s work, they debate whether to label Garašanin a Serb nationalist or a South Slavic nationalist, but for this analysis his references to and reliance on the medieval kingdom of Serbia to justify future Serbian statehood and regional domination are most salient.58 The Načertanije does not explicitly cite the Battle of Kosovo, but it does rely heavily on the overarching messages of the famous oral literature – that the Serbian state has glorious roots in the medieval period and that it will be reborn and rebuilt on that foundation in the present nation-building period. It also does recognize the centrality of epic poetry to Serbian culture. Garašanin believed and included in his work that “in no single European country is the memory of the historical past so vivid as among the Slavs of Turkey, for whom the recollection of the celebrated events of their history is especially cherished and fondly remembered.”59 Just how were these celebrated events of history remembered? The answer, as shown earlier, lies in the epic poems and oral literature celebrating the Serbian state. The Draft was the first plan to envision Serbia as an independent state and became the leading model to be followed by nineteenth and even twentieth century Serbian statesmen.60 As Tim 57 Garašanin, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism,” 164,167. 58 For views on Garašanin’s politics see: Edislav Manetovic, “Ilija
Garašanin: Načertanije and Nationalism,” The Historical Review/La Revue Historique 3, no. 0 (January 20, 2007): 137–73.Nacertanije , that envisioned an independent Serbian state. His ideas and policies remain highly controversial. While some scholars argue that Garasanin was an inclusive Yugoslavist, others maintain that he was an exclusive Serbian nationalist seeking a Greater Serbia. Both arguments assume that the South Slav nations are pre-modern social phenomena. In contrast, this paper suggests that a modernist perspective of nations and nationalism provides a far more coherent and nuanced interpretation of Garasanin. Garasanin was a Serbian, not a Yugoslav, nationalist. But his nationalism was inclusive not exclusive. Inclusion was a precondition for social stability of the large state he wanted to forge. Garasanin was also illiberal. Establishing a state in a predatory inter-state environment required suppressing individual liberties. Insecurity caused by a Hobbesian world political system structured the content of Garasanin’s nationalism.”,”ISSN”:”17917603”,”shortTitle”:”Ilija Garasanin”,”author”:[{“family”:”Manetovic”, ”given”:”Edislav”}],”issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2007”,1,20]]}}}],”schema ”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/cslcitation.json”} 59 Garašanin, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism,” 160. 60 Manetovic, “Ilija Garasanin,” 140.Nacertanije , that envisioned an independent Serbian state. His ideas and policies remain highly controversial. While some scholars argue that Garasanin was an inclusive Yugoslavist, others maintain that he was an exclusive Serbian nationalist seeking a Greater Serbia. Both arguments assume that the South Slav nations are pre-modern social phenomena. In contrast, this paper suggests that a modernist perspective of nations and nationalism provides a far more coherent and nuanced interpretation of Garasanin. Garasanin was a Serbian, not a Yugoslav, nationalist.
48
Judah has succinctly written, the Načertanije is the “document that synthesizes centuries of Serbian dreams as preserved by the church and epic poetry and formulates them into a statement of modern nationalism.”61 It built on the oral tradition’s medieval histories and the promise of rebirth to fuel the beginnings of Serbian nationalism that was initially private to the state, but that ultimately lasted into the twentieth century. Garašanin relied on the epic tradition when he harkened back to the Serbian state under Stefan Nemanja, Stefan Dušan, and Turkish domination to demonstrate Serbia’s roots and hence preparation for a large state in the nineteenth century. As he wrote, “its roots and foundation are firmly embedded in the Serbian Empire of the 13th and 14th centuries and the glorious pageant of Serbian history.”62 He goes so far as to declare that ancient Serbia under Dušan almost inherited the Byzantine Empire’s cultural and political heritage, but Turkish power halted their progress. This glorious past is remembered through epic poetry that memorialized the successes and failures of the Serbian state in the Kosovo cycle and other songs. In the nineteenth century, he suggested, “this interrupted process must commence once more in the same spirit and again be undertaken in the knowledge of that right.”63 To Garašanin, that “right” was the promised realization of medieval desires for a Slavo-Serbian kingdom in the old Greco-Roman lands. These desires stumbled in the Middle Ages in the “Fall of the Serbian Empire,” as Lazar chose defeat and future greatness over current glory, but were clearly not forgotten by statesmen and the public alike who desired an independent state in the late nineteenth century. After he established the deep and glorious foundation of the Serbian state, Garašanin turned to the second theme of the oral tradition – the rebirth of the empire promised to the Serbs after their defeat at Kosovo. The Serbian Empire, the Načertanije claims, “must be cleared of all encumbrances so that a new edifice may be constructed on this solid and durable historical foundation… for then we Serbs could appear before the world as the heirs of our illustrious forefathers.”64 The new edifice – the state – was part of the logical progress from the “historical foundation” laid by the “illustrious forefathers” of medieval Serbia. It was also a call for not just any South Slav state, but specifically a state built “upon the solid foundation
61 62 63 64 49
But his nationalism was inclusive not exclusive. Inclusion was a precondition for social stability of the large state he wanted to forge. Garasanin was also illiberal. Establishing a state in a predatory interstate environment required suppressing individual liberties. Insecurity caused by a Hobbesian world political system structured the content of Garasanin’s nationalism.”,”ISSN”:”1791-7603”,”shortTitle”:”Ilija Garasanin”,”author”:[{“family”:”Manetovic”,”given”:”Edislav”}],”issue d”:{“date-parts”:[[“2007”,1,20]]}},”locator”:”140”}],”schema”:”https:// github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation. json”} Judah, The Serbs, 59. Garašanin, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism,” 159. Ibid. Ibid.
of the old Serbian state [to] erect a great new Serbian state.”65 This path from a historical basis to a contemporary state led by Serbia justified Garašanin’s call for a Greater Serbian state because Serbia was believed to have the previous experience and foundation for leading a new incarnation of South Slav statehood – a national plan in conflict with Croatia’s, but supported by Serbian epic literature. While the poems themselves are not quoted, the Draft places much of its evidence for a Serbian-led South Slav state in the “elevated and fiery national feeling”66 created by the folk tradition. The rhetoric of the Načertanije is even similar to what is found in the oral literature. For instance, Garašanin’s goal in the Draft is the “rebirth of the Serbian kingdom,”67 just as Nemanja and Dušan gave birth to it and Prince Lazar, as recorded in epic poetry, assured its rebirth in the future. Garašanin likely relied so heavily on folklore because it was ubiquitous in Serbian culture, and as Judah comments, “as for all nationalists, history was there to be used for the present.”68 In the Načertanije itself, too, Garašanin claimed that “our present will not be without a link to the past… ,”69 an assertion that held true because of the Serbian epic tradition that supported an independent Serbian state. In contrast to Serbia’s straightforward use of oral literature towards its goal of a greater Serbian state, Croatia’s national development focused more on language with some influence from their epic tradition to create broad South Slavic unity and autonomy, not independence, inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The movement “sought to link the Croatians with a people who had lived in the area before the Germans and Hungarians.”70 Similar to Serbian aims, this move attempted to create a historical foundation for the South Slavic people before the Turks and Europeans. Drašković was a member of the Croatian Sabor (Parliament) and a Croatian delegate at the Hungarian Diet in Pressburg from 1832 to 1836.71 He presented his Dissertation to the Hungarian Diet written in Croatian, instead of German or Latin, in the first instance of the use of 65 66 67 68 69 70 71
Ibid., 163. Ibid., 160. Ibid. Judah, The Serbs, 58. Garašanin, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism,” 160. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, 306. Greenberg, “The Illyrian Movement,” 4; “Dissertation, or Treatise,” in National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements, by Balazs Trencsenyi and Michal Kopecek, trans. Robert Russell, Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945, Volume II (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013), 349.”page”:”364-380”,”volume”:”2”,”source”:”kuscholarwor ks.ku.edu”,”event-place”:”Oxford”,”abstract”:”The article appears in a handbook that demonstrates the interconnection between language and ethnic identity, providing a systematic treatment of language and ethnic identity efforts, assessing their relative successes and failures, and placing the cases on a success-failure continuum. This essay focuses on the early nineteenth-century Illyrian Movement attempt in the framework of Pan-Slavism—an ideology intended to unite spiritually all Slavic speakers—to unify the South Slavs (Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Bulgarians
a standardized Croatian language for political discourse.72 As his message was to validate the Croatian right to language determination and thus national determination, his piece opened with, “I shall use our own mother tongue, in the hope of demonstrating its ability to express all that the heart and reason may demand.”73 This language was the štokavian dialect that the “root stock of our kingdoms” used and that had historical precedent in “all the old books” written in Croatian lands.74 Similar to Serbia’s establishment of a foundation for their state, Croatia attempted to establish a basis for their Illyrian language to enhance legitimacy. The Illyrian Movement stressed an overarching language to convince people that “all South Slavs were basically one people and that, by implication, they should form a political unit.”75 They believed a standard language would unite South Slavs under one government, hopefully a Croatian-led government, inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As Drašković wrote, because “language is the spiritual connection between peoples and countries,”76 having a united Illyrian language of the štokavian dialect mixed with parts of Slovenian and Serbian forms would connect the Slavic people to a unified state in the empire. However, the Disertacija was not without folk literature influence. The Illyrian Movement’s goal was to unite Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia under the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the center of “Great Illyria” in Zagreb.77 Hence, though seemingly unrelated, the Death of Smail-Aga Čengić actually fit into the national plan of uniting South Slavic peoples. By celebrating Montenegrin success over the traditional enemies of both Serbia and Croatia, Mažuranić’s epic poem and other Croatian oral literature created the bond between Slavic peoples with a common enemy that Croatian nationalists relied on to promote their movement. Though Drašković’s outline of national unity was less forceful than Garašanin’s, he did advocate for Dalmatia rejoining Croatia so that “we shall again form one nation and one blood.”78 The Croatian epic tradition was thus emphasized in the Illyrian Movement to stress the commonalities between Serbian and Croatian peoples and the Croatian hope for a convergence of national plans. Unfortunately, for the Croatian project, the Serbs did not react well to a Croatian-led state in another empire while they had a Greater Serbian project growing simultaneously with the help of Garašanin and Karadžić. Though Illyrians seemed open to all Slavic peoples, the Disertacija revealed nationalistic rhetoric by quietly insulting the Serbs who were “in a condition of subjugation from which we freed ourselves more than a hundred years ago, and are now too wise to lapse into
72 73 74 75 76 77 78
Drašković, “National Romanticism,” 341. Ibid., 344. Ibid. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, 306. Drašković, “National Romanticism,” 345. Macesich, “The Illyrian Provinces,” 124. Drašković, “National Romanticism,” 344.
slavery again.”79 In the same section, Drašković also appealed to the Hungarians as he placed the Illyrian Movement in between Eastern Ottoman subjugation and Western “brilliance the weak eyes of our people are not yet able to bear.”80 It is clear throughout the document that their ideal state would be partnered with the Austro-Hungarians in a federal system – a plan that was ultimately unappealing to Serbians who had not yet fully gained autonomy from their own imperial enemy and so doomed the Illyrian aim of a united state until the twentieth century. Jelavich was correct as he wrote, “there was no reason to abandon the emphasis on Kosovo and the medieval Serbian kingdom for this mystical ancient basis,” of Illyria.81 While the Disertacija outlined the Illyrian Movement in 1833 with the help of communal oral literature and language, by the time Garašanin wrote the Načertanije with its heavy reliance on Serbian national myths in 1844, the Croatian and Serbian national plans had diverged so much that future nation-building would follow a pattern of Serbia emphasizing its popular folklore while Croatia largely moved away from its previous invocations of communal oral literature. Folklore, Territory, and Great Power Politics, 1848-1865: Jovanovič’s The Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question and Strossmayer’s “Letter of February 10, 1863” As we have examined the history of oral literature and its influence on early national movements before 1848, the final sources I will compare to the oral tradition are both documents from 1863, one from a private propagandist who had previously been in the Serbian government, and the other from a Croatian bishop who led the People’s Party for Croatian autonomy inside the empire. These documents are particularly useful because they illustrate the development of Balkan national plans in the larger romantic nationalist period. They offer examples of how oral literature was used in nation-building outside of official national plans and directed towards outside audiences. Jovanović wrote for the British people in English to gain support for Serbian independence, while Strossmayer wrote his letter to a fellow Croatian nobleman in Vienna outlining his preference for a federalized Austria. As the dreams of statehood grew in Serbia and Croatia, we see that Serbia continued to rely on the Kosovo cycle and medieval history recorded by folktales to further its political goals, while Croatia shifted its focus further away from language and the influence of oral literature to an argument for historical territorial rights to a Croatian nation. By 1863, Prince Mihail Obrenović III had asserted more autonomy for Serbia, causing increased tensions between the still-occupying Turkish forces and the Serbian government and prompting a Turkish bombardment of Belgrade in 1862.82 79 80 81 82
Ibid., 346. Ibid. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, 308. Gale Stokes, Legitimacy through Liberalism: Vladimir Jovanović and the
50
Vladimir Jovanović’s trip to England followed shortly after this conflict as the Great Powers stepped in to halt a Balkan War. His mission aimed “to win England’s favor for a Serbian national liberation movement,” despite England’s long support of the Turkish Empire.83 In March of 1863, Jovanović published a brochure entitled The Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question that recounted the ancient history of the Serbian state up until the present day to illustrate Serbian propensity for an independent, liberal government. To establish this liberal foundation, Jovanović explicitly used and manipulated the epic tradition to assert Serbia’s long national memory and history of enlightened government. Though a slightly different influence than on the Načertanije, folk literature continued to be a source of national pride and method of transmission of political ideas, even when written to a non-Serbian audience. Like Garašanin’s Draft, Jovanović’s brochure is significant enough to be analyzed ten times over, but most important to my research is his use of the Kosovo cycle and the tradition of heroic songs that in his words, “awakened recollections of Serbian history.”84 Whereas the Draft established Serbia’s national plan to expand based on historical right, the Serbian Nation brochure made the argument international and used folklore to convince other nations of Serbia’s legitimacy, which illustrated the centrality of the overarching oral tradition in nineteenth century Serbian nationalism. Early on in the 46-page document, Jovanović gives the national history of Serbia from Dušan who “had done much to preserve the original spirit of the Serbian nation,” to the interference of the voyvodas whose “evil consequence of this decentralization … [was] faithfully pointed out in the heroic songs of that period.”85 Dušan is held up yet again as the greatest leader of the medieval kingdom and it is only after the failures of Vuk Branković, also explicitly named in the brochure, and the fighting vojvodas that the nation fell to the Turks, which we know from the “heroic songs of that period.” But not to be forgotten, “the valour and devotedness of the Serbian nation was made manifest in the heroic deed of Milosh Obilitch… ,” and “nothing could destroy the Serbian spirit of freedom.”86 The use of epic histories in such official propaganda in 1863 illustrates just how long the tradition had survived and the significance of Vuk Karadžić’s books of collections. They were not only powerful in internal Serbian nationalism, but also central enough to be used in arguments to the international world for a Serbian nation. The international English reader was emphatically reminded of the strength of Serbian national vitality throughout the brochure. According to Jovanović, “the Serbs kept alive their
83 84 85 86 51
Transformation of Serbian Politics, Publications on Russia and Eastern Europe of the Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies 5 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 53. Miroslav Došen, “Projects for the Federation of South-East Europe in the 19th Century,” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai. Studia Europaea 51, no. 2 (2006): 50. Jovanović, “The Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question,” 12. Ibid., 8. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 9.
enthusiasm for freedom by their ‘hope in God,’ and by their songs, which related the glories of the past and expressed the hopes of the future, instead of bewailing the unhappiness of the present.”87 In churches, too, “they sang the deeds of their heroic ancestors, and declared what was to be undertaken against their oppressors.”88 National memory of Kosovo, the kingdom they lost and the future kingdom the song promised the Serbian people, was thus central to the propagation of Serbian nationalism both inside and outside the Balkans. These explicit reminders of the power of Serbian songs illustrate their significance in growing and maintaining a national spirit in the late nineteenth century. Jovanović closes, too, with the claim that “it is owing, indeed, to the great internal vitality of the nation that it did not entirely disappear or become wholly degenerate and corrupt” under centuries of rule by “a herd of uncultivated savages.”89 This internal vitality was cultivated by the oral tradition of heroic songs espousing the mythic medieval losses and triumphs that inspired nineteenth century nationalists. The rhetoric of past defeat and future splendor is so ingrained in Serbian policies and foreign relations by 1863 that Jovanović can even quote a book by an Englishman who travelled through the Balkans and spoke of his “respect and admiration for a people whose virtues have not been destroyed by four centuries of oppression, and without an assurance that for such a race a splendid future is in store.”90 From Garašanin to Jovanović, Serbia’s nationalism had only become more dependent on the themes and rhetoric of their epic tradition for independence – a stark contrast to Croatia’s national development from the Disertacija to Strossmayer’s letter. In Croatia, instead of inching towards independence like in Serbia, the national movement faced setbacks in the revolutions of 1848 as Vienna defeated the Hungarian revolt and imposed a centralized system of administration with no territorial reward to the Croats for their support of the empire against Hungary.91 The Illyrian Movement ended in 1848 as Hungarian nationalism no longer threatened the Croatian state, while the Croats had lost much of their autonomy with the new centralized regime in the empire, and Serbia had turned away from a unified Slavic national movement to their own national plans. Strossmayer, a former Illyrianist and leader of its political descendant, the National Party, was made bishop of Djakovo in 1849 and was a strong supporter of Yugoslavism and a federal Austro-Hungarian Empire.92 His letter to a Croatian politician in Vienna laid out his pro-Austrian, federalist views focused on historic territorial rights with only slight invocations of the oral tradition. Though some heroic songs highlighted Croatian successes, much of the Croatian oral tradition celebrated victories over foreign Turks and South Slavic
87 88 89 90 91 92
Ibid., 11. Ibid. Ibid., 38, 29. Ibid., 45. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, 318. Ibid., 319.
unity, as in the Death of Smail-aga, which was a less influential factor on Croatian nationalism by 1863 when their desires had evolved from a Croatian-led Slavic state inside the empire to a single autonomous state under the empire’s wing. As the translator of the letter, James Bukowski, writes of Strossmayer, “the principal object of his political career was to win for Croatia the status of an autonomous and territorially reunited Kingdom under the Habsburg dynasty.”93 With this goal in mind, he relied on the idea that “the Croats and the other ‘historic’ people of Austria possessed a separate ‘state right’ which preceded their membership in the empire and stood as the imperishable witness of their national existence.”94 By basing the Croatian state on territorial claims instead of claims on people, language, or culture, Strossmayer was likely influenced by the folk tradition that recorded the medieval history of the Triune Kingdom when the Military Frontier, Dalmatia, and Slavonia were all united under Croatian rule. As he suggests to his countryman, “the only way to wrench Dalmatia once and for all from the jaws of Italy is to make it Slavic, as is its ancient right and character… .”95 Surprisingly, he uses the verb “make” instead of one that would emphasize Dalmatia’s hereditary Croatian-ness to support his point. This verb choice could merely refer to making the region part of Croatia by law, but the choice of the term “Slavic” instead of a national term like Croatia then becomes strange as Croatia no longer saw a Croatia-led South Slavic state as feasible in the 1860s. The ancient right he references is likely tied to oral histories from the period that have been passed down through song, but this version of nationalism is much less reliant on oral literature than the Serbian variant in 1863. Even when Strossmayer did include references to the epic tradition, he focused not on South Slavic traditions, but specifically on Croatia’s relationship to Austria-Hungary. For example, he cited the role Croatia played opposing incursions of the Turks over time as he wrote, “we are a people who have made uncountable sacrifices in battle against the accursed enemies of humanity and of Austria… .”96 The Croatian oral tradition did record many instances of Slavic-led triumphs over the enemies of humanity, but Strossmayer in this case chose to highlight Croatia’s historic defense of Austria from Turkish enemies instead of the communal Slavic effort to repel the Turks that the Illyrian Movement had previously emphasized. To close his letter, Strossmayer outlined his opinions on a political system inside the Hungarian sphere of empire that tied Croatia closer to the East than the West. One of his points stated, “our integrity must be guaranteed and realized.”97 Perhaps it is only an innocent omission, but by avoiding the word ‘national’ in
his statement, he struck a much less forceful nationalist tone. This contrasts starkly to the Serbian state-making examples discussed above that were unabashedly nationalist and focused on national myths. Although this difference is explained by Strossmayer’s focus on a federal, autonomous Croatian state instead of an independent nation, my comparison of national development and folklore influences reveals that not all nineteenth century Balkan nationalist movements were inspired nor heavily influenced by their respective epic traditions. Conclusion While historians have been quick to claim that the “fever of nationalism in the nineteenth century led to the use of oral epics for nationalist propaganda,”98 they have generally overlooked how folklore influenced Serbian and Croatian nationalism in the early national period. It is true that folk literature in both regions influenced national planning until 1848 – it helped Serbia establish a historical foundation for the rebirth of its nation, and it helped Croatia form a relationship among South Slavic peoples through a common language and enemy. However, post-1848, while folk literature remained central to Serbian nationalism and its drive for independence, Croatia greatly decreased its use of folk literature as it aimed for autonomy in an empire that did not strongly relate as strongly to its oral tradition. This comparison makes it easier to understand how Radovan Karadžić viewed himself as part of Serbia’s national mythic past, which its politicians have so ardently invoked since Garašanin. It is also easier to understand how the shared folk traditions among the South Slavic peoples helped to justify the twentieth century Yugoslavian state under Tito. Unfortunately for the fate of the twentieth century state, though, the divergence of Croatian and Serbian national planning in the 1800s, with their differing goals and uses of oral literature, foreshadowed the eventual violent split of Croatian and Serbian nationalism in the 1990s. Although the Yugoslavian state dissolved, the South Slavic epic tradition will likely live on as small Slavic states face the same conflicts between great powers and among each other over religion and territory as they did in centuries past. After all, the people who supported Radovan Karadžić before his arrest also encouraged him to offer the younger generation of Serb nationalists this piece of advice: “Sing with and through the gusle. Speak about Serb traditions. Hold the banner of our glory high.”99
93 Josip Strossmayer, “Bishop Strossmayer’s Idea of a Federalized Austria: 94 95 96 97
A Document from 1863,” trans. James B. Bukowski, Southeastern Europe 3, no. 1 (January 1, 1976): 89. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 99.
98 Lord, The Singer of Tales, 7. 99 Borger, “How Radovan Karadžić Embraced Evil.” 52
Savage Sagebrush and Christian Orchards: Reassessing Wilderness and Civilization on the Harriman Alaska Expedition Anna Davis, Johns Hopkins University Introduction In Seattle on May 31, 1899, 126 members of the Harriman Expedition boarded the George W. Elder, a luxury steamer bound for the Alaskan wilderness. Railroad tycoon Edward Harriman had organized the expedition after his doctor ordered him to take a vacation. Half of the party were hired sailors, while the rest included Harriman’s family and preeminent scholars from universities, museums, and the government. With twenty-five scientists, three artists, two photographers, two taxidermists, and two stenographers, the group stimulated curiosity and intellectual discussion. Two months later, having explored the Alaskan coast, the Aleutian Islands, and the eastern tip of Siberia (Figure 1), the expedition returned. It had collected numerous fossils and Indian artifacts; painted and photographed the landscape, Alaskan Natives, and Siberians; and discovered a fjord, several glaciers, more than fifty genera, and almost six hundred species of plants and animals.1 Over the next twelve years, with Harriman’s sponsorship, expedition member C. Hart Merriam published the scientific and ethnographical findings in a thirteen-volume collection titled Alaska.2 The present obscurity of the Harriman Alaska Expedition is understandable. Leaving aside its scientific achievements and galvanization of Theodore Roosevelt to preserve the Alaskan wild, the expedition was not a dramatic historical event. It neither instigated international conflict, nor changed most of its participants’ worldviews.3 The few historians who have written about it often assume that the members paid little attention to their society’s destructiveness.4 However, writings and photographs from the expedition imply the opposite. They constitute a deeply conflicted reassessment of the meanings of wilderness and civilization in a post-frontier America. At the end of the pioneer era and the height of industrialization, the members of the expedition came face-to-face with their country’s last large1 2 3 4
53
William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan, Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska, 1899, (New York: Viking, 1982), xiv, 3-5, 193, 200, 207. Edward Henry Harriman, Alaska (New York: Doubleday, 1901). Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, 1899 (New York: Viking, 1982), 385, 469-470; Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, xiv, xvii. See Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, xii-xiii; also see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006), 337.
Figure 1. “Alaska with Parts of Siberia Canada and Washington Showing Route of the Harriman Alaska Expedition 1899,” by Henry Gannett and the U.S. Geological Survey, c. 1899. The red line marks the route of the expedition. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
ly untouched territory. Their perceptions of it stemmed from an expansionist, Romantic, and Social Darwinist intellectual heritage striving to adapt to a post-frontier reality. For many educated Americans in 1899, the words wilderness and civilization suggested both natural settings and human societies. Wilderness connoted an unimproved landscape, and it was also inseparable from popular notions of human “savagery.” Similarly, civilization brought to mind images of a garden-like countryside just as often as it referred to a complex social configuration. Both entities contained an ambiguous mix of merits and shortcomings, and each was considered necessary for the survival and fulfillment of the other.5 Moreover, people were coming to regard savagery as an institution parallel, if not equal, to civilization. As ethnologist John Wesley Powell wrote in an 1878 government report, “Savagery is not inchoate civilization; it is a distinct status of society with its own institu-
5
Frederick J Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (New York: Readex Microprint, 1947), 224; Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, 1910), 3-4.
tions, customs, philosophies, and religion.”6 Powell was not the only American at the time to voice a growing appreciation for the cultural richness of “savage” (i.e. Native) societies. At least among the American elite, there was a growing awareness that wilderness and civilization were not manifestations of a battle between devilry and godliness.78* Most historians who discuss nineteenth-century American perceptions of wilderness and civilization offer a narrow understanding of those opinions. Some focus exclusively on environmentalism, while others study the perspectives solely in the context of their relation to national heritage. However, it is impossible to fully grasp the Harriman Expedition members’ views on wilderness and civilization without exploring nineteenth-century concern for both nature and society, and for both the country’s past and future. This essay will attempt to synthesize the existing historiography in order to render more completely the tension and complexity of the expedition members’ ideas. Analyzing the work of the Harriman Expedition sheds light on the ideological trends that had hitherto shaped the United States and would propel it into the twentieth century. The Harriman Expedition is worthy of study, because as employees of redoubtable institutions of learning and governance, its participants expressed ideas (often unconsciously) that either were or would become commonplace in American society. This paper will focus on the work of four expedition members who shaped public opinion and policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the naturalist John Burroughs, the conservationist and ethnologist George Bird Grinnell, the preservationist John Muir, and the photographer Edward Curtis.9** Because their private writings from the expedition are archival, and therefore not easily accessible to undergraduate researchers, most of the primary sources in this essay will be drawn from edited or published materials. Granted, the edits made to these works risk obscuring their creators’ true opinions. The result, however, is that the material can reveal which ideas were deemed relatively uncontroversial and therefore palatable for an elite readership. This essay will also engage with
6
7 8
9
Department of the Interior, J.W. Powell, “Report on the Methods of Surveying the Public Domain to the Secretary of the Interior, at the Request of the National Academy of Sciences” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1878), 15, https:// ia700809.us.archive.org/30/items/ reportonmethodso00geog/reportonmethodso00geog.pdf. Lee Clark Mitchell, Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth Century Response (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), xiii-xiv. * Due to the fluid connotations of wilderness and civilization, for clarity’s sake this essay will use the terms when referring to combinations of natural and social characteristics and not to those characteristics seen separately. ** Conservationists believed that land and resources should be saved for long-term human use. Preservationists believed that the wilderness should be left untouched for aesthetic or quasi-spiritual reasons. (National Park Service, “Conservation vs Preservation and the National Park Service,” accessed April 29, 2014, http://www.nps.gov/klgo/ forteachers/classrooms/conservation-vs-preservation.htm.)
Curtis’ The North American Indian, a twenty-volume work published between 1907 and 1930 that included photographs of Natives, historical information, and tribal legends. Though Curtis’ views no doubt evolved after the Harriman Expedition returned in 1899, his experiences on the voyage contributed to the opinions he voiced in the collection. Grinnell, whom he befriended in Alaska, likely fueled his interest in the Natives, and the ideas embodied in Curtis’ expedition photographs resemble those of his later work. Thus, the expedition members’ writings and photographs reveal the disparate takes on wilderness and civilization that circulated on the decks of the Elder and within an influential segment of American society. This essay will explore three nineteenth-century intellectual trends that influenced the Harriman Expedition. First, it will examine the expedition members’ expansionist conception of the utility of wilderness and their faith in civilization. It will then analyze the participants’ Romantic reverence for wilderness and troubled acknowledgement of civilization’s harmfulness. Finally, the paper will explore the men’s complex Social Darwinist view of the inevitable subjugation of wilderness and the fragility of civilization. The expedition members’ conflicted perspectives shed light on their uncertainty in confronting a rapidly changing national landscape. As they explored the glaciers and villages of Alaska, they struggled to comprehend their proper relationship with America’s natural and cultural features in the wake of the frontier. The Expansionist Perspective The Harriman Expedition occurred at the end of an age of pioneers, Indian wars, and unchecked industrialization. The Census of 1890 had declared the frontier officially closed, concluding nearly three centuries of white expansion across the continent. That same year, the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee had subdued Indian resistance to American policies.10 In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his Frontier Thesis, which argued that American democracy had relied on a continuously receding frontier — now gone — in which industrial civilization evolved from hunter-gatherer “savagery.” Turner concluded his influential essay with the prediction that although the West was no longer wilderness, the United States would “continue to demand a wider field for its exercise.”11 To all extents and purposes, the continental frontier had passed. Even so, in 1899 the desire to dominate the West and its soils was not yet extinguished.12 Buffalo Bill still toured the country to wide acclaim, portraying Indians as violent and
10 Lori Liggett, “The Wounded Knee Massacre, December 29, 1890, An
Introduction,” 1890’s America: A Chronology, accessed April 29, 2014, http://clio.missouristate.edu/lburt/Resources510/WoundedKnee_2. htm. 11 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 227. 12 Mitchell, Vanishing America, 223.
54
sub-human.13 The wilderness’s beauty could not mask its dangers, and most Americans considered industrialized, Christian society to be the wave of the future.14 As Richard Judd explains, this line of thinking reached back to the earliest days of American settlement, when colonists prized nature for its utility and regarded Indians with contempt. Until the Romantic era (roughly 1830-1860), most Americans believed that the land existed for the sole purpose of being tilled. In their view, untamed land was inherently corrupt, and humans completed the natural order by transforming wilderness into civilization.15 Thus, as the agent of agrarian republicanism and the pastoral ideal, the farmer enjoyed an exalted status in the expansionist national consciousness.16 Indians, on the other hand, were thought to lack both the will and the ability to cultivate the land.17 Judd writes that their seeming inseparability from the degenerate wilderness meant that they had internalized nature’s depravity. The idea that wilderness cultivated barbaric savagery in its inhabitants remained potent well into the nineteenthcentury.18 Americans, after all, were still settling a frontier under harsh and hostile conditions. As late as 1893, three years after the frontier had officially closed, Frederick Jackson Turner referred to nature’s power over humans in his Frontier Thesis: “The wilderness masters the colonist…at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man.”19 Many of Turner’s contemporaries agreed. Like him, they embraced an expansionist intellectual heritage that considered wilderness to be a perilous commodity with practical value. Commoditizing wilderness necessarily designated civilization as its master. The utility of nature was never far from the minds of the members of the Harriman Expedition. Though awed by the landscape, most of the scientists were preoccupied with plumbing Alaska’s economic possibilities. W. B. Devereux was most interested in mining technologies that could help Americans access Alaska’s mineral deposits. Bernhard E. Fernow investigated the region’s lumbering potential. Ornithologist A. K. Fisher, to quote William Goetzmann and Kay Sloan, “was downright belligerent in his search for birds” to kill and study for the advancement of science. Edward Harriman, though hell-bent on shooting a Kodiak bear, was no less interested in Alaska’s resources. In fact, he seems to have flirted with the idea of building a railroad line around the world. He may have used the expedition to determine whether building a railroad un-
13 David Hamilton Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth
derneath the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia was feasible.20 Evidently, he decided it was not. Utility was certainly at the core of George Bird Grinnell’s agenda. Unlike many of his shipmates, however, he viewed the usefulness of nature through a conservationist lens. Grinnell was the editor of the sportsmen’s magazine Forest and Stream, a co-founder with Theodore Roosevelt of the conservationist Boone and Crocket Club, the founder of the Audubon Society, and an expert on Indians. Following his death, the New York Times hailed him as “the father of American conservation.”21 Richard Levine makes clear that Grinnell was not a romantic preservationist — that is, he was usually unconcerned with protecting nature for its own sake. Like his close conservationist friend and associate Gifford Pinchot, he held that nature should be used sparingly so as to ensure the survival and economic success of Americans in both the present and the future.22 Even when Grinnell advocated leaving land untouched, he maintained that the total lack of exploitation would be the “highest possible use” of the area.23 In his essay “The Salmon Industry,” published in 1901, Grinnell decried the overfishing and wasteful canneries that were decimating Alaska’s salmon populations. He warned that devastating the supply of fish would cause the canning industries to fail. According to Grinnell, canning industries worked “in a most wasteful and thoughtlessly selfish way, grasping for everything that is within their reach and thinking nothing of the future.” Bankruptcy would ruin Alaska’s prosperity and spell untold suffering for the people thrown out of work. Grinnell may have worried that they would meet the same fate as the luckless gold rushers who had flocked to Alaska and now lived with barely enough income to stay alive. What was worse, the canneries infringed upon Alaska Natives’ fishing rights and destroyed the Indians’ main source of food.24 Grinnell wanted to save the salmon not because he thought they were aesthetically pleasing or that all life was sacred, but because he considered them essential to American prosperity and Native survival. Like the settlers and pioneers, Grinnell maintained that nature’s primary purpose was to benefit humankind. He regarded the land as a commodity and thereby espoused the unsentimental pragmatism inherent in an expansionist understanding of wilderness. Unlike Grinnell, expedition historian John Burroughs had mixed feelings about the natural component of wilderness. More ideologically transcendentalist than Grinnell, but less so than John Muir, the white-bearded naturalist had spent much
(Wales: Welsh Academic Press, 2001), 42.
14 Mitchell, Vanishing America, 14-15, 217-219. 15 Richard W. Judd, The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of 16
17 18 19 55
Conservation in America, 1740-1840, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43, 47-48, 46, 12, 18, 182. Kaye Adkins, “Serpents and Sheep: The Harriman Expedition, Alaska, and the Metaphoric Reconstruction of American Wilderness,” Technical Communication Quarterly 12, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 429-430; Judd, Untilled Garden, 12. Mitchell, Vanishing America, 16. Judd, Untilled Garden, 47-48, 220. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 201.
20 Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, xiv-xv, 8. 21 Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior, 186, 202-204. 22 Richard Levine, “Indians, Conservation, and George Bird Grinnell,” American Studies 28, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 44, Mid-America American Studies Association, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40642210; Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation, 3-4. 23 Levine, “Indians, Conservation, and George Bird Grinnell,” 45. 24 George Bird Grinnell, “The Salmon Industry” in Alaska 1899: Essays from the Harriman Expedition (Korea: University of Washington Press, 1995), 343, 345-346, 348.
Figure 2. “At Frazer Reach, British Columbia,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. Dark mountains loom under a stormy sky, evidence of nature’s fearsome power. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
Figure 3. “Before the Great Berg Fell,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. A stark representation of the tenuousness of human existence. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
of his life wandering through the green and subdued northeastern landscape, and his nature books enjoyed a solid readership.25 Despite his love of the outdoors, Burroughs had one foot firmly planted in civilization. Gazing out the window of Harriman’s luxury Pullman car as it chugged toward Seattle, Burroughs “rejoiced in the endless vistas of beautiful fertile farms” that stretched across the prairie. The land’s attractiveness lay not in the “picturesque,” but in “the beauty of utility.” In Idaho, an admiring Burroughs noted that the farmers’ irrigation techniques “made the desert bloom as the rose.”26 Agriculture in arid regions deepened the connection between God and man. “Here,” reflected the old naturalist, “may the dwellers well say with the Psalmist, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”27 Like the pioneers, Burroughs compared the cultivation of land to a sacred duty: “Baptize the savage sagebrush plain with water and it becomes a christian [sic] orchard and wheat field.” Baptism by irrigation “clothed” the wild earth in an appropriate suit of green.28 For Burroughs, farmers were missionaries to the wilderness, transforming it into a pastoral civilization. In accordance with the expansionist perspective, the naturalist considered wilderness to be insufficient to man’s needs and, to a certain extent, immoral. Civilizing it was a noble work. Burroughs found some aspects of the western wilderness to be strangely repellent. To a certain extent, he seems to have
believed that nature could physically and spiritually imperil humans. He was struck by the poverty he witnessed west of the fertile Great Plains. “Forlorn” families dwelled in “pitiful” and “rude” homes against a backdrop of “bare, brown, and forbidding” mountains.29 There, the wilderness appeared to be much stronger than civilization. Whereas Turner exuberantly thought that “[stripping] off the garments of civilization” was temporary and facilitated the “most rapid and effective Americanization,” Burroughs recoiled from it.30 In his view, living in a non-pastoral wilderness and being removed from civilization could cause untold misery. The dilapidated farmhouses of the West affected him “like a nightmare.”31 Danger aside, the sheer majesty of the western landscape terrified Burroughs. Kaye Adkins notes that the naturalist often used violent language and death imagery to describe the wilderness.32 West of Wyoming, the land was “raw, turbulent, forbidding, almost chaotic.” Utah’s Badlands were “flayed alive,” “gashed,” and “red as butcher’s meat,” and the Price River was a “red and angry torrent.”33 Alaska was still more daunting. The sea alone was enough to cow anyone; Burroughs spent much of his time aboard the satirically nicknamed “George W. Roller” heaving in his cabin.34 His forays above deck and on land, however, gave him ample opportunity to gape at Alaska’s overbearing grandeur. At the gorge at White Pass “it was appalling to look up as to look down; chaos and death below us, impending avalanches of hanging rocks above
25 Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 11. 26 John Burroughs, “Narrative of the Expedition,” in Narrative, Glaciers,
29 30 31 32 33 34
Natives vol. 1 Alaska, ed. C. Hart Merriam, (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901), 1-2, 12. 27 Burroughs, “Narrative,” 13. 28 Burroughs, “Narrative, 13.
Burroughs, “Narrative,” 3. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 201. Burroughs, “Narrative,” 3. Burroughs, “Narrative,” 3. Adkins, “Serpents and Sheep,” 425-426. Burroughs, “Narrative,” 4-6. Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 33.
56
us. How elemental and cataclysmal it all looked!” Muir Glacier was “ridged and contorted like an angry sea,” while the Serpentine Glacier was “a great white serpent with its jaws set with glittering fangs.” Burroughs’ one favorable remark about Alaskan glaciers — that they were “Muir’s mountain sheep” — did not compliment their wildness, but connected them with images of pastoral utility.35 Burroughs had inherited an expansionist heritage that regarded wilderness as a primordial, satanic obstacle to human progress, and civilization as a divinely sanctioned conqueror. He believed that through cultivation, nature could shed its dangerous depravity, merge with civilization, and attain idyllic beauty. The naturalist surveyed the untilled western landscape with the same fear that many frontiersmen must have felt upon seeing the daunting expanse for the first time. Like Burroughs, Edward Curtis was keenly aware of the menace of the wilderness. By contrast, however, the young photographer found it aesthetically appealing. Having spent most of his career photographing Seattle socialites, Curtis must have been elated at the opportunity to document the Alaskan wilderness under the uncanny midnight sun.36 According to Aaron Sachs, his photographs are the most stirring and insightful of all the work produced on the Harriman Expedition. The historian rightly notes that they convey the power and harshness of nature, the tenuousness and perseverance of humanity, and the beauty of both. Sachs goes so far as to suggest that Curtis “rescued the Harriman Expedition” from a general lack of conscious introspection on the impact of American expansion.37 Dark, looming mountains and turbulent skies frequently appear in Curtis’ photographs of Alaska (Figure 2).38 In a stroke of genius, he often juxtaposed striking landscapes with man (Figure 3), speaking to the fragility of human life within vast and uncontrollable spaces.39 This theme would feature time and again in his later work with American Indians (Figure 4).40 Curtis’s photographs depart from the expansionist view of nature as commodity, but they conform to the pioneer perspective by portraying the wild as formidable. They indicate that at a time when fewer Americans were experiencing the harsh realities of pioneer life, the expansionist fear of wilderness was still prevalent. The expedition members exhibited an expansionist atti35 36 37 38
Burroughs, “Narrative,” 32, 43, 72, 28. Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 29, 51. Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 337. Edward S. Curtis, “At Frazer Reach, British Columbia” in New York to Cook Inlet vol. 1 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 14, accessed March 3, 2014, https://content.lib. washington.edu/u?/harriman,13. 39 Edward S. Curtis, “Before the Great Berg Fell” in New York to Cook Inlet vol. 1 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 14, accessed March 3, 2014, https://content.lib.washington. edu/u?/harriman,35. 40 Edward S. Curtis, “Cañon de Chelly – Navaho” in The Apache. The Jicarillas. The Navaho vol.1 The North American Indian, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Cambridge, USA: University Press, 1907), plate no. 28, accessed March 3, 2014, http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/curtis/.
57
tude not only toward nature, but also toward the Natives. As had the colonial and pioneer missionaries who preceded them, they generally held that it was in the Natives’ best interest to assimilate into Christian, Euro-American culture. In this respect, the expedition members were typical of most other Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. One contemporary children’s book, A Peep at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, hammered the idea of white superiority into the heads of its young readers: “And though some in the red men’s homes may long/For wars that will never cease,/There are others we know who would gladly go/With the white men and be at peace.”41 Many late-nineteenth-century Americans still regarded the Natives as backward and undisciplined. White society generally maintained that peace would elude Indians unless they abandoned their allegedly savage ways. Not even Curtis was immune to this expansionist outlook. It is true that he was experienced and open-minded enough to recognize that a Euro-American lifestyle was not necessarily more ethical or fulfilling than were Native cultures. He regarded “Indianness” not simply as a race, but as a way of life that had evolved over time to enable Natives to thrive in a “harsh environment.”42 Nonetheless, in The North American Indian he wrote that the Natives, with their “deep-rooted superstition, conservatism, and secretiveness” would inevitably fall before white civilization. The two societ-
Figure 4. “Cañon de Chelly – Navaho,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1904. Navaho Indians on horseback are dwarfed by the imposing canyon wall. Courtesy of Northwestern University Digital Library Collections.
41 “A Peep at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” (McLoughlin Brothers, 1887),
12, accessed March 3, 2014, http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/ BookReader?bookid=___peep_00361524&twoPage=false&route=adv anced&size=0&fullscreen=false&pnum1=1&lang=English&ilang=Eng lish. 42 Edward Curtis, introduction to The Teton Sioux. The Yanktonai. The Assiniboin. in The North American Indian, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Cambridge, USA: University Press, 1908), 3: xi, accessed March 3, 2014, http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/.
ies were so different that “to the workaday man of our own race the life of the Indian is just as incomprehensible as are the complexities of civilization to the mind of the untutored savage.”43 Considering that Curtis wrote these words after living with Indians for nearly a decade, it is probable that he espoused even more racist views while on the Harriman Expedition. Almost ten years after the voyage, his writings betrayed his expansionist intellectual heritage. In them, he conveyed a conviction that “savagery” was weaker than “civilization” and destined to fail. The Harriman Expedition most clearly expressed an expansionist view of Indians in their description of a Sunday visit to New Metlakahtla, a colony of Christian Indians under the ministerial direction of William Duncan. Assuming that even small amounts of alcohol would destroy the Natives, Duncan had moved his congregation from the mainland to Annette Island, where the Episcopal Church could not force him to use wine during his services. To protect the Indians from the debauchery of gold prospectors, he usually did not allow other white people on the island; visiting it was a rare privilege. New Metlakahtla was a religious and capitalist experiment. It contained a church, a town hall, a school, sawmills, and salmon canneries, resembling, in Grinnell’s view, “an old-fashioned New England hamlet in its peaceful quiet.”44 Even the expedition members who appreciated Native cultures were deeply impressed with Duncan’s accomplishments. Grinnell commended the minister on transforming the Indians from “the wild men that they were…to the respectable and civilized people that they are now.” Burroughs thought that New Metlakahtla was “one of the best object lessons to be found on the coast, showing what can be done with the Alaska Indians.” He observed that the Indians were dressed like rural northeastern Americans and arrived at church “tastefully clad.” Under the minister’s “wonderful tutelage,” the Indians “had been brought from a low state of savagery to a really fair state of industrial civilization.” Burroughs entertained no doubts as to which society was superior. The praise he lavished on the New Metlakahtla Natives was directed less at them than at the EuroAmerican civilization to which they had conformed. In Burroughs’ view, a white man had taught the “childish” Indians the true path; he was the master, they the docile disciples. This attitude was expansionist to the core. It asserted the enlightenment of white civilization and condescendingly maintained that with stern care, “savage” societies could approach such heights. As much as Burroughs commended Duncan for Christianizing the New Metlakahtla Indians, the naturalist also approved of the Natives’ willingness to accept the change in their lifestyle. The Alaskan Natives, wrote Burroughs, appeared more willing to integrate white habits and industrialism into their way of life than were the mainland Indians. The aging natural-
43 Curtis, introduction to The Apache. The Jicarillas. The Navaho., xiii-xv. 44 Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 38-43. George Bird Grinnell,
“The Natives of the Alaska Coast Region,” in Narrative, Glaciers, Natives vol. 1 Alaska, ed. C. Hart Merriam (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901), 155.
ist noted that they had lighter skin and “none of that look as of rocks and mountains, austere and relentless, that our Indians have.” For Burroughs, Indians were of the “rocks and mountains” just as sagebrush was “savage” and orchards “christian [sic].”45 These characterizations illuminate the ways in which nature and humanity were linked in a late-nineteenth-century elite worldview. Wilderness was understood to be a way of life. Unless conquered, nature would lodge itself within man, making him “savage” and “wild.” They would live together in a symbiotic relationship that, to most white Americans was exotic, yet unsatisfactory in its “primitiveness.” In his introduction to the first volume of The North American Indian Curtis wrote, “The word-story of this primitive life, like the pictures, must be drawn direct from Nature…It is thus near to Nature that much of the life of the Indian still is…”46 By contrast, civilization was Christian, industrialized, and capitalist. Its complexities often signified advancement and progress, and its very existence depended on exploiting, rather than coexisting with nature. The Harriman Expedition members’ expansionist intellectual heritage — that is, their love of utility, fear of the wilderness, and disdain for “savagery” — was just one facet of their complex views on wilderness and civilization. In addition to expansionist beliefs, the Harriman Expedition inherited a boisterous Romantic tradition. Many of the members were conscious of the sublimity of the western landscape and the perceived admirable qualities of “savagery.” Accordingly, they were also cognizant of civilization’s darker side. They questioned what it meant to be civilized and even doubted that Euro-American society was worthy of the term. The Romantic Perspective The Romantic conception of wilderness and civilization was a complex fusion of pioneer and post-frontier ideology. On the one hand, the years between the 1830s and the 1860s were perhaps the apex of American expansionism; these decades witnessed the Mexican War, the creation of the term “Manifest Destiny,” and the annexation of Alaska and all the territory from Texas to Oregon Country into the United States. To a certain extent, Americans still regarded the wilderness as something to be distrusted and exploited. They believed that the pioneers who cultivated the earth were completing a divinely mandated natural order.47 On the other hand, this period also saw the stirrings of preservationist and anti-imperialist sentiment. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Smokestacks belched sooty clouds that settled in a haze over increasingly crowded and unhealthy cities.48 Outside urban centers, overhunting reduced animal populations to shadows of what
45 46 47 48
Burroughs, “Narrative,” 24-26, 13. Curtis, introduction to The Apache. The Jicarillas. The Navaho., xiv. Judd, Untilled Garden, 182, 220. Robert E. Bieder, “From Thoreau to Muir: Changes in NineteenthCentury American Conceptions of the Environment,” Americana 7, no. 2 (September 1, 2011).
58
Figure 5. “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,” painted by Albert Bierstadt, c. 1863. A sentimentalized scene of peaceful “savages” harmoniously living in a pristine, majestic landscape. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
they once were. Many Americans regarded these changes with unease.49 The disturbing effects of technology and national progress softened the prevailing view of wilderness.50 Richard Judd explains that nature came to be valued not just as a commodity, but also as a spiritual force that benefited humans even in its untilled state. All of its components were thought to be connected in accordance with a divine plan that gave them a rational and moral quality. According to Judd, the idea that the pioneer and industrialist movements were desecrating God’s handiwork filled many Romantics with anxiety. They began to see civilization as corrupt and the wilderness as simple and pure.51 In their view, the wilderness had the power to rejuvenate Americans both individually and collectively. Mary Lawlor suggests that this notion served to justify westward expansion, and, indeed, her theory is borne out in Turner’s Frontier Thesis.52 In the thesis, Turner quotes a delegate of Virginia’s 1830 constitutional convention on the regenerative powers of the wilderness and its ability to improve even politicians: “This gives [the statesman] bone and muscle…and preserves 49 50 51 52 59
Judd, Untilled Garden, 212-213, 240. Mitchell, Vanishing America, 11. Judd, Untilled Garden, 183-184, 202-204, 208, 212-213, 247-248, 46. Lawlor, Recalling the Wild, 18-19.
his republican principles pure and uncontaminated.”53 The Romantic perception of nature undoubtedly influenced Turner’s belief in the necessity of wilderness for American progress and democracy. Even so, the same conception of a regenerative wilderness that appears in Turner’s work is also present in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the preeminent paean to the divinity of nature. In Judd’s opinion, the growing appreciation for nature’s beauty led to a desire for harmonious existence with the land that laid the groundwork for preservationism.54 The shift in opinion regarding nature also applied to Romantic views of the Natives. Since the Indians were considered inseparable from the natural wilderness, some Americans began to believe that they embodied its “primitive virtue.”55 “Savagery” came to be seen as simpler and more ethical than white society. Of the displacement of the Sioux, Mary Eastman wrote in 1849, “We should be better reconciled with this manifest destiny of the aborigines, if the inroads of civilizations were worthy of it.”56 Thoreau expressed similar sentiments a decade
53 54 55 56
Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 222-223. Judd, Untilled Garden, 244, 247-248. Judd, Untilled Garden, 46. Mary H. Eastman, Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling (Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1962), xvi, quoted in Mitchell, Vanishing America, 126.
later, observing, “I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.”57 Before and after the Civil War, Romantic painters created sentimental images of Native life before its perceived contamination through white encroachment.58 In 1863, Albert Bierstadt produced his famous work “They Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,” an idealized depiction of an Indian tribe camping tranquilly in an unadulterated landscape (Figure 5). In the painting, the Natives are living off the land, but they are also living with it. Some are returning from a successful hunting trip, while others sit by the shores of a lake, admiring a waterfall and being watched, in turn, by a prairie dog. Saddle-less horses graze and dogs prance the meadow. The shapes of the tepees mirror those of the jagged mountains in the background, bathed in heavenly light.59 Bierstadt’s painting portrays nature as sublime, even godly, and the Indians as a serene and integral component of the landscape. The Romantic conception of the wilderness that he espoused persisted at the end of the nineteenth century, manifesting itself in the writings and photographs of the Harriman Expedition. Though members of the Harriman Expedition often conveyed a Romantic perception of wilderness’ worth, their underlying philosophies were different. John Muir and Burroughs were a case in point. Of all the members of the expedition, Muir perhaps best embodies the transcendentalist side of romanticism. He founded the preservationist Sierra Club and tirelessly fought corporate and governmental projects that threatened the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite Valley, and redwood forests. His writings and lectures on the environment instilled in many Americans an appreciation for the wild and for the need to protect it.60 Muir’s preservationism was based on the premise that nature was a fellow being. He loved it as he would a friend and exulted in its wild beauty. Burroughs, on the other hand, regarded nature and humanity as two distinct elements. At odds with his expansionist perspective was a Romantic conception of wilderness as innocent and pure, and civilization as ugly and tainted. For Burroughs, nature was simultaneously in need of human protection and exalted above mankind. This paradox typified his complex views of wilderness, and like Muir, he expressed them in his expedition writings. Muir’s descriptions of the Alaskan landscape are nothing short of ecstatic. The Harriman Expedition was Muir’s fourth trip to Alaska, and the scenery awed him as it had on his previous visits.61 Whereas Burroughs regarded glaciers with fearful ambivalence, Muir beheld them in thrilled wonder. The icy expanses were “magnificent,” “grand,” “beautiful,” and “superb;” at Disenchantment Bay, the Hubbard was “a truly
57 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, ed. J.J. Moldenhauer, quoted 58 59 60 61
in Mitchell, Vanishing America, 243. [Edition unknown.] Mitchell, Vanishing America, 131. Albert Bierstadt, “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak,” database online, ARTstor, accessed March 9, 2014. Bieder, “From Thoreau to Muir;” Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 27. Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 4.
noble glacier.” The language Muir used when discussing the glaciers at Port Wells Fjord exuded delight. They were “the finest and wildest of their kind, looking, as they [came] bounding down a smooth mountain side through the midst of lush flowery gardens and goat pastures, like tremendous leaping, dancing cataracts in prime of flood.”62 It is no wonder that, according to Burroughs, the Indians called Muir the “Great Ice Chief.”63 The Scottish adventurer was in his element on the icy mountain slopes. He loved them not because he thought they benefited mankind in any material way, but because their wild ethereality resonated with his Romantic personality. He connected personally with the scenery around him. Harriman Fjord, with “nature’s best and choicest alpine treasures purely wild” was, he wrote, “a place after my own heart.”64 Muir’s letters from the expedition reveal his deep kinship with nature, which he tried to share with his correspondents. In a letter to the Harriman girls one month after the expedition, Muir advised, “Kill as few of your fellow beings as possible and pursue some branch of natural history at least far enough to see Nature’s harmony.”65 For Muir, plants, animals, and humans all deserved to live, and each filled some role in the balance of nature. The sight of hunted animals repulsed “the old man of the mountains.” He simply could not understand his shipmates’ enthusiasm for the “ruthless business” of hunting. Likewise, he could not enjoy the expedition’s excursion to a hot springs near Sitka, where the caretaker had “murdered a mother deer and threw her over the ridge-pole of his shanty, then caught her pitiful baby fawn and tied it beneath its dead mother.”66 To Muir, killing an animal could be equivalent to murder. His account of the dead deer and its fawn indicates that he considered animal life to be as sacred as human existence. Thus, Muir seems to have regarded wilderness and civilization as vital organisms that had as much a right to life as the other. This lack of differentiation was radically Romantic and set Muir apart from his shipmates. Unlike Muir, Burroughs saw no similarity between wilderness and civilization. As a result, Burroughs faced the challenge of determining whether one was more worthy than the other. The aging naturalist approved of development and material progress, but he also shared Muir’s Romantic appreciation of wildness. Despite his preference for pastoral scenery, he reviled humanity’s encroachments on wild landscapes that he considered wholesome and helpless. His conception of nature’s innocence made him less certain of civilization’s superiority. After passing Omaha on the train to Seattle, Burroughs surveyed the untilled prairie, noting that the “gentle slopes and dimpled val62 John Muir, “Notes on the Pacific Coast Glaciers,” in Narrative, Glaciers, 63 64 65 66
Natives vol. 1 Alaska, ed. C. Hart Merriam, (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901), 122, 125-126. Burroughs, “Narrative,” 18. Muir, “Pacific Coast Glaciers,” 132. John Muir to Mary and Cornelia Harriman, Elizabeth Averell, and Dorothea Draper, August 30, 1899, in The Life and Letters of John Muir, ed. William Frederic Bade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 2: 333. Goetzmann and Sloan, Looking Far North, 4, 119, 90.
60
leys are innocent of the plow.” Wild nature was childlike, not yet forced into maturity by the plow’s defiling touch (although, considering Burroughs’ fascination with the “youthfulness” and sensual femininity of the western landscape, deflowering might be the more appropriate word).67 Burroughs seems to have struggled with his belief in the pastoral ideal partly because he considered wilderness and civilization to be two distinct entities. Whereas Muir’s Romanticism regarded wilderness and civilization as fundamentally the same, Burroughs’ Romanticism maintained that the former was superior to the latter. As delightful as he imagined Arcadian civilization to be, he recognized that it was contrary to the land’s natural state. This understanding clashed with his expansionist perspective, but the naturalist could not ignore the sinister side of subduing nature. Burroughs expressed his Romantic differentiation between wild purity and civilized degeneracy more than once. On the journey to Seattle, the plow was the least of his worries. The train tracks that sliced through the countryside filled him with horror even as he benefited from them. Rather than allowing the “great god Erosion” to shape the plains, the naturalist wrote, humans “surprise his forces with shovels and picks… and the spectacle is strange indeed and in many ways repellant. In places the country looks as if all the railroad forces of the world might have been turned loose to delve and rend and pile in some mad, insane folly and debauch.”68 Rapid industrialization disrupted the natural order. Civilization could be destructive, insane, even debauched, and it was ruining the pristine innocence of the wilderness. As shall be discussed later, Burroughs used similar language to describe white Americans’ devastation of Native life. His characterization of the Snake River Canyon as “wild and aboriginal, yet with such beauty and winsome gentleness and delicacy” suggests that Romantic conceptions of the virtue of nature and “savagery” — that is, wilderness — and the corruption of civilization were influential even at the turn of the twentieth century.69 Muir and Burroughs’ diverging Romantic outlooks extended to their perceptions of wilderness’ spirituality. In Muir’s view, nature was more than just an aesthetic gift; it was a friendly manifestation of divinity that smiled upon humankind. Conversely, Burroughs trembled before it as he would before an aloof and omnipotent God. This terror was not of the land’s depravity, but of its transcendence. Though both men agreed that the wild was sublime, they understood its sublimity in different ways. Muir regarded the land not as a lofty and inaccessible Other, but rather as a sacred being that desired close association with humankind. For him, nature was a religious experience that was as instructive as it was spiritual. When he hiked through a forest at Wrangell that he had visited two decades ago, and he
67 Burroughs, “Narrative,” 3-4, 16-17. 68 Burroughs, “Narrative,” 6. 69 Burroughs, “Narrative,” 108. 61
wrote home mystically, “I had many questions to answer.”70 At Glacier Bay, he observed that the earth-shaping glacial activity was “teaching lessons so plain that he who runs may read.”71 Muir was truly a disciple of the wilderness, which taught him to see God’s hand everywhere in nature. After mentioning the dark clouds that obscured the mountains until the Expedition reached Yakutat Bay, Muir waxed lyrical: “Then the heavens opened and [Mount] St. Elias, gloriously arrayed, bade us welcome…”72 This description rivals the prophetic visions from the Bible, with Mount St. Elias the heavenly being ushering his followers into paradise. The mountain range at Prince William Sound was no less spiritual to the “Great Ice Chief.” Bathed in “celestial light,” it was “one of the richest, most glorious” landscapes Muir had ever seen. The Fairweather Range, too, was “transfigured in divine light,” and the sight of it was “the crowning grace and glory of the trip.”73 Like many of his Romantic contemporaries, Muir considered nature to be a sacred manifestation of God’s will. However, he did not perceive the wild as austere. Instead, it was kindly and welcoming even to comparatively insignificant members of civilization. Such grace, Muir believed, deserved preservation. While Muir experienced the wild with delighted veneration, Burroughs confronted it with half-fearful awe. The aging naturalist felt dwarfed by nature’s otherworldly majesty. When he climbed Mount Wright overlooking Muir Glacier, he encountered a breathtaking view. “Glory and inspiration” were at the mountain’s peak. Exhilarated, Burroughs meditated that “It was indeed a day with the gods, strange gods, the gods of the foreworld, but they had great power over us.”74 Mountains proved to be a source of endless wonder for the naturalist. He regarded Mount St. Elias as intensely spiritual, with its “lift heavenward” and the “aspiration of the insensate rocks…to carry one peak into heights where all may not go…till it stands there in a kind of serene astronomic solitude and remoteness.”75 This description brings to mind a heavenly court where God reigns in splendor and, in contrast to Muir’s view, at a distance. Destroying the wilderness was therefore tantamount to an assault against the unapproachable Divine. For both Muir and Burroughs, nature was holy, but they conceived of its spirituality differently. Muir spoke with nature face-to-face; it was exalted, but also a friend. Burroughs, on the other hand, regarded the wild as transcending human experience. The men’s diverging viewpoints demonstrate the sheer complexity of American perceptions of wilderness. Not even Romantic conceptions were uniform. Burroughs’ perspective not only differed from Muir’s under-
70 John Muir to Louie, Wanda, and Helen, June 6, 1899, in The Life 71 72 73 74 75
and Letters of John Muir, ed. William Frederic Bade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 2: 324. Muir, “Pacific Coast Glaciers,” 128. Muir, “Pacific Coast Glaciers,” 130. Muir, “Pacific Coast Glaciers,” 135. Burroughs, “Narrative,” 46. Burroughs, “Narrative,” 55.
standing of nature, but was also at variance with the expansionist belief that agriculture conformed to God’s will. The tension between obeying and offending God through interacting with the land is prevalent throughout the naturalist’s writings. As was the case with many of his contemporaries, his faith in material progress and love of nature collided. Moreover, he was not the only member of the Harriman Expedition who felt conflicted about humankind’s proper relationship with wilderness. Curtis appears to have been no less aware of the destruction that civilization wreaked on the landscape. His photographs from the Harriman Expedition seem to doubt the worth and purpose of development. Figure 6 depicts the clapboard Episcopal church and school house of New Metlakahtla standing in a field of mangled tree stumps. A gloomy sky deepens the bleakness of the scene.76 Figure 7 presents a similar picture: to the left is the town of Wrangell surrounded by the stubby remains of trees; to the right is a rich, dense forest threatened by urban encroachment.77 The juxtaposition of civilization, destruction, and the vibrancy of nature seems to question the value of America’s march to material progress. Curtis’s photographs remind the viewer that civilization comes at a cost, and they imply that the cost is too high. The Harriman Expedition members’ Romantic conceptions of nature’s innocence mirrored their notions of the purity of
Figure 6. “Episcopal Church and School House, New Metlakahtla, Annette Island, Alaska, June 1899,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. The trappings of civilization stand in a field of mangled tree stumps at New Metlakahtla. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
76
Edward S. Curtis, “Episcopal Church and Schoolhouse, New Metlakahtla, Annette Island, Alaska, June1899,” in New York to Cook Inlet vol. 1 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 16, accessed March 13, 2014, https://content.lib.washington. edu/u?/harriman,19. 77 Edward S. Curtis, “Episcopal Church and Schoolhouse, New Metlakahtla, Annette Island, Alaska, June1899,” in New York to Cook Inlet vol. 1 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 16, accessed March 13, 2014, https://content.lib.washington. edu/u?/harriman,22.
“savagery.” Undoubtedly, they viewed Natives with condescension and believed that white society was altogether superior. Even so, the members of the expedition thought that in many respects, Indians were more ethical than Euro-Americans. The writings from the trip contend that by forcing material progress on the Indians, the United States had corrupted them. White civilization’s greed had ruined the idealized simplicity of Native culture. Indians represented a way of life that many expedition members admired, but regarded as irretrievable. The expedition members’ views of the Indians epitomized the tension between patronizing and respectful attitudes toward the Natives. They condescendingly thought that the Alaskan Natives possessed a virtuous simplicity that white civilization had lost. Burroughs, for instance, believed that the Alaskan Natives, like nature, were as ingenuous as children. At Lowe Inlet, he commented on “large, round, stolid innocent faces” of the Indians. The first Eskimo he met at Virgin Bay, meanwhile, had “an amused childish look.” In Siberia, other Eskimos stood with their hands inside their sleeves “after the manner of children on a cold morning.”78 Grinnell also attributed simple innocence to Indians, and immorality to whites. The Alaska Indians were “a hardy race,” Grinnell wrote — “they fish, they hunt, they feast, they dance; and until the white man came and changed all their life, they lived well.” These supercilious observations, on the one hand, reinforced the notion that whites needed to take charge of the supposedly inexperienced Indians. On the other hand, the remarks implied a certain fondness for the Natives that conflicted with the expedition members’ general disdain for “savagery” and was a far cry from expansionist mistrust. Since Burroughs and Grinnell equated Indians with children, it follows that they considered them in need of the same protection as youngsters. Though they favored white society overall, the two men held that “savagery” had been an unnecessary victim of civilization’s unscrupulous practices. They regarded the former’s simplicity as far superior to the latter’s contamination. In Siberia, Burroughs despaired at the treatment that whites accorded the Natives, writing that whalers “[corrupted] them with bad morals and villainous whiskey.” The naturalist was similarly shocked at the destruction of the Indians on St. Lawrence Island. He claimed that whalers had given the Natives liquor and, in so doing, had “debauched and demoralized them” until the Indians died of starvation.79 Grinnell, too was highly cognizant of Euro-American civilization’s failings. Selfish Americans, particularly gold miners, had brought untold misery on the Natives. Contact with “the contaminating touch of the civilized” had decimated the Indians:80 White men, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, already swarm over the Alaska coast, and are overwhelming the Eskimo. They have taken away their women, and debauched their men with liquor. They have brought them strange new diseases that they 78 Burroughs, “Narrative,” 23, 68, 100. 79 Burroughs, “Narrative,” 100-101, 108. 80 Grinnell, “Natives,” 137-138, 183. 62
never knew before, and in a very short time they will ruin and disperse the wholesome, hearty, merry people whom we saw at Port Clarence and at Plover Bay. 81 “The civilized” were not limited to independent gold rushers. Industry, too, was killing the Natives. Salmon canneries depleted Indians’ food supplies, appropriated their fishing rights, and stole their historical territory.82 Grinnell’s vivid portrayal of Alaskan Indian life both before and after white encroachment was a sharp critique of a nation that considered itself advanced. “Primitiveness” was “wholesome” and had once been “merry,” but civilization could be scheming and violent. Grinnell was no Romantic, but like Burroughs, he nonetheless entertained Romantic doubts about the value of Euro-American progress and society. Amid the complexities of an industrial age, the seeming simplicity of Native life was greatly appealing, and the ruinous drive of the United States, appalling. Grinnell’s wrath no doubt had an impact on his friend Curtis. Throughout The North American Indian, Curtis denounced white civilization for its arrogance toward the Natives. In so doing, he challenged the notion that Euro-Americans were more “civilized” than the peoples they were oppressing. Curtis admired the Indians for their “elaborate religious system,” piety, and “beautiful” artistic creations. He asserted that his countrymen’s denial that the Natives possessed faith, ethical codes, and art was simply wrong.83 American civilization, implied the photographer, would do well to examine its own hypocrisy before scoffing at the lifestyles of other peoples. The first volume of Curtis’s work opens with an indictment of white society: “The treatment accorded the Indians by those who lay claim to civilization and Christianity has in many cases been worse than criminal.”84 According to Curtis, Americans claimed civilization, but did not actually practice the values that they associated with it. The photographer was not afraid to speculate that his own society might be less civilized than the one it oppressed. Curtis even suspected that civilization itself inherently possessed negative traits. His doubts reflected a Romantic disenchantment with Manifest Destiny and American aspirations to material progress. Above all, he considered civilization to be avaricious. He raged that the California Natives “fell easy prey to the greed of civilization” and that the change wrought on Indians in general had “been made many-fold harder by the white man’s cupidity.”85 The photographer may have been suggesting that white American society was, by nature, selfish and competitive. Through sheer greed, it had ravaged “primi81 82 83 84 85
63
Grinnell, “Natives,” 183. Grinnell, “The Salmon Industry,” 348. Curtis, introduction to The Apache. The Jicarillas. The Navaho., xvi. Curtis, introduction to The Apache. The Jicarillas. The Navaho., xv. Edward Curtis, introduction to The Kato. The Wailaki. The Yuki. The Pomo. The Wintun. The Maidu. The Miwok. The Yokuts. in The North American Indian, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Cambridge, USA: University Press, 1924), 14: xi, accessed March 14, 2014, http://curtis. library.northwestern.edu/; Curtis, introduction to The Teton Sioux. The Yanktonai. The Assiniboin, xi.
Figure 7. “Wrangell, Alaska, June 1899,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. On the left, the town of Wrangell is surrounded by tree stumps; on the right is a rich forest not yet fallen before man’s axe. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
tive” and perhaps more fulfilling cultures. Returning to Alaska in 1927 must have been especially poignant for Curtis. White intrusion had left its mark on the Natives he had photographed in his youth thirty years before. “As among so many primitive people,” he wearily observed, “contact with whites and the acquirement of diseases have worked a tragic change during this period.” Amid the onslaught of industrialization, Romanticallyinclined Americans had begun to question the foundation of material progress on which their civilization was built. Living among the Natives for three decades made Curtis see clearly the cracks in that foundation. Like his fellow expedition members, he believed that in many ways, “wilderness” was preferable to American civilization. This understanding formed part of the basis of the conservation and preservation movements at the turn of the twentieth century. The Social Darwinist Perspective In 1899, many Americans faced the end of the pioneering era with a profound sense of loss. As perhaps nothing else could, the closing of the frontier brought into sharp relief the fact that wilderness was finite. Rapidly growing settlements dotted a Western expanse that had once seemed endless. Plows raked the earth, railroads slashed through mountainsides, the bison were on the verge of extinction, and the remaining Native tribes were thoroughly demoralized. The wilderness, with all of its Romantic connotations, appeared to be vanishing. Such destruction caused more Americans than ever before to wonder whether the promises of Manifest Destiny had been worth the price after all.86 86 Mitchell, Vanishing America, xiii.
This doubt informed many of the late-nineteenth-century efforts to preserve nature and Indian cultures. Lee Clark Mitchell contends that what most alarmed the preservationists was a disappearing American heritage. He suggests that the surge of nationalism after the War of 1812 gave rise to the notion that the United States’ landscape, Native tribes, and pioneering past comprised a glorious national inheritance. By the twentieth century, anxiety for this endangered heritage escalated to the extent that many Americans joined initiatives to protect natural spaces, collect Indian artifacts, and document Native cultures.87 Mitchell’s analysis is insightful, but it overlooks preservationism’s future-oriented focus. Though undoubtedly nostalgic, the movement owed much to the spread of Social Darwinist fears of the rise and fall of nations. The expansionist and Romantic understandings of wilderness and civilization focused on the two entities’ relative value and characterized their struggle as a conflict between right and wrong. By contrast, the Social Darwinist standpoint regarded the tension between wilderness and civilization as a natural manifestation of survival of the fittest. At its worst, Social Darwinism arrogantly asserted the inevitable ascendency of white society over nature and other peoples. At its best, Social Darwinism compelled its proponents to reassess their views of wilderness, civilization, and the tenability of their own society. It galvanized many Americans to work toward ensuring that both would still exist in the future. In his Frontier Thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner clearly articulated the post-Darwinian concern with the rise and fall of civilizations. The wilderness, he declared, was the lifeblood of American advancement and democracy. Chasing the receding edge of the frontier westward had distanced the nation from European influence and nurtured rugged individualism in Americans. The country’s success was the result of a unique “recurrence of the process of evolution” that could occur only through colonizing a vast wilderness. Turner detailed the “record of social evolution” that was scribbled across “this continental page from west to east.” It originated with the “savagery” of Indians and hunters. The trader, “the pathfinder of civilization” displaced these early peoples and was in turn supplanted by ranches. Subsistence farmers followed, then commercial farms, until finally industrialized cities completed the process. The frontier necessary for this Americanizing progression, however, was “gone, and with its going [had] closed the first period of American history.”88 Turner’s theory of the natural process of national evolution may have resonated with his countrymen in part because it was not new. The idea that “primitive” societies inevitably evolved into “civilized” nations reached as far back as the eighteenth century. In 1794, Yale President Timothy Dwight’s description of the allegedly natural transformation of hunters and trappers into farmers and townspeople was strikingly similar to
87 Mitchell, Vanishing America, xiii-xiv, 8-9. 88 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 221, 201, 200, 207, 227.
Turner’s.89 Furthermore, Judd contends that many mid-nineteenth-century Americans thought that human improvement of nature corresponded to the earth’s scientific, evolutionary trajectory. Some, for instance, argued that draining marsh and cutting down trees speeded up the land’s natural tendency to dry over time. According to this view, the pioneer and industrialists’ alteration of the landscape eased the course of both natural and national evolution.90 By the 1870s, however, many Americans were becoming cognizant of the ominous side of collective evolution. As Judd observes, they worried that unchecked industrialization would bankrupt the United States of its resources, causing American civilization to fail like the ancient European empires that preceded it. Scientists were growing aware of humanity’s capacity to wreak disastrous change on the climate. In 1873, Franklin B. Hough asserted that “stately ruins in solitary deserts” were the products of environmental transformations resulting from “the improvement acts of man, in destroying the trees and plants which once clothed the surface, and sheltered it from the sun and the winds.”91 Those who had not already internalized the Romantic conception of the spirituality of an unsullied landscape were now becoming convinced that nature was necessary for their country’s survival. Once the frontier had closed, the dire warnings about the land’s exhaustibility assumed greater urgency. More Americans began calling for the preservation of nature for their descendants before it succumbed to the onslaught of modernity.92 The seeming disappearance of the Indians compounded the anxiety over the fate of American civilization. Turner’s thesis had voiced commonly held Social Darwinist notions that “primitive” societies would inevitability succumb to more advanced cultures. This idea justified white expansion; displacing and exterminating millions of Natives seemed less criminal if the victims were destined to die out anyway.93 Mitchell writes that even Americans who considered themselves supporters of Indian rights believed that the only way the Natives could avoid extinction would be if they assimilated into the dominant white society.94 Nevertheless, especially after the closing of the frontier, the influence of Social Darwinism raised unsettling questions. If once-populous Indian tribes were decimated and driven from their homelands, who was to say that American society could not meet the same end? It was a melancholy prospect.95 When Americans flocked west to document Indian ways of life and collect Native artifacts, they may have done so not only to preserve a threatened national heritage, but also to
89 Mitchell, Vanishing America, 271; Judd, Untilled Garden, 219. 90 Judd, Untilled Garden, 239-240 91 Franklin Hough, “On the Duty of Governments in the Preservation 92 93 94 95
of Forests,” American Association for the Advancement of Science Proceedings (August 1873): 1-2, quoted in Judd, Untilled Garden, 305. Mitchell, Vanishing America, 54, 58. Mitchell, Vanishing America, 16. Mitchell, Vanishing America, 217-219. Mitchell, Vanishing America, 5-6.
64
save themselves. Mary Lawlor writes that Curtis’s photographs “record the somewhat displaced self-pity of a vanishing white culture (that of the frontier) which depended on the presence of Indians for its own romance.”96 Documenting Indian cultures enabled many Americans to cling to a bygone age. Uncertain of their country’s trajectory after the closing of the frontier, they sought to transfer remnants of its past into the future to dispel the feeling that they were nearing the end of their nation’s evolutionary path. The members of the Harriman Expedition regarded the “vanishing” wilderness with a Social Darwinist mixture of complacency and apprehension. Some maintained that man’s modifications of the land conformed to scientific norms, while others disagreed. Burroughs, for one, implied in his writings that manmade adjustments to the landscape were simply rapid evolutionary processes. The naturalist was amazed at how similar the earth-shaping power of Muir Glacier was to that of man. “It is so rare to find nature working with such measure and precision,” he marveled. One moraine resembled “a railroad embankment…about the width of a single-track road.” Another was “more suggestive of a wagon road,” and Burroughs wondered that the gravel had not “been sifted out from some moving vehicle.”97 This striking comparison of glacial and human creative activities hearkened back to the idea that artificially altering the landscape corresponded to the natural stages of evolution. Men laying track was equivalent, in effect, to glaciers digging furrows in the ground. Despite his love of nature and abhorrence of unrestrained railroad development, Burroughs was not a radical preservationist; he believed that humans ought to work the land. The naturalist appears to have held that improving the landscape to make way for civilization was not only a fulfillment of God’s wishes, as previously shown, but also the culmination of evolutionary progress. Other members of the expedition expressed a gloomier perspective on the evolution of civilization. Witnessing American devastation of the Alaskan landscape made some of the scientists focus on the potential for national decline, rather than ascension. Grinnell was most vocal about the dangers that could spring from destroying nature. As a leading conservationist, he fretted that industrialization would leave successive generations with fewer resources. He predicted that the effects would be economically disastrous for the United States. In his article “The Salmon Industry,” Grinnell lambasted Alaskan canneries for their wasteful slaughter of local fish populations. So many salmon were being killed, he warned, that “before long the canning industry must cease to be profitable.” When he considered the businesses’ unscrupulousness, Grinnell was incensed: “The canners work in a most wasteful and thoughtlessly selfish way, grasping for everything that is within their reach and thinking nothing of the future.”98 The future of both the industry and the nation’s prosperity dominated Grinnell’s 96 Lawlor, Recalling the Wild, 51. 97 Burroughs, “Narrative,” 43-44. 98 Grinnell, “The Salmon Industry,” 343, 345-346. 65
thinking. At the end of his essay, he made sure to mention that in 1900 Alaska’s salmon canneries produced over six million dollars’ worth of fish — nearly double the amount produced the year before. “Certainly such a resource is worth saving and making perpetual,” the conservationist scolded.99 Like other Social Darwinists, Grinnell believed that diminishing resources jeopardized civilization. In his view, nature was meant not only to be worked, but also to be spared for generations to come. The success of the United States depended on it. The members of the Harriman Expedition were more resigned to the perceived disappearance of Native cultures than they were to the destruction of nature. They regarded the “vanishing Indian” as an unavoidable byproduct of the progress of civilization. The only safeguards against Indian extinction were assimilating the Natives into white society and documenting their existing ways of life before it became too late to do so. At the same time, the “disappearance” of tribal society led some on the expedition to worry about the fate of civilization in general. In a world where nations naturally rose and fell, civilization seemed inescapably tenuous. The Social Darwinist belief in the inevitability of Native decline influenced even staunch Indian supporters like Grinnell and Curtis. They considered white and Indian societies to be locked in a battle of survival of the fittest. Neither man expected the latter to win. “There is an inevitable conflict between civilization and savagery,” Grinnell mused after witnessing the deterioration of Alaskan Native culture, “and wherever the two touch each other, the weaker people must be destroyed.”100 Grinnell was clearly implying that the “weaker people” were the Natives. Curtis took his theory a step further in The North American Indian. According to the photographer, the alteration of Indian ways of life were not only “inevitable,” but also “a necessity created by the expansion of the white population.” Indeed, “civilization [demanded] the abandonment of aboriginal habits.” “For once at least,” wrote the photographer, “Nature’s laws have been the indirect cause of a grievous wrong.” This fatalistic approach to the decline of Native society infuses Curtis’s writings. He held that the Indians had always been “destined to pass” through the destruction of tribal culture. “Those who cannot withstand these trying days of the metamorphosis must succumb,” he warned. Thus, Indians were “destined ultimately to become assimilated with the ‘superior race.’”101 Curtis’s quotation marks around the words “superior race” suggest that he did not consider American civilization to be better than Indian society. He did, however, believe that the former was much more powerful than the latter, and that the two could not live harmoniously together. Historian Nicole Tonkovich contends that Social Darwinism was merely a guilt-driven ploy to justify Manifest Des-
99 Grinnell, “The Salmon Industry,” 355. 100 Grinnell, “Natives,” 183. 101 Curtis, introduction to The Teton Sioux. The Yanktonai. The Assiniboin., xi, xiii; Curtis, introduction to The Apache. The Jicarillas. The Navaho., xiii.
Figure 8. “The Vanishing Race,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1904. A shadowy column of Navahos on traditional horseback disappears into black mountains – what Curtis terms “the darkness of an unknown future.” Courtesy of Northwestern University Digital Library Collections.
tiny.102 Although this assertion is in many respects accurate, Grinnell and Curtis’ espousal of Social Darwinism indicates that the concept embodied something deeper. For many likeminded Americans, savagery and civilization were no longer mere states of good or bad. Rather, they were organic entities subject to Darwinian principles of evolution. To Grinnell and Curtis, traditional Native cultures simply could not keep pace with modern, industrialized American life. The end of the weaker tribal society was a necessary, scientific evil if the Indians themselves were to survive. In addition to documenting Indian life, Curtis responded to the destructive effects of evolution by advocating the assimilation of Indians into white society, which he thought would protect the population from extinction. Natives who desired assimilation were “enlightened,” and the photographer despaired that in some cases, “primitive conservatism” was obstructing “progress in the pursuits of civilization.” Curtis was especially frustrated with the Pueblo priesthood’s attempts to “maintain the ancient order of life” in spite of younger “progressive” Indians’ desire to adopt Euro-American ways.103 The arrogance of this viewpoint should not discredit the photographer’s admiration for Native cultures and his distress at their apparent passing. Like Grinnell, Curtis lived among Indians for thirty years, made an unprecedented effort to understand their ways, and denounced American disregard for their rights. He even earned
the respect of the Hopi to the extent that they adopted him into their tribe and initiated him as a priest.104 His Social Darwinist views reflected a concrete, Turnerian perspective that “savagery” and “civilization” were distinct stages in the lifecycle of humankind. It was an abstract, if flawed understanding of social discrepancies that was far more nuanced than expansionist notions of “savagery” and civilization’s relative worth. Curtis’s conviction that the Indian cultures were destined to yield to white society is plain in his photographs. Historians have criticized Curtis for his “sentimentality and stylization” in posing his subjects and bringing costumes for them to wear.105 Bernardin and her coauthors, for instance, revile American photographs of Natives as “a readily digestible narrative of white expansion…that furthered expansionist policies” and dismiss Curtis’s pictures as “imperialist nostalgia.”106 In a similar vein, Lawlor argues that Curtis’s work insinuates Native bestowal of their ties to the land on Euro-Americans.107 It is true that, as Mitchell suggests, the photographer’s staged and edited pictures presented his own view of Indianness. Nevertheless, his work imparts an unmistakable impression of sorrow for the fate of the people he studied.108 Curtis titled the first photogravure of The North American Indian “The Vanishing Race” (Figure 8). He believed that the picture, with its expressive title and still more evocative content, conveyed the purpose of the entire series. The photograph depicts a column of
Figure 9. “‘The Last Sledge’ – White Pass, June, 1899,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. A lonely dogsled sits forlornly in a desolate landscape. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
102 Susan Bernardin et al., introduction to Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880-1940, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 7. 103 Edward Curtis, introduction to The Tiwa. The Keres. in The North American Indian, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Cambridge, USA: University Press, 1926), 16: xiii-xiv, accessed March 24, 2014, http:// curtis.library.northwestern.edu/.
104 Mary Lawlor, Recalling the Wild, 49. 105 Mitchell, Vanishing America, 147. 106 Bernardin et al., introduction to Trading Gazes, 4, 14. 107 Lawlor, Recalling the Wild, 53. 108 Mitchell, Vanishing America, 147. 66
Navajo on horseback, facing away from the viewer and riding toward dark and distant mountains. The Natives disappear into the shadows, heading towards what Curtis calls “the darkness of an unknown future.”109 The viewer cannot help but share the photographer’s anxiety for the prospects of the departing Navajo. Receding Indians with their backs to the viewer is a common theme in the photographer’s work. Clearly the idea of “vanishing” nations worried him. Curtis’s preoccupation with imperiled Native lifestyles, in fact, emerged on the Harriman Expedition. One photograph, with the striking title “The Last Sledge” (Figure 9) is a prelude to the symbolism that fills The North American Indian. By portraying a single dogsled in a desolate, snowy landscape, the picture captures the forlornness of a passing way of life.110 This photograph is especially arresting in that it can apply to both Indian and American culture. Sledges were as integral a part of the white Alaskan frontier as they were of Alaskan Native existence. In this instance, at least, Curtis’s work reflects what Lawlor regards as regret for a disappearing pioneer heritage.111 White and Indian societies were equally capable of passing away as a result of industrial and material progress. This strand of Social Darwinism was not triumphant, but despondent. It expressed unease that “Nature’s laws” of evolution were buffeting all humanity, and that the concept of civilization was built on an unstable foundation. The tenuousness of civilization is a recurring theme throughout Curtis’s photographs from the Harriman Expedition. In fact, the pictures seem to evoke the expansionist fear of nature’s danger and power. These photographs depart from the expansionist perspective, however, in that they depict civilization as no godlier than the wilderness. The two are competing in the harsh game of survival of the fittest. Curtis’s “Juneau” (Figure 10) displays this tension. The thriving town of Juneau extends along the seashore, overcoming nature, but a sinister mountain casts a shadow over its very survival.112 The future of both is in doubt. “House and Hearth” (Figure 11), meanwhile, pushes further at the idea that civilization is innately fragile. In the picture, a Siberian Eskimo shack and fire pit cling precariously to the tundra. The slight constructions look as though the wind might easily blow them away. More startling, however, is that their shape resembles that of the mountain behind them.113 109 Edward S. Curtis, “The Vanishing Race – Navaho” in The Apache. The
Jicarillas. The Navaho vol.1 The North American Indian, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Cambridge, USA: University Press, 1907), plate no. 1, accessed March 24, 2014, http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/ curtis/. 110 Edward S. Curtis, “‘The Last Sledge’ – White Pass, June, 1899,” in New York to Cook Inlet vol. 1 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 25, accessed March 24, 2014, https://content.lib. washington .edu/u?/harriman,30. 111 Lawlor, Recalling the Wild, 51. 112 Edward S. Curtis, “Juneau,” in Cook Inlet to Bering Strait and the Return Voyage, vol. 2 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 201, accessed March 24, 2014, https://content.lib. washington .edu/u?/harriman,230. 113 Edward S. Curtis, “House and Hearth,” in Cook Inlet to Bering Strait and
67
Figure 10. “Juneau,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. The thriving town of Juneau extends along the coast, gamely pressing nature back, but a towering, dark mountain threatens the settlement’s existence. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
This likeness may represent a pessimistic version of Turnerian philosophy: that in order to endure, civilization must sometimes become wilderness with no guarantee of ever reemerging victorious. Curtis’s photographs bring American confidence in progress crashing back to earth. They seem to imply that civilization is hard-earned and never assured. As often as they call whites’ attention to the unfortunate, “vanishing” Indian, they urge EuroAmerican society to recognize that it, too, could meet the same end. “The Disputed Boundary” (Figure 12) appears to provide a suitable caution to America on the eve of the country’s experimentation with international imperialism. The photograph portrays the flags of Britain and the United States — two of the nineteenth century’s greatest empires — blowing in the wind on a barren hillside. Both flags are in tatters.114 Conclusion The Harriman Expedition can reveal much about Americans’ shifting perspectives of wilderness and civilization at a pivotal moment of their nation’s history. In 1899, the United States was poised between an era of westward expansion and twentieth-century modernity. The closing of the frontier had forced Americans to rethink their country’s trajectory and reassess the value of its completed pioneer enterprise. The members of the Harriman Expedition were in the perfect the Return Voyage, vol. 2 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 163, accessed March 24, 2014, https://content.lib. washington .edu/u?/harriman,191. 114 Edward S. Curtis, “The Disputed Boundary,” in New York to Cook Inlet vol. 1 A Souvenir of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, May – August, 1899, 26, accessed March 24, 2014, https://content.lib.washington. edu/u?/harriman,38.
Figure 11. “House and Hearth,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. A fragile shack and fire pit mirror the shape of the mountain in the background, perhaps implying that surviving nature often necessitates that civilization become wilderness. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
flicted. The men embraced an expansionist perception of the usefulness and untrustworthiness of wilderness and the godly superiority of civilization; a Romantic appreciation for wilderness’ sublimity and moral value, and civilization’s destructive depravity; and a Social Darwinist ethos of winner-takesall, wilderness preservation, and fear of the tenuousness of civilization. Considering the convolution of these four men’s perspectives, it is reasonable to assume that the rest of the American populace espoused opinions that were even more complex. It would be a mistake to regard the contradictory conceptions of wilderness and civilization as having no bearing on American life. The perspectives’ divergence spelled the difference between industrialists, conservationists, and preservationists, and between white supremacists, assimilationists, and supporters of tribal rights. As the twentieth century dawned, Americans debated which path their country should take. Should the United States experiment with international imperialism? Should it expand its industrial powers to pursue an ideal of material progress? Or, as more radical minds proposed, should it abandon either or both projects as ruinous to its moral health?115 The values that Americans assigned to wilderness and civilization determined their answers to these questions. Thus, the Harriman Expedition was a microcosm of a chaotic intellectual climate that gave rise to twentiethcentury disputes over land development, American treatment of Natives, and international imperialism. The George W. Elder pitched and rolled upon a sea of ideas more turbulent than that which sent John Burroughs scurrying to his cabin.
Figure 12. “The Disputed Boundary,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1899. Tattered British and American flags provide a sobering outlook on the long-term prospects of empire and civilization. Courtesy of University of Washington Digital Collections.
position to do so. As they pondered their relationship with the last American wilderness, they drew on a vast intellectual legacy of Manifest Destiny, Romantic transcendentalism, and Darwinist theory. The breadth of this legacy complicated their conceptions of wilderness and civilization. Indeed, this essay focused on the work of Burroughs, Grinnell, Muir, and Curtis, precisely because their understandings were so con-
115 Lawlor, Recalling the Wild, 194; Mitchell, Vanishing America, 5-6, 262264, 271.
68
Lift the Red, Stay in the Black: The Public and Private Economies of Race Ideas at the Carlisle Indian School, 1879-1904 Isaac Stein, University of Chicago Abstract This thesis addresses the intersection of finance and race at the Carlisle Indian School (1879-1918), the first and largest of the former U.S. off-reservation boarding schools for Native American students. Carlisle, founded and led by Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt and supported by a nearly all-white staff, was the first of what would become 25 off-reservation institutions that defined U.S. efforts to assimilate Native Americans through education during this period, which I study through Pratt’s retirement in 1904. The Carlisle administration’s professed ideas of what race meant were grounded in its constant incentives to obtain maximum funding and political support for the school from both public and private sources. Three of these race ideas were that Indian people could rise towards the status of white Americans, colonized groups such as Puerto Ricans were comparable to Native Americans, and American blacks could never become white. This thesis reveals the campus newspaper, The Red Man, as a fundraising instrument that promoted Carlisle to donors by repeating these race ideas, and Pratt as a man who prioritized the financial viability of the school over internal consistency in Carlisle’s assimilationist mission. Some Carlisle students accepted or elaborated upon administrators’ racial ideas, while government increasingly turned to U.S. public schools as instruments for its ongoing, futile quest to assimilate Native students. Introduction: Pratt and Porto Ricans [sic] In 1898, the Carlisle Indian School enrolled the first member of what would become a cadre of 60 non-indigenous Puerto Rican students. The unsuspecting students were part of the administration’s master plan to secure Carlisle’s short-run finances by officially presenting colonized people as Native.1 Government funding was the school’s primary source of revenue, and its dollar appropriation from Congress was based on the number of enrolled students. Enrollment had stagnated, 1
69
The Puerto Rican students did not believe that they were Native. On official registration forms where the students were asked to list their tribal affiliations, they invariably crossed out the section and wrote “Puerto Rican.” Pablo Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation Under Duress: The Puerto Rican Experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School 1898-1918,” http://home.epix.net/~landis/navarro.html, last accessed 17 February 2016.
which therefore placed the school in dire financial straits.2 So, Carlisle needed more students, which it could only acquire in bad faith. A plethora of “negative publicity” was assailing the school, and its Native American students were running away from Carlisle in droves.3 The administration’s plan to circumvent these problems, which never materialized, was to double the school’s student body by adding 1,000 “Porto Ricans [sic] or Cubans” on scholarships paid for by the U.S. government. Of course, the Carlisle administration preferred to spin the school’s financial predicament as a vanguard program that the Puerto Ricans had solicited. As A.J. Standing, a senior Carlisle administrator, remarked at the school’s 1901 Commencement ceremony, Within the last year or so there has grown a new interest. It is small at present, but we do not know what it may grow to—that is the presence with us of some people from Porto Rico [sic]…I want to say further that this school on the annual appropriation of $150,000 carries a thousand pupils, and let the same amount of money carry a thousand Porto Ricans [sic] or Cubans, or, if we wish to be liberal, let it be $200,000.4 Much of the extant scholarship on Carlisle has focused on how the school’s nearly all-white leadership conceived of race in a period of American imperialism and state-sanctioned violence against persons of color. This essay addresses that question by revealing how most of the administration’s publicly professed race ideas were constructed around what Carlisle’s predominantly white public and private benefactors considered acceptable. The administration’s attempt to realize its theory that colonized Puerto Ricans were the same as Native Ameri2 3
4
Stein Appendix A. Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 223 and Linda F. Witmer, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1879-1918, (Camp Hill, PA: Cumberland County Historical Society, 1993), 51. Navarro-Rivera notes that both BIA officials and Carlisle administrators refused to acknowledge that the first Puerto Ricans arrived at Carlisle in 1898, not 1900, as Standing implied. The reasons behind this institutional lie are unclear, and the existence of Puerto Ricans at Carlisle prior to 1900 was not acknowledged in The Red Man. Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation Under Duress: The Puerto Rican Experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1898-1918” and “Commencement Exercises,” The Red Man, 22 March, 1901, 1.
cans was just one example. Conversely, the school’s superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt, denied admittance to indigenous students perceived as “too dark,” for fear that he could lose the support of those same benefactors by being associated with the Hampton Institute, a school with a predominantly black student body.5 At Carlisle, race was a function of money. In his introduction to Battlefield and Classroom, Robert M. Utley asks a contemporary readership to accept that Carlisle was a milestone in U.S. attempts at Native education.6 For Utley, Carlisle was justifiably progressive because Pratt, the central figure of any story about the school, did not assume that indigenous people were racially inferior to white Americans.7 Utley argues that Pratt—a portly white man who was Carlisle’s head educator, newspaperman, fundraiser, and disciplinarian—was unlike his countrymen for believing that “different skin color and different cultural background did not automatically produce an inferior being.”8 Utley also tells us that Pratt developed his worldview on race in America while at his previous post as a Captain of the U.S. 10th Cavalry Regiment. The 10th were the “Buffalo Soldiers”—black American troops commanded by white officers, who fought against Native people in a number of conflicts during this period. In response to Utley, Linda Witmer further theorizes that Pratt’s Army experiences made race “a meaningless abstraction” in his mind.9 Both scholars’ claims that race was irrelevant to Pratt are false, and work to superimpose a modern definition of what race meant to an era in which it did not apply. Race was far from meaningless to Pratt—rather, it was the guiding concept behind his crucial decisions on who to admit to the school and how to appeal to potential donors to Carlisle through the campus newspaper, The Red Man.10 It was also the intersection 5
I use “black” to refer to persons whom mainstream late nineteenthcentury U.S. society would have considered to be black, as defined by either skin tone or the one-drop standard in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Hampton Institute is now Hampton University, a historically black college in Hampton, Virginia. “Pratt’s determination to protect his experiment from accusations of racial taint is evidenced on the student cards of a group of youths belonging to the Shinnecock nation, who arrived at Carlisle on September 4, 1882. On their Carlisle report cards the reason for discharge was given as ‘too much Negro,” Andrea Smith, “Better Dead than Pregnant,” in Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization, (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002) and Fear-Segal 163. 6 Utley’s book is Pratt’s edited autobiography. Richard Henry Pratt, ed. R.M. Utley, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964). 7 In this essay, I will alternate between Native and indigenous to refer to Native peoples in a U.S. context. I use mainstream to refer to non-indigenous institutions. While Carlisle administrators referred to students as Indians, and they referred to each other as such, I only use Indian to describe the early twentieth-century racial idea that with Western education, Indians could both approach status as white Americans and become U.S. citizens. 8 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, xvii. 9 Witmer 3. 10 Published from the beginning to the end of Carlisle’s existence, the newspaper published by the school administration changed its title
of race and fundraising efforts that led him to publicly profess three theories: that Native people could approach equal status with white American citizens, black Americans could never become white, and Puerto Ricans and other colonized groups were nearly identical to Native Americans. These three theories belie Carlisle’s place as a site of indigenous identity production that also revealed its administrators’ attempts to financially exploit the ambiguous racial discourses of the era. Through an original analysis of Carlisle finances that draws from annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Superintendent of Indian Schools, this thesis argues that Carlisle administrators constructed these racial positions in rational pursuit of maximum revenue for the school. However, Pratt and his staff ultimately failed to prevent Carlisle from closing when the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) deemed both it and Pratt as political liabilities that were expensive in dollar terms. Carlisle opened as a privately funded enterprise, but, over the course of Pratt’s tenure, it drew an increasing share of its revenue from the federal government. As the student body at Carlisle grew steadily between 1879 and 1900, government funding doubled.11 In this period of study, there was also no national consensus on which ethnic groups in the U.S. were considered white, or on the criteria by which groups would become incorporated as white in the future.12 American blacks constituted the one clear exception to this system of racial ambiguity; by the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, they were clearly and legally defined as separate from the white American public, irrespective of blood quantum.13 How mainstream publics perceived the relative closeness of a given group to the ostensible white American ideal was communicated by euphemism. A group was said to be either rising or falling, which was a synonymous parallel to civilization and degradation.14 Carlisle, located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, enrolled Native American students from communities across North America. The administration and the federal government believed that its brand of Western-style education would alter the race of its students
11 12 13 14
several times. Pratt originally named it Eadle Keatah Toh (Lakota for “Big Morning Star”), which was succeeded by Morning Star, The Red Man and Helper, and, finally, The Red Man. I refer to all issues as The Red Man for the sake of consistency, except when discussing the implications of the Lakota etymology of Eadle Keatah Toh. Stein Appendix A. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). “Plessy v. Ferguson,” Legal Information Institute: Cornell University Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537, last accessed 12 March 2016. The ostensible white American ideal was primarily a rhetorical tool used to distinguish American blacks, and, to a lesser but significant degree, Native Americans from the mainstream polity. Therefore, Native historian Vine Deloria Jr. states that “it stands for the white superman who never existed. The peddler’s grandson who conquered the unknown by inheriting a department store—such is the basic American religion unmasked,” Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins, (Toronto: The Macmillan Company, 1969), 190-191.
70
by preparing them for American citizenship through compulsory training in English language and Protestant religion. As Thomas Jefferson “T.J.” Morgan, then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, said of Carlisle and the 25 other off-reservation schools in 1892, [Off-reservation] schools are instrumental in moulding [sic] the character of the entire rising [Native] generation of those who to-day are regarded by multitudes as incapable of civilization, snatching them from the degradation of the camp and the base habits and superstitions of the tribe, and lifting them on to the high plane of American citizenship.15 The assimilationist ideal supported by these educators, which compared Native tribalism to the status of immigrants or other urban minorities who were purportedly supposed to blend into an American polity, conveniently ignored the fact that sovereign indigenous nations had a right to exist that was guaranteed by U.S. law.16 The comparison of indigenous people to immigrants also disregarded the possibility that Native individuals might not have wanted to acquire the citizenship of, or to otherwise identify with, a nation that explicitly sought to subvert their cultural identities in an assimilation project.17 Furthermore, race in the U.S. was tied to conceptions of jurisdiction, land, and self-determination for a supposedly homogenous people that constituted a nation-state. Racial selfdetermination undergirded both the paternalistic images of American colonial subjects from former Spanish territories as emasculated children, and, later, the neo-colonial post World War I mandate system.18 Notably, the language employed by the 22nd Article of the Covenant of the League of Nations— used to describe the purpose of the mandate system in 1918— was identical to the way that T.J. Morgan characterized Native education in 1892. As it read, Those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which
15 “Proceedings of the First Conference of Government Indian School
Workers, Held at Lawrence, Kansas, December 23 and 24, ’91 [sic],” The Red Man, February, 1892, 2. 16 “Educators ignored the ways in which Indian people were not the same—historically, culturally, socially, politically, and legally. Thus they failed to recognize the need for a different approach to helping them,” Julie L. Davis, Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 74. 17 Assimilation was a catchall term for boarding administrators’ belief that forcing indigenous students to speak English and relocating them thousands of miles from family members would provide the best possible immersion in [white] American civilization, which, in turn, would lead them to become economically productive American citizens. Davis 51. 18 Servando D. Halili, Jr., Iconography of the New Empire: Race and Gender Images in the American Colonization of the Philippines, (Diliman, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2006).
71
are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation [sic] and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant.19 Just as the mandates entrusted nation-states that possessed “civilisation” [sic] to assist “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves in the modern world,” until, presumably, they achieved sovereignty, white American educators thought that exposing indigenous children to their conception of civilization—through English language training—would forge independent Native American citizens. While the United States did not accept a mandate in 1918, it colonized the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and other territories that it absorbed in the Spanish-American War two decades earlier. Pratt clearly understood the parallel between the paternalism of “civilized” colonial rule and the premise that Carlisle and schools like it could raise Native children into citizens. He believed it was an American duty to protect Native people from their own inadequacies as “undeveloped races” that had not achieved “moral manhood.” For example, he argued that Native and colonized people ought to be denied alcohol, as: It is a disgrace to our civilization that it should be said in Manila that there never was the amount of drinking under Spanish rule that there is under the American flag. We must recognize in our treatment of the Indian and of all undeveloped races, that they have not reached moral manhood, and we must keep away from them, as far as possible, temptations which will lead to their ruin...In Alaska so strong is the desire for liquor among the natives that if they cannot get it, they will buy cologne or Jamaica ginger and get drunk on these. It will be a work of generations to cultivate such a degree of self-reliance as shall enable these undeveloped races to withstand the temptations which accompany our civilization.20 The self-reliance to which Pratt referred was a mainstream American idea of work and capital, which presumed that individual property ownership would lead to economic development and to the racial metamorphosis of reservation Indians into U.S. citizens. Furthermore, Federal policy towards Native people codified this principle in law. The General Allotment Act of 1887, commonly known as the Dawes Act, divided tribal land into 160-acre parcels that were distributed among indi-
19 “The Covenant of the League of Nations,” The Avalon Project: Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp#art22, last accessed 12 March 2016. 20 “It is a Duty,” The Red Man, 02 November, 1900, 3.
vidual tribal members in a failed attempt to encourage indigenous people to assimilate and to take up agricultural work.21 In The Red Man, Pratt framed the legal status of colonial subjects as similar to that of Native Americans through his eccentric third-person editorial voice as “the man on the bandstand.” He compared the Dawes Act to U.S. land reform on the island of Guam, as initiated by its military governor, Richard P. Leary.22 It is said that [Leary’s] policy for governing the few thousand inhabitants there was characterised [sic] by sound practical common-sense and the man-on-theband-stand thought that as he read the account that some of the methods reminded him of some of the methods tried sometimes upon our Indians on the reservations.23 Pratt viewed inhabitants of American colonies as both racially and politically similar to Native Americans, but is not readily apparent why he extended the effort to do so. In fact, his repeated comparisons between the two groups served as propaganda for a fundraising campaign that aimed to save the school from insolvency. Carlisle administrators preferred to explain the situation by articulating that the school needed to take its rightful place as an extension of American colonial efforts. In a nod to the rising cost of off-reservation schools, they noted that colonization via education would be less expensive to the U.S. government than military rule.24 The Carlisle administration’s attempt to enroll Puerto Ricans at a Native American boarding school, which will subsequently be discussed in greater detail, was just one episode of the longer history of administrative race ideas in The Red Man that aimed to obtain financial and political support from both government and private sources. In the previous two decades, Pratt undertook fundraising projects aimed at regional white private interests in Pennsylvania and New York. Focusing on fundraising shows that Carlisle was not a strictly federal experiment, and highlights the underemphasized necessity of local and regional white publics to its funding.25 In effect, Pratt was
21 Leonard A. Carlson, “The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming,” The Journal of Economic History 38, no. 1, (1978): 274-276.
22 Jacqueline Fear-Segal has noted that the school bandstand was a
gazebo-like structure on the Carlisle campus that had a sightline to every other school building. By announcing his position as the ruler of the bandstand in The Red Man, she argues, Pratt aimed to project power and control over the student body. Fear-Segal 206-230 and “Richard P. Leary Papers, 1860-1957,” Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy, http://cdm16099.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ p16099coll5/id/2233, last accessed 13 March 2016. 23 “How the Indolent People of Guam Became No Longer a Burden,” The Red Man, 29 March, 1902, 4. 24 “In three years we would have expended for the education of these young people, the sum of $1,200,000 or about one fourth the cost of a battleship [sic]” “Commencement Exercises,” The Red Man, 22 March, 1901, 1. 25 For example, Davis refers to “the federal Indian schools” without qualification. Carlisle was exceptional in the sense that it was not
selling private donors a stake in a campaign of cultural genocide couched as civilization.26 Assimilation and its Friends In the midsummer of 1901, the predominantly non-Native readership of The Red Man read its editorial page, on which Pratt described the mission of the off-reservation boarding schools. He casually described a shared mission among peer institutions that contemporary historians have widely regarded as cultural genocide—or, in a specifically educational context, the “assimilationist imperative.”27 For Pratt, it was unacceptable for Native youth to choose anything other than Western and middle-class Protestant definitions of educational success, or to shun American citizenship. He viewed both as necessary conditions for Native racial assimilation and economic advancement.28 Whether indigenous families “opposed the specific kind of education” that their children received was irrelevant to him, as: These schools deserve the congratulations as well as the practical help of their friends in the effort thus to set forth the work and its claims, by means of the founded with strong government financing. Other off-reservation schools, such as the Haskell Institute, in Lawrence, KS, which was founded via a federal construction grant in 1884, may be more aptly referred to as “government schools” in this regard. Even so, I resist the moniker “federal schools” to refer to these institutions, as it is arguably ahistorical. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1884, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), http:// digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History-idx?id=History. AnnRep84, last accessed 5 March 2016. 26 By cultural genocide, I specifically refer to Carlisle’s attempt to prohibit students from speaking indigenous languages, which was enforced by ritualized public shaming. Human Rights scholar David Nersessian describes cultural genocide as “attacks upon the physical and/or biological elements of a group [that seek] to eliminate its wider institutions… Elements of cultural genocide are manifested when artistic, literary, and cultural activities are restricted or outlawed,” David Nersessian, “Rethinking Cultural Genocide Under International Law,” Carnegie Council for International Affairs, https://www.carnegiecouncil. org/publications/archive/dialogue/2_12/section_1/5139.html/:pf_ printable, last accessed 13 March 2016 and Fear-Segal 223. 27 Davis 92. 28 Pratt’s justification for the assimilationist imperative was grounded in what he considered to be constitutional law. He argued that the reservation system and individual tribes’ status as separate nations was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as it denied indigenous people the “opportunities to develop, become equal, and [compete] as citizens in all the opportunities in our American life.” Stuart Banner’s recent legal history of Native dispossession actually vindicates Pratt from allegations of improper reasoning, but certainly not ethical failure, on this point. Whereas colonial Britain had de jure respected Native ownership rights to all land its subjects had not purchased, the post-Revolutionary American government summarily declared jurisdiction over all indigenous land in North America, including that not yet bought or conquered. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 7, and Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007).
72
printed page. Some of these days, whoever may live to see it, these distinctions will be lost forever and all will be Americans without a qualifying title.29 Pratt’s editorial first appears as a blasé statement about how the school and its supporters aimed to eliminate racial distinctions in the United States, which is a half truth that must be interpreted correctly. One must probe and see the coded euphemisms that are often at the center of any genocidal campaign.30 Pratt was actually arguing that The Red Man was a vehicle for fundraising from both public and private donors, who were the school’s “friends.”31 The “work” was cultural genocide, and the central “claim” was that any violence used to accomplish it was justified.32 Finally, Pratt implied that the “distinctions” between racial groups in the United States would always be preserved between American blacks and other Americans, who were presumed to be white. Pratt adopted this and other positions on race in the pages of The Red Man to secure Carlisle’s finances. He then acted on his racial theories by selectively admitting or refusing students to Carlisle based upon their racialized appearances. The off-reservation boarding schools were fundamentally different than previous U.S. attempts to educate indigenous persons.33 In contrast to on-reservation and missionary schools, boarding schools aimed to mold Native students into white Americans by physically removing them from both indigenous institutions and their own families. The off-reservation schools proceeded to become the centerpiece of federal efforts and funding to educate Native Americans in the late nineteenth century.34 However, the rise of the off-reservation schools did not represent a change in government philosophy regarding Indian education. They fit squarely within the continuum of the assimilationist imperative embedded in U.S. attempts at Native education that both preceded and followed Carlisle. Carlisle was operational between 1879 and 1918, and Pratt 29 “Indian Exchanges,” The Red Man, 20 September 1901, NP, reprinted 30 31 32 33 34
73
from Reformatory Record, Huntington, PA, http://chroniclingamerica. loc.gov/lccn/sn86083446/, last accessed 22 February 2016, Davis 96. For an illustrative example of government and civilian use of euphemistic language in the Argentine “Dirty War,” see Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Several prominent donors to the school were Quakers, which suggests an additional meaning to “friend.” “If students were caught [attempting to escape Carlisle] and brought back, they were punished by being locked in the guardhouse,” FearSegal 224. For the longer history of on-reservation schools operated by both missionaries and governments in North America, see Fear-Segal 67-100. By “indigenous institutions,” I refer to Native languages, tribal governments and political leadership, and religious practices such as the Sweat Lodge ceremony, among other expressions of cultural identity. While Carlisle and its peers were occasionally referred to in BIA reports as “Training” or “Industrial Training” schools, the curriculum was primarily based on English language instruction and manual or domestic labor. Annual Report of the Indian School Superintendent to the Secretary of the Interior, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882).
acted in the capacity of Superintendent from its founding until 1904, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) effectively fired him in a forced retirement.35 Evaluating the school’s legacy on Native American education, family and community cohesion, and relations with other minority groups is difficult. An explicit mission of indigenous cultural destruction means that very few accounts of daily school life survive, except in Pratt’s memoirs and the pages of The Red Man. A few direct consequences of Carlisle’s existence were the divergence of government-sponsored educational projects for Native and black Americans and continued U.S. attempts to assimilate Native students, albeit in forms other than boarding schools.36 Only in 1972, nearly 100 years after Pratt founded Carlisle, would activists with the American Indian Movement (AIM) found their own schools for indigenous children that refused to conform to mainstream ideas of educational success.37 Conversely, Carlisle is often portrayed as an early generator of Native American political activism based on shared identities. The school brought together young people from tribes that never would have interacted otherwise—sometimes it did so forcibly—and ultimately failed in its quest to assimilate them.38 This thesis centers on the financial and political forces that made the existence of the Carlisle School possible, and which Pratt and other contributors to The Red Man—including Carlisle students and indigenous supporters of the school—appealed to through their published stances on race. However, both federal and private funding eventually proved insufficient to save the institution from the BIA’s early-twentieth century shift from supporting off-reservation schools to sponsoring Native students to attend U.S. public schools.
35 Historians dispute the “root cause” of Pratt’s firing. The official reason,
supplied in a letter addressed to Pratt which was later printed in the Red Man, was that he had referred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a “barnacle” that should be removed, as it sought to preserve the reservation system against his wishes. Another possible cause was a personal feud with Theodore Roosevelt. In my analysis, I find it most believable that he was fired because the BIA had, for several years, planned to phase out off-reservation boarding schools because of the necessary expense of transporting students to the schools. Starting in 1895, the BIA intended to expand Native education in U.S. public schools. The white community of the town of Carlisle and across Pennsylvania, particularly large business owners, regretted that he had been fired, as I discuss later in this study. Witmer 51. 36 After Carlisle, the U.S. government moved to push indigenous students en masse into U.S. public schools, where personnel were often unwilling or unable to teach them. By 1930, 53 percent of Native children were enrolled in public schools. My analysis shows that this process started on a very small scale in 1895, which has not been addressed by scholarship on Native education. Davis 92 and Stein Appendix A. 37 In 1972, AIM established the Heart of the Earth Survival School (H.O.T.E.S.S.) in Minneapolis and Red School House in St. Paul. I will discuss the structure and curriculum of both schools later in this thesis. 38 Native scholar Renya Ramirez uses the term transnationalism in place of the more commonly applied Pan-Indianism, as a measure of respect for non-Federally recognized Native persons and tribes, and to refute suggestions that “ties to reservation communities were exchanged for a Pan-Indian ethnic identity.” I agree, and use that term here. Renya K. Ramirez, Native Hubs, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 98-99.
Notably, Carlisle was originally a privately funded enterprise that later became primus inter pares of its group of offreservation, government-supported peer institutions.39 Pratt’s ambition to expand his vision of Indian education, as well as his own egocentric behavior as an administrator and newspaper editor, was enabled by his ambitious program of multilateral fundraising for the school. He began fundraising before Carlisle was inaugurated in 1879, and fundraising remained a priority over the course of Pratt’s 25 years as Superintendent. The school even established a volunteer Board of Trustees to oversee charitable donations. While many of the Trustees are not recognizable as contemporary names in American philanthropy, extant scholarship has largely ignored that Pratt was supported by government interests as powerful as the Board of Indian Commissioners, private interests as renowned as the Thaw family of Pittsburgh, and higher education leaders such the President of Dickinson College, a mainstream institution in the surrounding town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.40 While charitable donations to Carlisle decreased sharply after 1887, Pratt remained dependent on the political support of the surrounding white community in Carlisle and across Pennsylvania, particularly to find host families for his Outing program.41 After Pratt initially established Carlisle on private funding, the U.S. government then zealously supported Carlisle and the off-reservation model with both political overtures and a boon 39 I have selected Carlisle rather than any of its peer institutions for this
study for the following reasons: first, Carlisle was the first off-reservation school. Second, it was unique in the sense that it was founded as a predominantly private enterprise. Third, Pratt was an outsize personality who exuded a great deal of influence on curriculum and practice at the other schools, particularly through his invention of the “Outing” program, which will be discussed later in context of Pratt’s political relationship with private Carlisle supporters. Fourth, The Red Man is simply more detailed than other boarding school newspapers of the period, such as the Haskell Institute Indian Leader, which is available on microfilm at The Library of Congress. The Red Man, despite all of its warts of blatant censorship and half-truths, is the best primary source for understanding administrative motives at any of the early boarding schools. 40 The Board of Indian Commissioners was a special commission established by Congress that advised the U.S. government on policy related to Native peoples. The President appointed its members. The Thaw family operated transportation and banking interests throughout Pennsylvania. Today, the Thaws are most remembered for the sensational 1907 trial of Henry “Harry” K. Thaw for murder. Harry was the eldest son of the donors referred to above. Susan Gillman, “‘Dementia Americana’: ‘Mark Twain,’ ‘Wapping Alice,’ and the Harry K. Thaw Trial,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 2, (1988): 296-314. and Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 333. 41 Outing was an externship program invented by Pratt in which students would work as either tradesmen, or, in the case of female students, as domestic workers for white families. Reports from the white families were addressed to Pratt, and he re-printed them in The Red Man. Later in this study, they will be treated as evidence that Carlisle was politically tied to local white publics through 1904, when the BIA fired Pratt. For more on “Outing” at Carlisle and other boarding schools, see Robert Trennert, “From Carlisle to Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of the Indian Outing System,” Pacific Historical Review 52, no. 3, (1983): 267-291.
of funding. From 1879 to 1904, total government support for Indian Schools increased over 47 times—from $75,000 to $3.5 million! And from that burgeoning pie of government appropriations, off-reservation schools commanded a continuously increasing slice through the turn of the twentieth century. In 1886, the off-reservation schools accepted 20 percent of government funding for all BIA-supported schools; by 1904, this figure was over 34 percent. This point was not lost on Thomas Jefferson Morgan, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who remarked in 1891 that the off-reservation schools were the “best schools in the entire system,” as they purportedly assimilated Native students into the American public. However, he said, they operated at significant cost to the government: I regard with special favor the non-reservation schools because they draw the pupils away from reservations and bring them into contact with civilized life, and advance the time when their pupils will be absorbed into our national life. I think it wise to give special prominence to them…they ought [to] be in every respect the best schools in the entire system. It is not practicable owing to the vast cost of such institutions to develop all Indian schools into technical industrial schools, but it is possible to develop a few of them… At present, large sums are being expended on these non-reservation schools, and I hope that this expenditure shall be continued in the near future, until they shall all of them be well-established.42 While the BIA supported the off-reservation model as the future of Native education as of 1891, this would be less true fourteen years later, when the agency allocated funding for the first Native students to attend U.S. public schools. This was a significantly less expensive solution than boarding schools to mainstream America’s erroneous perception of an Indian Problem.43 The funding arrangement for the off-reservation schools naturally created irreconcilable tension between the egocentric Pratt, who founded and operated Carlisle from 1879 through 1881 primarily through private fundraising, and the BIA, which increasingly viewed the off-reservation schools as a federal project. However, Pratt was not immune from political consequences for opposing BIA policy, as he was a federal employee from the start, and this is one of the reasons why the BIA fired him in 1904. While Pratt was justified to some
42 “Proceedings of the First Conference of Government Indian School
Workers, Held at Lawrence, Kansas, December 23 and 24, ’91 [sic],” The Red Man, February, 1892, 2. 43 The Indian Problem, a term that frequently appears in The Red Man and other mainstream publications regarding Native Americans during this era, ought to be understood in this context as resistance to the “assimilationist imperative” that Davis describes. Pratt believed that the Problem was that individual tribes’ status as separate nations prevented their assimilation into American life, which also perpetuated their racial degradation. Ray A. Brown, “The Indian Problem and the Law,” The Yale Law Journal 39, no. 3, (1930): 307-331.
74
degree in publicly declaring that he was the founder of Carlisle and of the off-reservation model, actual fiscal support for Carlisle over this period increasingly depended on the federal government. In 20 years, the shares of private and public funding as components of Carlisle’s budget completely inverted, from nearly 100% private to 100% federal money.44 Over the past fifteen years, historians also appear to have reached a dangerously inaccurate consensus that Carlisle was a crime perpetrated exclusively by the federal government and its employees against Native communities, and that, as Jennifer Bess suggests, Carlisle students managed to maintain “cultural continuity” in its multilaterally oppressive learning environment.45 Acts of identity preservation that Bess terms “cultural continuity” were evident in students’ overt resistance to school rules, such as their attempts to run away.46 Cultural continuity was also evident in student poetry published in The Red Man that subverted Pratt’s English-only policy. An anonymous Carlisle student submitted a list of Native words and their definitions, which was accepted for publication in 1901. The etymology of the list borrows from Massachusett, Lakota and Dakota Sioux, and Narragansett, which further supports the thesis that Carlisle students built intertribal connections within the “shared traumatic experience” of an oppressive boarding school environment.47 As the student wrote, Other [words] less familiar are: Musquash, meaning muskrat; quahog an edible clam; samp, maize broken or crushed for food; sannop, a brave, and tautog, a species of fish. Still other[s] will cause most of us to make extended inquires before we discover their meaning, such as mohonk, mousilaug, netop, nunkomb, peequaw, torchent and wastchu.48 Recognizing resistance to assimilation, such as the poem above, acknowledges the personhood of the former students. Doing so is particularly important, because histories on Carlisle prior to Pratt’s edited autobiography repeated the dubious administrative viewpoint that Native students were appropriately schooled, instead of functioning as people who were capable of resistance.49 However, cultural continuity is an incomplete perspective on Carlisle’s assimilationist mission, as its students also sometimes accepted or elaborated on the worst racial theories that were popular during the era—particularly regarding
American blacks. Moreover, these student racial ideas were enabled by an administration that was financially incentivized to condemn the Hampton Institute. Pratt feared that the continued existence of the program that he founded in 1878, which enrolled Native Americans at Hampton, was both a competitor for government money and a potential public relations disaster for Carlisle donors who may have been anti-black. The school’s institutional racial ideology was evidenced by Pratt’s contradictory enrollment practices of aggressively recruiting students who could pass as Indian and refusing to admit others deemed “too dark.” Such policies were likely based on both government and private financial incentives. In 1878, Pratt administered the first 17 Native students at Hampton. After Pratt left one year later, Hampton continued to co-educate a cadre of Native students alongside its majority black population from 1878 to 1923. Pratt saw the program, which expanded considerably until 1888, as a potential threat to Carlisle’s funding base.50 Historians have not yet mentioned that Carlisle, which was originally supported by private donors, became a public enterprise that was in direct competition for federal money with Hampton’s Native education program starting in 1882. In that year, both schools received a special Congressional appropriation for their efforts at Native education. This produced a strong incentive for Pratt to argue that blacks and indigenous people were of different racial groups, and that unlike indigenous people, blacks could never fully assimilate into American social life. From 1879 through 1881, Carlisle was an untested education venture that the BIA and Congress only invested in materially when its growth appeared imminent. In those three years, Pratt solicited $150,000 from private donors, and received a small, unspecified amount of money from The Civilization Fund, a Congressional slush fund for education projects related to indigenous people.51 Both programs received their first major appropriation of government funding in 1882 through the Congressional appropriation, which provided for 284 students to attend Carlisle and 84 to Hampton.52 After the first round of government money, federal support for Carlisle soared. By 1900, government funding, adjusted for inflation, had more than doubled, and enrollment more than tripled, to 950 students. Meanwhile, the Hampton program, which Pratt had founded as a significantly smaller enterprise 50 Stein Appendix A. 51 Congress obtained the monies for the Civilization Fund Act of 1819
44 Stein Appendix A. 45 Jennifer Bess, “Casting a Spell: Acts of Cultural Continuity in Carlisle 46 47 48 49 75
Indian Industrial School’s The Red Man and Helper,” Wicazo Sa Review 26, no. 2, (2011): 13-38. “One of the school’s most serious and persistent problems, runaways, went almost unmentioned [in The Red Man],” Fear-Segal 223. Andrea “Dréa” Jenkins, lecture, University of Chicago, 11 February 2016. “Indian Words,” The Red Man, 16 October 1903, NP, excerpted from Bess, “Casting a Spell.” Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom.
through the 1809 Treaty of Fort Clark, in which the Osage Nation ceded territory to the United States. For the $150,000 figure, Witmer cites Pratt’s memoirs—Richard Henry Pratt, The Indian Industrial School Carlisle, Pennsylvania [sic], (Carlisle, PA: Cumberland County Historical Society, 1908, 1979). However, this estimate does not appear in the Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for this period, and I express my reservations about accepting any of Pratt’s statements as true. As of this writing, the author could not be reached for further comment on the sourcing for this figure. Witmer 38 and Stein Appendix A. 52 The Congressional appropriation, which would be renewed and increased in future years, effectively replaced the Civilization Fund as the source of government money for Carlisle.
than Carlisle, was funded from the beginning more as a charity and government partnership.53 It, in turn, completely stagnated in terms of enrollment and government funding after 1888, when its government appropriation peaked at funding for 150 students.54 By 1923, the program ceased to exist, after several years of under-enrollment relative to the appropriation. However, the slow death of the Native program at Hampton did not mean that the federal government withdrew from black education—rather, it indicated that black and Native education programs would never again intersect during this period. By the time the BIA forced Pratt to retire and Carlisle had reached its peak nominal enrollment, black education was flourishing separately from Hampton’s Indian program, particularly at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.55 Pratt, like Washington, had his beginnings in education administration at Hampton, a fact that he later worked diligently to conceal. But to establish Carlisle, Pratt needed more than money and propaganda, though he would prove to be diligent at acquiring the first and disseminating the latter. He needed Native families to send their children to him from locales as distant as Alaska, so that he could teach them the moral and educational values of mainstream society in a completely unregulated environment. In order to measure the political influence of Carlisle’s private donors and the economic relationship between the school and the federal government, as well as how those relationships were articulated in the language of race, it is necessary to turn to the pages of The Red Man. From Carlisle’s inception in 1879, Pratt was primarily concerned with the fiscal sustainability of the institution, and he solicited private donations both from the surrounding mainstream communities in Carlisle, PA, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as from a variety of religious institutions and business interests. Two prominent donors were the “two elderly Quaker ladies” who surface repeatedly in Pratt’s memoirs: Mary Anna and Susan M. Longstreth of Philadelphia.56 The Longstreths and other private donors paid nearly all of the school’s expenses for its first three years, and, significantly, continued to support approximately 10% of Carlisle’s total budget through 1886.57 This includes the period in which the school realized its most rapid percentage growth in enrollment, which peaked at approximately 1000 students in 1900.58 By that year, private donations had dwindled to just $238.91, but the Carlisle administration still depended on
53 Stein Appendix A. 54 Ibid. 55 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, (Garden City, NJ: The
Country Life Press, 1901) and Allen W. Jones, “The Role of Tuskegee Institute in the Education of Black Farmers,” The Journal of Negro History 60, no. 2 (1975): 252-267. 56 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 331. 57 Stein Appendix A. 58 Mary Anna, Susan’s mother, had founded a prominent all-girls preparatory school in Philadelphia, which Susan administered at the time that she met Pratt. After she died, Susan continued to give to the school philanthropically. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 333 and Stein Appendix A.
private sources for political support and as employers for the Outing program. Over the previous two decades, Pratt sought increases in the annual federal appropriation to Carlisle, which rapidly became the school’s predominant form of income. Government dollars earmarked for Carlisle were determined based on the number of enrolled students, and Pratt’s lobbying could do little to change the dollar amount allotted to Carlisle “per capita,” which stayed flat at just under $200 throughout his tenure. Rather, this funding structure simply incentivized the administration to enroll as many students as possible, which led to the chronic overcrowding that Myriam Vuckovic has directly connected with epidemic disease at the Haskell Institute, another off-reservation boarding school.59 Beyond anecdotal accounts that remain on the historical record of Pratt and his junior administrators working tirelessly to recruit Native children from reservations, editorials in The Red Man aimed to recruit Puerto Rican students to attend the school. They did so, although not in the numbers Carlisle administrators had hoped for. Other Red Man articles suggest that the school wanted to enroll students from other newly acquired U.S. territories, particularly Hawaii and Guam, but these plans were never realized. Fundamentally, Pratt wanted to enroll as many students as he could, provided his financial backers did not confuse them for American blacks. Especially after 1882, when the school was firmly backed financially by the federal government, Pratt feared that if black and Native education was conflated in the minds of any mass audience, he stood to lose private money and political support. Another possible explanation for Pratt’s anti-black bias is that Carlisle’s Quaker donors, often implicitly referred to in Pratt’s reports to the BIA and Battlefield and Classroom as “Friends of the School,” had qualms about supporting black education. While Quakers are usually associated with the abolition movement, recent scholarship has suggested that Quaker support for abolition was economically motivated, and that “anti-slavery was not always the same as pro-black.”60 The Carlisle Appeal, for Families and Indigenous Leaders As shown in the previous section, Carlisle explicitly proposed to educate through forcing assimilation, imparting Anglo-American concepts of civilization, and destroying Native tribalism. The destructive intergenerational consequences of the school, including students’ removal from tribal rites that “rendered them without knowledge of how to rear children,” are incalculable. However, at the time of Carlisle’s existence, indigenous leaders that were also prominent in mainstream
59 Myriam Vuckovic, Voices from Haskell: Indian Students between Two Worlds: 1884-1928, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 179210. 60 Emma J. Lapansky, “New Eyes for The ‘Invisibles’ in Quaker/Minority Relations,” Quaker History 90, no. 1 (2001): 1-7 and Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014)
76
political circles supported the idea of off-reservation boarding schools. When Carlisle’s enrollment peaked around 1900, prominent alumni and Native activists, such as Chauncey Yellow Robe and Dr. Carlos Montezuma, strongly and publicly supported Carlisle. Yellow Robe was a member of the Sioux nation and a Carlisle alumnus. Montezuma, a Yavapai, was a personal friend of Pratt’s, and had worked as Carlisle’s physician through its first decade of existence.61 Both men would later serve as founding members of the Society of American Indians (SAI, 1911-1923), the first Native American political activist group that advocated for Pan-Indian ethnic identity.62 Yellow Robe and Montezuma lauded Carlisle’s potential to remove Native children from reservation communities that failed to provide marketable skills in an increasingly whitedominated economic landscape. Moreover, American conceptions of what white racial identity meant were not definable during this period by the staid Caucasian identity that a contemporary audience understands. What a Progressive-era American saw as white wrangled with the then-ambiguous racial status of recent immigrants from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe. Status as white was also often interrelated with class and geographic location.63 As the Carlisle School’s photography department literally retouched photos to make students seem lighter, the prospect that schooling might lead to the incorporation of students as white was certainly weighing on Yellow Robe’s thoughts.64 In the language of the time, rising into civilization for Native people was an act of eschewing the condition of an Indian, and approaching equal status with white Americans. In an 1893 editorial, Yellow Robe therefore asked his readers: Why is it, that foreigners rise so rapidly and the Indian remains ever the same?…You would consider it a dangerous system, if all the Germans, speaking one dialect, were compelled to locate in one small district by themselves; all the Swedes in another district by themselves; all the Poles in another, and the Italians in another. Very soon we would find within our borders, a German empire, a Swedish kingdom, a Polish principality, and an Italian monarchy, each speaking its own language…how are we to be led into the paths of civilization, if our ankles remain bound by the chains of United States law to the reservation system?65
Native leaders such as Yellow Robe were not alone in this calculus, which fundamentally placed faith in the idea that a system of compulsory English language comprehension far away from home would spare Native children from poverty, as tribal holdings were rapidly deteriorating. The General Allotment Act of 1887 was on the legislative horizon, and would further compound the dispossession of Native persons brought on by centuries of exposure to endemic disease and treatybreaking by the U.S. government.66 By 1900, white farmers and speculators had alternately purchased or stolen an estimated 70% of Native landholdings circa 1870.67 For parents, the choice to send students to Carlisle was somewhere between coerced and voluntary, in a way that closely mirrored the origins of most U.S. treaties with indigenous people.68 Although documentation of the methods used to advertise the school to Native families is incomplete, it also appears as though Carlisle agents simply kidnapped some children from reservations. Successful kidnappings contributed to increases in the school’s annual Congressional funding appropriation by boosting Carlisle’s total enrollment in an ethically bankrupt manner.69 Initially, Native parents also had incomplete information about both the school’s assimilationist mission and what they were consenting to by sending their children to Pratt. Particularly in 1879, parents and their children could not have known anything about conditions at the school. Certainly, it was only upon arriving in Carlisle that many students would fully understand the horrors that characterized life in a physical Panopticon that sought to re-orient their personal economic aspirations, religious beliefs, and behavior to white middleclass standards through extreme regimentation.70 In addition to endemic tuberculosis and trachoma, the latter of which was often reported euphemistically as “sore eyes,” the students were placed under a monotonous daily work schedule, which entailed waking at five in the morning and retiring at nine-thirty at night.71 The curriculum was based on English language Chicago,” The Red Man, May and June, 1893, 1-2.
66 In Native Hubs, Ramirez has also extensively chronicled the illegal
67 68 69
61 Fear-Segal 166-169. 62 Chadwick Allen, “Introduction: Locating the Society of American Indians,” American Indian Quarterly, 37, no. 3 (2013): 3-22.
63 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 64 Witmer notes that Pratt also sent these photographs to white publics that he wanted to impress as potential benefactors, such as Congress. In 1880, Pratt wrote to a member of the House of Representatives: “I send you today a few stereo views of the Indian youth here. You will note that they came mostly as blanket Indians,” Witmer 24-25. 65 “Speech by Chauncey Yellow Robe, Before the Congress of Nations at
77
70
71
displacement of Native Californians in the antebellum period, which has hindered contemporary efforts for unrecognized tribes seeking recognition and separate nation status from the BIA. Carlson, “The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming.” Fear-Segal 48-66. For an example of the liminal space between voluntary and coerced treaties, again see Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land. At the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, Pratt and his agents worked aggressively to “recruit” students to enroll at Carlisle. As noted by George P. Capture Horse Sr., “[Pratt] searched the country-side for Indian students and in 1890 his representatives arrived here to ‘collect’ the young people slated to attend this school. This push was to augment the enrollment at Carlisle, and he wanted to increase the participants from each of Montana’s reservations from 40 students to about 175 from every agency,” Witmer, “Introduction,” xiv. “The ‘inhabited’ bandstand was perfectly equipped for both visual and auditory surveillance…although supposedly living on the bandstand in the center of the school, [Pratt] also trumpeted his ability to step down from his home to spy on the children wherever they might be,” FearSegal 217. Pratt re-printed the written reports submitted to him by white
instruction and indoctrinating students with civilization, the umbrella term for mainstream, middle-class notions of work ethic and gender roles. Male students were groomed for positions as semiskilled laborers, while female students were trained as housewives and domestic workers. Some indigenous people who were connected to the boarding schools found it difficult to reconcile their identities as Natives and as Americans in this period of coerced assimilation, and perceived that their status in one community came at the expense of acceptance in the other. Contemporary authors such as Renya Ramirez have argued that this generalization is an unjust reduction of indigenous identity. She claims that Native people who moved away from reservations have always maintained ties with indigenous communities, including tribes, through hubs—physical or virtual shared experiences and ceremonies, which work to reinforce their identities. Ramirez also emphasizes indigenous transnational status in order to respect the individual personhood of Native people who, for example, reject U.S. notions of citizenship and view themselves as residents of sovereign indigenous nations.72 But in context of the Carlisle school and early Native activism, Ramirez’s optimistic claims of an undamaged Native identity appear ahistorical. Carlos Montezuma, for one, articulated that his stances against the reservation system and for Western education had cost him acceptance in what was implied as his home in the Yavapai community. Yet, he was unrepentant. As he said, I have been among the Indians since I received my education and they have made me understand that I was different from them, and their explanation was this: that something supernatural has jumped into me and made me different. I am called a white person by some of the Indians and they sometimes feel that I am their enemy, because it is my principle to work to elevate them instead of degrading myself to their condition.73 Those who lived through the boarding school period therefore sometimes developed a sense of self that was in limbo between two communities—reservation Indians and the Native people who left reservations and searched for employment elsewhere. Fear-Segal also attributes a sense of fractured identity to Charles Eastman, another Native political leader prominent in mainstream circles.74 Some contemporary Native historians employers who hired Carlisle students for the Outing program. The reports, titled “Outing Reports,” were published in detail, reveal Pratt’s attempts to please the surrounding white communities in Carlisle and across Pennsylvania. In one section, the employers described student health as “good except sore eyes; not good; quite good; he is very good except for a little bilious attack.” “Outing Reports,” The Red Man, June, 1895, 2. 72 Ramirez, Native Hubs. 73 “Our School Physician Gives a Parlor Talk in Philadelphia,” The Red Man, April, 1895, 2. 74 “Eastman’s openly voiced misgivings about civilization, spoken so softly in his writing, were to boom ever louder in his life. In his final years, he found himself unable to live fully with either Indians or whites,” Fear-
even go so far as to separate the groups as Urban Indians and Reservation Indians in the context of larger scale and federally sponsored mid-twentieth century Native migrations to U.S. cities.75 Throughout this entire period of study, Pratt and his institution were in direct financial competition for federal money with the missionary and on-reservation schools that also received government appropriations, particularly in the American Southwest.76 However, Pratt was more than capable of variously pleading, bullying, and orating support from both government and private hands to build his vision of an Indian School. Before establishing Carlisle, he had practiced thoroughly. The Beginnings of Richard Henry Pratt Not least because of his many roles as the founder of the first off-reservation boarding school, as well as its chief fundraiser, newspaper editor, and disciplinarian, it is impossible to tell any story about Carlisle without mention of Pratt’s early life. A single mother raised Pratt in Indiana from his birth in 1840, and his childhood was characterized by autodidactism and various jobs in manual labor to support his family.77 Before founding Carlisle, he also previously held posts as an infantryman and cavalry captain in the U.S. Army. His military background simultaneously led him to believe that he could undertake a project in indigenous education, exposed him to methods of lobbying and population control that he translated into newspaper propaganda and the physical layout of the Carlisle campus, and forged connections that would later allow him to build his Indian School at the Carlisle barracks. The barracks were a dilapidated and unused government property that was, nonetheless, a strategic geographic location for a campaign of cultural genocide.78 Carlisle was at least a thousand miles away from reservation communities on the plains and in the Southwest, which disincentivized students’ families and relatives from visiting the school and discovering its horrid
Segal 139.
75 Donald L. Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in America, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000).
76 Fear-Segal 67-100. 77 “At the age of thirteen [Pratt’s] education was cut short after his father was murdered returning from the California gold fields. As a youth, Pratt helped to support his mother and two younger brothers by printing, tinsmithing, and splitting rails,” Witmer 1-2. 78 “Founded in 1757, the ‘Old Barracks’ had a distinguished military history. Indian fighting tactics had been taught there by Colonel Henry Bouquet; General George Washington personally assembled in Carlisle the largest force ever under his command to quell the ‘Whiskey Rebellion’ of 1794; and there on the evening of July 1, 1863 the Confederate Cavalry, commanded by J.E.B. Stewart and Fitzhugh Lee, applied torches to the buildings of the Carlisle Barracks before marching to Gettysburg…the historic site with its glamorous history appealed to Pratt and fit well into his master plan…while removing the children as far away as possible from their traditional culture in the West he would also be moving them closer to civilization in the East,” Witmer 11-12.
78
conditions. Conversely, it was just over a hundred miles from the Carlisle campus to Washington, DC or to Philadelphia, which placed Pratt within striking distance of potential public and private donors to his school. Pratt’s military career began when he enlisted and served as an infantryman in the Union Army in the Civil War, and was only briefly interrupted by a postwar attempt at opening a hardware store.79 In 1867, he re-enlisted, and was commissioned as a Captain with the Buffalo Soldiers. For the next eight years, Pratt and the 10th Regiment battled the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes in a multitude of conflicts, including the Washita Campaign (1868-9) in Oklahoma and the Red River War (1874-5) across a broad swath of the Great Plains. In April 1875, Pratt was assigned to guard 72 indigenous prisoners of war from the Red River War at Fort Marion, a former Spanish fortress in St. Augustine, Florida.80 While stationed at Fort Marion, Pratt undertook several experiments in discipline and education with the prisoners that would become bases for his attempt to assimilate Carlisle students and his obsession with imparting Western conceptions of economic productivity on Native people. With the knowledge that the fortress exit could not be seen from the inside, Pratt unshackled the prisoners, outfitted them in surplus Army uniforms, and dismissed the camp guards so that the prisoners could guard themselves in what remained a highly controlled environment.81 This was, however, a blatant breach of his orders from the Army.82 He then encouraged the prisoners to earn money while in captivity by producing a variety of saleable items and services to the mainstream community in St. Augustine. The prison labor program was a sensation with both government and private citizens, and, crucially, the War Department seems to have accepted Pratt’s initiative as a form of Native “education.”83 In 1878, the War Department released the prisoners and relieved Pratt of his guard duty. However, the prisoners chose to not return home.84 Pratt, again acting outside the purview of his orders, wrote to mainstream colleges,
79 Witmer 2. 80 Ibid. 81 Fear-Segal argues that the spatial environment of Fort Marion inspired
the layout of Carlisle, in which it was impossible to see the single entrance and exit from inside. Additionally, the aforementioned school bandstand, located on the center of campus, provided Pratt with a perch that had a sightline to every major school building. Both, FearSegal says, were subtle efforts at population control. Fear-Segal 206 and Witmer 4-5. 82 Witmer 6. 83 In Pratt’s prison labor initiative, one sees the likely origins of Carlisle’s Outing program. “Government officials, writers, artists, and northern vacationers all came for a closer view of the notorious ‘hostiles.’ Pratt used every advantage he could ‘to bring the Indians into the best understanding and relations with people,’” Ibid. 8. 84 “[The War Department gave] them the choice of continuing their education in the East or returning home…now dependent on the government for the necessities of life, the tribes had lost their ability to resist failing programs concocted for their welfare. The home they had left no longer existed,” Ibid. 9.
79
asking if they might accept the former prisoners as students. He was rebuffed—but not one to surrender responsibility, Pratt wrote General Samuel Armstrong, Principal of the Hampton Institute, with the same request. Armstrong acquiesced, and, in 1878, allowed Pratt to pilot the Native education program at Hampton, with an inaugural class of 17 ex-prisoners-of-war. Pratt’s involvement with Hampton lasted for one year. At the time, he feared public outrage at a program that co-educated blacks and indigenous people, so he recommended that the 17 students be segregated from the black student body.85 Although the program “was attracting favorable attention and optimism,” the mainstream public still feared the prospect of alliances or intermarriage between these minority groups.86 Publicly, Pratt then professed that the education problems of blacks and Native Americans were not the same, and that Indian education required a larger scale immersion in white culture in order to remove students from indigenous institutions. Witmer argues that Pratt was “convinced” of these positions, and therefore decided to pursue another independent project—founding Carlisle.87 Other scholars, such as Donal Lindsey, are more skeptical of Pratt’s ostensible conviction that Native and black education had to be conducted separately, irrespective of public opinion. Linsey suggests that Pratt’s decision to leave Hampton in pursuit of a superintendency of his own was evidence of his strong egotism and desire for power.88 I support his view on the basis that the physical layout of Carlisle and the content of The Red Man are just two examples of Pratt’s later attempts to consolidate power in what he believed was ‘his’ school. His intentions aside, in early 1879 Pratt successfully applied to Carl Schurz, then Secretary of the Interior, for license to establish the Carlisle school, his own project in indigenous education. Armstrong opposed Pratt’s departure from Hampton, but did not act in any way to obstruct his plans for developing Carlisle once he left.89 Pratt received permissions from the War Department to use the Carlisle barracks as the site for the school, and to recruit the first Carlisle class from reservations in Dakota Territory. He was a skilled recruiter, so all of the necessary condi-
85 Ibid. 11. While it is certain that the Native students were segregated,
86 87 88
89
Witmer’s claim that Pratt supported the segregation is disputed. Donal Lindsey, for example, argues that “Pratt believed that the degree of separation between blacks and Indians on school grounds was counterproductive,” Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 38. Ibid. 9-11. Ibid. “Pratt’s quest for an undisputed arena to work out his particular racial convictions ultimately made it impossible for him to maintain a cooperative venture with Armstrong. Although it is uncertain how sharply Pratt had defined his own goals for Indian education while at Hampton, he could not have reconciled its program with the one he developed later at Carlisle, as a way station for Indians into public education…Armstrong never publicly criticized Pratt and apparently valued their relationship, but while at Hampton the Captain chafed at losing control of what he considered to be ‘his’ Indians,’” Ibid. 38-39 Ibid. 38-39
tions for establishing a school were easily met, except for one: money. Reading The Red Man As an organ of the Carlisle administration that was heavily censored by Pratt and his assistants, The Red Man is particularly difficult to use as a scholarly primary source if one’s objective is to understand the lived experience of the student body.90 Linda Witmer has noted that a large share of the monthly content was repetitive propaganda.91 However, Witmer overlooks the purpose of the propaganda: a targeted strategy for balancing the school budget and ensuring the continued existence of Carlisle. There was no better tool to observe Pratt’s capacity to disseminate pro-Carlisle messages over two decades of attempts to raise political and financial support from various white publics.92 The paper, which had a continuous circulation between 2,000 and 10,000, was intended for a primarily white audience—most likely the aforementioned large donors in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York.93 Pratt’s attempt to solicit from a white donor base is evident from the promotional campaign that the newspaper operated between October 1887 and December 1891, in which subscribers could buy photographs of Native students working on the presses that printed The Red Man.94 The promotion ran as follows: Standing offer: For ONE new subscribed [to The Red Man], we will give the person sending it a photographic group of the 13 Carlisle Indian printer boys, on a card 4 ½ X 6 ½ inches, worth 20 cents sold by itself. Name and tribe of each boy given.95 By using the students’ tribal affiliations as a selling point, Pratt seems to have again conveniently ignored the position that he tirelessly advocated in his editorial columns—that the purpose of Carlisle was to incorporate Native students into the
90 “Certainly, [some] contributions such as this one to [The Red Man]…
91
92
93 94 95
‘ventriloquized the social evolutionism and assimilationism of Carlisle’s founder and first superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt,’” Bess, “Casting a Spell.” “The paper featured news about students, visitors, teachers and the school itself. It also heavily proselytized Pratt’s concept of education with articles on the comparisons of reservation and non-reservation schools. The paper’s content, also comprised of school news and editorials, also promoted sobriety, encouraged using the English language and enforced good habits,” Witmer 40. For example, Fear-Segal has described in depth how Pratt would evade the subject of deaths at the school by either not acknowledging them or by saying that the students were ill in advance of coming to Carlisle. The existence of the school cemetery was never mentioned in The Red Man. Fear-Segal 221. Witmer 41-42. “10,000 Subscribers Wanted,” The Red Man, October, 1887, 4 and The Red Man, December, 1891, NP. Ibid.
American body politic by destroying their tribal affiliations. The fact that Pratt was willing to refer to his pupils as Indians is important. It shows that he was more concerned with fundraising than in maintaining the consistent promise that a Carlisle education would allow Indians to rise from racial degradation to equal status with white Americans. Jennifer Bess communicates the same point by noting that the original Lakota title of the newspaper, Eadle Keatah Toh, disregarded the school’s English-only policy, which aimed to assimilate Carlisle students into American life.96 Pratt also directly admitted, in public, that the function of The Red Man was to publish an embellished perspective of the Carlisle school for public consumption. At a BIA-sponsored conference on Native education in 1891, Pratt responded to the question of whether all of the other off-reservation schools should print a newspaper similar to The Red Man. He suggested that it was only worthwhile if the editor could avoid “saying things that ought not be said.”97 He continued to explain his method of giving basic promotional material to students in order to sell the school to their friends and parents on reservations, as well as to Carlisle’s donor base, which was largely white. In starting [printing] at Carlisle, we thought we would print a little paper for the instruction of our pupils and send that paper to their parents, which would be a letter to them to be read by somebody who could give them the contents of it; we would also send it to the ‘out’ students. These were the three objects that led us to start printing at Carlisle. Our circulation outside the school grew so rapidly that we soon commenced to start printing [The Red Man] to impress upon the public our opinion in regard to what ought be done for the Indians.98 Despite all of these confusing admissions for the modern reader—such as the newspaper’s ready declaration that it was censored—The Red Man is worth reading precisely because most of the content prioritized what Pratt thought his largely white readership and donor base wanted to know. In any given issue of the newspaper, one would find Pratt’s editorial page, a bulletin list of school news, reprinted editorials and feature articles on federal Indian policy from mainstream newspapers, and, particularly after 1900, coverage of Carlisle’s famed football team. While Carlisle’s “friends” may have viewed the success and regimentation of the football team as evidence that Pratt’s campaign of civilization through education was working, students used the appearance of an assimilated team for collective resistance to mainstream institutions through a phys-
96 Bess, “Casting a Spell.” 97 “Proceedings of the First Conference of Government Indian School Workers, Held at Lawrence, Kansas, December 23 and 24, ’91 [sic],” The Red Man, February, 1892, 2. 98 Ibid.
80
ical contest.99 Sports were another manifestation of cultural continuity at Carlisle. As much as Pratt was writing and editing for a white public, he also felt beholden to them. He faithfully published the Outing Reports of the employers that hired Carlisle students, to a seemingly excessive degree of detail. For example, Pratt would publish all of the employers’ answers to mandatory questionnaires that he sent them regarding students’ work performance, behavior, and health. The Red Man categorically explained away the existence of students who endured severe health complications from disease or overwork on Outing. Therefore, the historical record shows the existence of a student who suffered from a “little bilious attack.”100 Conversely, white Pennsylvania publics loved Pratt. At the time of his 1904 firing, letters of support flowed in from across the Northeast. Over the span of Pratt’s 25 years, he used The Red Man as a forum for columns and reprinting news articles from national mainstream newspapers covering Native affairs. These articles reveal the personal insecurities of an administrator who thought that public opinion might associate his school with Hampton; he feared that this association would doom Carlisle’s fiscal future. Pratt’s fear was not entirely irrational, as he had founded the Native education program at Hampton. Furthermore, he was soliciting money from donors who believed in his specious message of racial uplift, and who were likely anti-black. Images of Blacks and Hampton as Racial Other Other, predominantly white contributors to The Red Man used different premises, but invariably reached the same conclusion—that blacks were separate from the mainstream American race, which they understood to be white. Some Native students appear to have genuinely agreed with the major tenets of Pratt’s racial philosophy, in the sense that they viewed blacks as an “other” that either was not yet or could never become part of the American race. But, unlike the administration, the students did not develop their racial theories in tandem with economic incentives. I argue that one long-run consequence of the Native students’ racial theories on black Americans was the further separation of future Native and black students in oppressive U.S. education projects. Several Carlisle scholars, particularly Bess and Fear-Segal, have turned to the pages of The Red Man for evidence that student contributors were able to evade Pratt’s censoring hand in the paper. For example, Bess cites student resistance through the coded language of poetry.101 But the student debates in The Red Man also respond to the ahistorical implication that all of the ideas that the students professed, apart from what they were instructed to do and say, were acceptable in a modern context. Some Native students expressed opinions regarding
other racial groups, particularly of American blacks, that were internally inconsistent and anti-intellectual. If assimilation and cultural continuity may be understood as a two-pronged survival strategy for Carlisle students, it may also be read for the students’ acceptance of or elaboration on problematic racial ideas. This discouraging truth undermines the misconception that oppressed groups have historically acted in solidarity with other oppressed groups in the way that contemporary middleclass white people might expect them to have done. Conflict between Native and black as separate races was most often present in debates between Carlisle students, which were then recorded in the pages of The Red Man. Like The Red Man itself, the student debate clubs at Carlisle went by different names throughout the history of the school, including The Invincibles, The Standard Debating Club, and the Susan Longstreth Literary Society—the latter, which was named after the aforementioned white, Quaker donor to the school, accepted only female students. This was likely either a stipulation Mrs. Longstreth attached to her charitable donations, or another manifestation of Carlisle’s gender segregation. Student debates were often focused on BIA policy initiatives, including the merits of the Dawes Act at the time when Congress voted on it, the political effects of allotment, and the prospect of U.S. citizenship and voting rights for Native people. As would be expected, some student commentary strongly suggested that the speakers advocated for arguments that they thought the administration would like to hear. In an 1890 debate on the resolution “That the Signing of the Dawes Bill was the Emancipation of the Indians,” Stacy Matlack, a Pawnee, proclaimed “you will live to see the day when Senator Dawes’ name will be adored and beloved by the Indians, even more so than Abraham Lincoln’s name is worshipped by the colored race.”102 While this statement seems profoundly affected, it also reiterated the separation of blacks from the American polity as a distinct race, and compared reservation Indians to liberated slaves. Others, such as Sioux student Henry Standing Bear, made startlingly accurate claims about the long-run effects of allotment policy, such as the political fragmentation of reservation communities and the dispossession of over 70 percent of Native landholdings to white hands, which took contemporary historians nearly a hundred years to verify.103 Standing Bear thanked Dawes for his kind “intentions to do good to my people,” but argued that allotment was destroying tribes by fragmenting limited quantities of arable land.104 As a result, he argued, individual ownership of government-allotted 160 acre plots simply exacerbated Native poverty. Standing Bear caustically stated that “the Dawes Bill offers freedom to the dead Indians,” and that “the Dawes Bill is simply starvation to
102 “The Dawes Bill Discussed by Our Pupils,” The Red Man, January and February, 1890, NP.
99 John Bloom, To Show What an Indian Can Do, (Minneapolis: University
103 Carlson, “Land Allotment and the Decline of American Indian
100 “Outing Reports,” The Red Man, June 1895, 2. 101 Bess, “Casting a Spell.”
104 “The Dawes Bill Discussed by Our Pupils,” The Red Man, January and
of Minnesota Press, 2000).
81
Farming.”
February, 1890, NP.
many tribes, for much of the land is so poor either for agriculture or grazing purposes that an industrious white man could hardly make a living from it.”105 He concluded with the suggestion that “Franchise Day”—an annual commemoration of the passage of the Dawes Act that was celebrated at Carlisle until 1900—was a rather hollow celebration.106 However, most of the Carlisle students quoted in The Red Man were neither as contrary to BIA policy as Standing Bear nor as obsequious as Matlack. Rather, they hinted at their simultaneous assimilation to boarding school culture, maintenance of cultural continuity, and absorption of the idea that Native people should become integrated with white American economic mores, which both Pratt and some of his students believed were opposed to the reservation system. Students’ acceptance of such culturally destructive ideas was possible because of the massive scale of dispossession that afflicted Native Americans during this period of study, as well as the absence of schools that they perceived as viable alternatives to Carlisle. These tensions were laid bare in an 1894 graduation speech by Martha Napawat, a Kiowa student. She implicitly resisted what she perceived to be mainstream publics’ unreasonable expectations for Carlisle students, in which cases of “fail[ed]” students, presumably those who did not find employment or ran away, were too heavily publicized. As Napawat said, You, the people of the East…cannot expect all the [Carlisle] graduates to become something great…take for example the graduates of the colleges and universities of this country, do they all become famous and accomplish great and wonderful things [sic]? No! Many have failed.107 Napawat simultaneously assimilated to the Carlisle environment by agreeing with Pratt’s message that reservations were full of “[moral] temptations” and “hardships.”108 For Pratt, the reservation was an ostensible disincentive for Natives to work, which let them remain degraded as Indians. He made this point abundantly clear when he asked the President of the Standard Debating Club to give an impromptu speech on the “Darwinian Theory of the Human Species.”109 The student responded with a hierarchy that placed “white” at the top, and “red” as the closest equal. The syncretism between Pratt’s acceptance of Jim Crow politics in favor of lobbying for Carlisle and recorded student positions of what race meant was also apparent during the Standards vs. Susan Longsteth Literary Society debate, fea105 The Red Man, January and February, 1890, NP. 106 “Something more must be done for the Indians than to give them a Franchise Day as proposed by the Dawes Bill,” Ibid. 107 The Red Man, January and February, 1894, 2. 108 Ibid. 109 “Robert was stalled. He said that he did not know the meaning of the first word, but when the subject was explained gave a number of laughable hits. He seemed to think we sprang from the dust. Then became stone, then the tree, then the animal, cow, dog, monkey, negro, red man, and finally the white man,” Ibid.
tured in the January and February 1894 issue of the Red Man. The topic of the debate was the resolution “Resolved: That the Negro is Superior to the Indian.”110 Without exception, the Carlisle student debaters believed that American blacks were a race apart from whites; the main point of contention was how close the relative civilization gap was between the two groups. They also debated whether Native peoples were more or less Americanized, as compared to the white mainstream ideal, than both reservation Indians and Native students at Carlisle’s peer boarding schools. The students also conflated black identity with Africa as a national origin, irrespective of where the ancestors of the black Americans in question might have come from. Florence Wells, an Alaskan student, opened the argument in favor of black superiority relative to Native people, on the basis that in spite of their separateness from the white American race, blacks were not inherently intellectually inferior, as evidenced by the historical existence of African empires. From her perspective, that “eighteen of the rulers” in the “cradle of civilization” were black provided evidence that racial superiority was relative to time and place.111 The American “negro” was not socially equal to whites, but this inequality would not have dated back to classical society. Wells began by stating that the American definition of blackness was arbitrary but immutable, as “the poor Negro [was] created black for reasons known to Almighty God alone.”112 She absolved white responsibility for slavery by suggesting “his color as well as physical features combined with his ignorance has given the handsomer race the courage to tread him as low as man can possibly sink.”113 She continued to conflate American blacks with Africans, for “the colored people are originally from a continent known as darkest Africa…[from] common sense little is expected intellectually, from a people who live under the vertical rays of the sun.”114 For Wells, however, American blacks had risen from African degradation by adopting Western education, speaking English, and eschewing both the reservation system and government aid that Red Man contributors—and its editor—often cited as the source of the Indian Problem. Given that Pratt often criticized the reservation system as the government’s “perpetual bribe” for Indians to avoid assimilating, it is not surprising that Wells supported his viewpoint.115 The Native students at Hampton, said Wells, were Indians that were “put through by their ever present help in trouble, Uncle Sam.”116 In comparison, she said, “the colored young men and 110 Ibid. 111 “Resolved, That the Negro is Superior to the Indian: Interesting Points
on Both Sides of the Question Made by Indian Students at a Public Debate Between the Susan Longstreth Literary Society and the Standard Debating Club,” The Red Man, January and February, 1894, 4-6. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 271. 116 “Resolved, That the Negro is Superior to the Indian: Interesting Points on Both Sides of the Question Made by Indian Students at a Public
82
women work their way through.”117 As shown through analysis of federal appropriations to Hampton in Appendix A, Wells’s statement was a mischaracterization of the funding structures for both schools. It ignored that Carlisle was almost exclusively government funded at this time. Furthermore, Wells’s comparison was a fairly accurate representation of the stigma of alleged welfare dependence that Pratt and others attached to the reservation system, and which continues to plague both Native reservation and urban communities.118 The racialization of welfare has also continued to affect black communities, particularly through the image of the “Welfare Queen.”119 Other students, such as Phillip Lavatta, a Shoshone, were far more blatantly anti-black on the specious grounds that slavery had been an opportunity for blacks to acquire white American customs and civilization, but they had failed in that regard in the years following emancipation. Of note was his suggestion that the black race was mutable during the antebellum era, and that blacks could have been incorporated as white through the chattel system. But having foregone this “opportunity,” he thought, it was no longer possible that blacks could achieve social parity with whites. As he said: We find in 1619 the Negro was brought to this country and placed into slavery—but slavery of body only. What a blessing that was to be brought from the depths of degradation, and be placed thousands of miles away from their early influences and former modes of life— placed, I say, into that situation of life which meant their advancement physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually—which meant that they would soon as become of a different race.120
Debate Between the Susan Longstreth Literary Society and the Standard Debating Club,” The Red Man, January and February, 1894, 4-6. 117 Ibid. 118 “Welfare is based upon the norm set up by the Puritans long ago. A man is defined as a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, healthy, ambitious, earnest, and honest, a man whom the Lord smiles upon by increasing the fruits of his labor. Welfare is designed to compensate people insofar as they deviate from that norm…Often when discussing treaty rights with whites, Indians find themselves being told that ‘We gave you the land and you haven’t done anything with it.’ Or some commentator opposed to the welfare state remarks, ‘We gave the Indians a small piece of land and then put them on the dole and they are unable to take care of themselves.’ The truth is that practically the only thing the white men have ever given the Indian was disease and poverty,” Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins, 35, 190. 119 For more on the development of the “welfare queen” stereotype in twentieth-century Chicago, and the mainstream vilification of black women as welfare recipients, see Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “‘The Crime of Survival:’ Fraud Persecutions, Community Surveillance, and the Original ‘Welfare Queen,’” Journal of Social History 41, (2007): 329354. 120 “Resolved, That the Negro is Superior to the Indian: Interesting Points on Both Sides of the Question Made by Indian Students at a Public Debate Between the Susan Longstreth Literary Society and the Standard Debating Club,” The Red Man, January and February, 1894, 6.
83
Ironically, Lavatta was the only speaker to acknowledge Jim Crow-era violence against blacks in the American South. Regrettably, he argued that it was justified, as “we see in the daily papers that the people of the South are trying to elevate the Negro. How? By placing him on the gallows and hanging him three or four every day.”121 Lavatta’s statement was probably sarcastic, but that does not exonerate its content. The idea of blackness as an immutable identity permeated the intermarriage metaphor that Pratt was so fond of using as a stand-in for Native assimilation to white culture. The same theory was apparent in Carlisle students’ own recorded opinions regarding blacks. From both administrative and student perspectives, the American black was a racial other that was separate from Native identity. The administration had financial incentives for presenting this viewpoint in public, and, in particular, for delineating the separation between Carlisle and Hampton. But the students were simply arguing, and at much lower stakes. While it is possible that some of the comments contained therein were throwaway remarks or simple pandering to Pratt, it is also clear that the students identified with an American racial hierarchy that distinguished between blacks, degraded Indians, off-reservation Natives, and whites. Native students’ positionality with respect to most of those groups is not quite clear, but the Carlisle students in this debate definitely did not identify with American blacks on the basis of shared discrimination at the hands of the U.S. government. They preferred to conceive of blacks in terms of their own relationship with government. In debate, Carlisle students attributed the same “dependence” stereotype to American blacks that both they and mainstream publics attributed to reservation Indians. By 1900, even the ever-paranoid Pratt realized that the Native education program at Hampton was far less of a competitive threat to Carlisle’s funding base than it had been two decades earlier, and the Battlefield and Classroom author needed a new frontier on which to fight for the financial security of his institution. He did so by enrolling Puerto Rican students at Carlisle starting in 1898, immediately after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. This ostensibly bizarre episode in Carlisle’s history provides an example of the indeterminate status of Native race at Carlisle, the connections that Pratt maintained with Army officials, and the lengths to which Carlisle extended itself in fundraising efforts.122 Thus, from the philosophically compatible projects of assimilationist education for indigenous persons and the expansionist colonialism of the early twentieth-century U.S., Pratt found avenues for obtaining government funding. The Carlisle administration believed that white, colonizing U.S. publics would not question the obvious cultural differences between Native persons and Puerto Ricans when it grouped them in the same racial category, which proved true. But this financially- driven racial idea failed to produce the quantity of government income that Pratt desired. That is the broader significance 121 Ibid. 122 Pablo Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation Under Duress.”
of this episode in Carlisle history, which Pablo Navarro-Rivera, its one chronicler, has regrettably missed. The administrative attempt to enroll Puerto Ricans fits into this study as the administration’s abortive last attempt to obtain government grants, just as the BIA’s philosophical focus increasingly shifted towards placing Native students in U.S. public schools.123 Puerto Ricans and Colonized Peoples as Native, and Vice Versa According to Navarro-Rivera, Carlisle enrolled approximately 60 Puerto Rican students from 1898 to 1913, although the vast majority of those students arrived in Pennsylvania between 1900 and 1901.124 The Puerto Rican students were mostly supported by scholarships from the U.S. government, which also made similar appropriations during the same period for Cuban and Puerto Rican students and teachers to study at Cornell and Harvard Universities, under the auspices of “acculturat[ing] a conquered people to the U.S. education system.”125 Navarro argues that the Puerto Rican families that sent their children to Pratt originally had no idea that Carlisle was a Native American boarding school, as a mixture of Carlisle agents and government officials in Puerto Rico falsely advertised the school.126 Like indigenous parents, Puerto Rican families were not told that their children would be enrolled in a militarized enclosure of Anglo-American “civilization.” Only by 1901, when students wrote home, pleading that “the instruction at the Indian School was abysmal…and the food was atrocious,” did Luis Muñoz Rivera, the Editor of San Juan’s largest newspaper, the Puerto Rico Daily Herald, visit Carlisle in-person in to investigate the school program.127 Rivera’s negative opinion of Carlisle, which he re-printed in the Herald, seems to have dissuaded more students from enrolling in the school. By 1903, when Carlisle posed 40 Puerto Rican students for the camera on “Porto Rican Day [sic],” 123 However, it must be stated that the first appropriations for Native
students to attend public schools, in 1895, were a very small share of the overall Indian School budget—about .16 percent—and would stay as such for the rest of the decade. Between 1895 and 1905, missions of various Christian denominations operated these public schools. Congress first made an appropriation for Native students to study at non-denominational U.S. public schools in 1905. 124 “In order to set up an initial teaching corps appropriate to the new colonial order, the United States government sent 1,600 Cuban teachers to Harvard University in the summer of 1900 and more than 400 Puerto Rican teachers to Harvard and Cornell Universities in 1904,” Pablo Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation Under Duress.” 125 Ibid. 126 “Both students and parents alleged that in Puerto Rico they had been told that they could study medicine, law, and architecture at Carlisle… it is clear from the documents encountered so far that at least until the middle of 1901 neither the young people nor their parents or guardians had much information at all about the institution to which the government was sending them. In their view, Carlisle was simply one of the schools in the United States for which the colonial government had approved scholarships,” Ibid. 127 Ibid.
nearly ten percent of the enrolled Puerto Ricans had somehow managed to escape the school and return to Puerto Rico, and only five more would enroll for the rest of Carlisle’s existence as an institution.128 While Navarro-Rivera is careful to note “the dearth of information available makes it difficult to reconstruct the Puerto Rican experience at Carlisle with a degree of historical accuracy,” the inverse relationship is not readily apparent—why did Carlisle want to enroll Puerto Ricans? From pronouncements that top Carlisle administrators made in the pages of The Red Man, it is clear that the school wanted to secure government grants by enrolling as many Puerto Ricans as possible. The administration likely thought this strategy necessary because the school was, by this time, operating on a stagnant budget that was dominated by government funding relative to private donations.129 The first five Puerto Rican students who arrived at Carlisle in 1898 were not supported by government dollars, but Pratt soon took advantage of a burgeoning federal initiative to change that fact. He was able to obtain much more government funding in the school’s early years when the continued existence of Carlisle was a fait accompli, and Pratt likely believed that he could do the same by accepting “four girls and one boy from Ponce, Porto Rico [sic],” one year in advance of the Congressional scholarship program.130 He likely did this in order to convince Congress that Carlisle was a logical destination for participants in the program, and, as with other government appropriations to the school, Pratt was paid for each Puerto Rican enrolled under the program. Navarro states that the government scholarship program began in 1899, although the specific dollar appropriation for this purpose does not appear in the Commissioner of Indian Affairs reports from the period.131 Pratt explained the connection between school finances and the Puerto Rican students clearly in his annual report to William A. Jones, then Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He re-printed his report to Jones in the September 13, 1901 issue of The Red Man. In the manner of casual conversation, the superintendent described his means and reasoning for enrolling Puerto Ricans and, he hoped, other recently colonized peoples. With your sanction, I received as students of this school, under the same rules and conditions governing in the case of Indian pupils…four girls and one boy from Ponce, Porto Rico [sic]. A few months previous to this, and upon the urgency of those who brought them and with your approval, I had received four boys, who came with our returning Pennsylvania 128 Ibid., Figure A 129 For comparative purposes, private donations constituted near 100%
of the Carlisle budget between 1879 and 1881, and just under 11% in 1886, five years after the school received its first appropriation from Congress. By 1900, Carlisle reported just $238.91, or about .16% of the total school budget, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs as charitable income. 130 The Red Man, 13 September, 1901, 1. 131 Stein Appendix A and The Red Man, 31 July, 1903, NP.
84
volunteers…very soon as a result of their letters home many requests poured in from parents and friends in Porto Rico [sic] urging us to accept others. I heard this matter before you and suggested that I be allowed to increase the number to forty, which you authorized in view of the fact that we are carrying quite a good many Indian youths over and above our appropriation number, and these could be counted as a portion of the excess.132 This report suggested that accepting Puerto Rican students made sense, because of its implicit argument that the aims of civilization as practiced at Carlisle were the same principles that undergirded American colonialism. In this excerpt, Pratt’s economic motives and race ideas regarding Puerto Ricans, as well as those of surrounding white publics, were also laid bare. Unlike Cornell and Harvard, the administration needed to negotiate with the BIA in order to receive funding through the Congressional scholarship program. While Pratt was obviously misguided in believing that nonNative Puerto Ricans were the same people as Native Americans, state and public institutions abetted his erroneous belief. A complicit Army with a local connection to Pratt [the Pennsylvania regiment] brought the first students to Carlisle, and beyond Pratt’s superficial, paternalistic distinction between the Puerto Rican “boys” and Indians, he asked Commissioner Jones for funding on the grounds that the racial groups could be educated in a similar manner. Jones agreed, believing that the money Pratt received for the Puerto Ricans could help balance Carlisle’s budget. A.J. Standing, a Quaker and Carlisle’s Assistant Superintendent, further explained the connection between Carlisle, government contracts, and American imperialism through a speech for at the school’s 1901 Commencement. Standing preached his vision of Carlisle’s short-term, ultimately far-fetched enrollment plan, in which the number of Puerto Rican students would hypothetically have grown to equal the number of Natives at Carlisle. To accomplish this, Standing thought, simply required Congressional approval. He continued by suggesting a similarity between colonial possessions and indigenous assimilation, in the sense that the U.S. could more cheaply export middle-class white and Protestant culture through education projects than by military force. He pictured that the continuation of American colonial rule could be accomplished by sending a thousand indigenous and a thousand Puerto Rican Carlisle graduates, all of whom had become “Americanized,” to go out and teach civilization to the inhabitants of America’s new Caribbean possessions. In three years we would have expended for the educa-
132 Residents of other territories that the U.S. had recently colonized, such
as Hawaiians and Filipinos, never enrolled at Carlisle. The Red Man also made no mention of the few Puerto Rican students that enrolled at Carlisle in 1898 and 1899. Ibid.
85
tion of these young people, the sum of $1,200,000 or about one fourth the cost of a battleship. We might expect there would be two thousand teachers going back to those islands perfectly conversant with our manner of life, our language, our customs and our plan of education, and I don’t think anyone can appreciate the vast amount of influence those two thousand teachers would have.133 In spite of Standing’s bombast, Navarro-Rivera’s source material proves that the Puerto Rican students were never duped into believing that they were Native Americans.134 However, just the as the 1894 Carlisle student debate demonstrated students’ acceptance and elaboration of the administration’s racial ideas about American blacks, the same phenomenon occurred in Carlisle’s contact with Puerto Rico. A column in The Red Man suggests that at least one indigenous, non-Puerto Rican Carlisle student believed in the administration’s conflation of Native Americans and Puerto Ricans. A curious Letter to the Editor from Emanuel Powlas, a member of the Oneida tribe and a Carlisle graduate who was stationed in Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American war, reflects the author’s acceptance of the administrative position.135 The editorialized header of the letter, “Carlisle Colony is Porta Rica [sic],” clearly shows that the Carlisle administration believed it was in step with American foreign policy. But Powlas believed that his own indigenous racial identity was mutable based on what language he spoke. If he could learn Spanish, he thought, he could “change into a Porto Rican [sic],” because, ostensibly, even Puerto Ricans would not be able to tell that he was indigenous. In part, Powlas’ letter read: I am studying Spanish and getting along well. I can go to town now and transact my business, using the Spanish language. I am trying hard to learn, and some tell me that I will change into a Porto Rican…I would not have to change anything else, and they could not tell but I was Porto Rican [sic].136 Powlas’ testimony therefore shows that at least one Carlisle Native student internalized and expanded the administration’s associations between U.S. colonial projects at home
133 “Commencement Exercises,” The Red Man, 22 March, 1901, 1-2. 134 “It is interesting to note that Puerto Rican students invariably crossed
off the terms “Indian” and “Tribe,” replacing them with “Puerto Rico” or “Puerto Rican.” Pablo Navarro-Rivera, “Acculturation Under Duress.” 135 As with all Letters to the Editor printed in The Red Man, it is impossible to ascertain whether its content was modified or censored by the Carlisle administration. However, Powlas was a documented Oneida student at Carlisle, so it is unlikely to be a complete forgery. “Soldier Boy Emanuel Powlas—Carlisle Colony is Porta Rica [sic],” The Red Man, September, 1900, 2 and “Powlas, Emanuel,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Dickinson College, http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/people/ powlas-emanuel, last accessed 18 February 2016. 136 The Red Man, September, 1900, 2.
and abroad. But instead of precipitating the grand enrollment boom envisioned by Pratt and Standing in The Red Man, my analysis of Carlisle’s finances strongly suggests that the Puerto Rican experiment was the school administration’s final and futile struggle for political relevance. Congressional interest and funding turned increasingly to reservation boarding and day schools, and, ultimately, to placing indigenous students in U.S. public schools. Both of these options were substantially less expensive than off-reservation institutions, because there was little or no cost to transport Native children to school. Pratt’s persistent advocacy for other colonized groups to send their children to Carlisle also failed to attract a single student. Later, attempts to assimilate indigenous students in public schools would continue on a much larger scale than had begun in 1895.137 It is clear from the financial record that Carlisle hit its zenith of government support in 1900, and slowly lost funding from that year forward. Consequently, the BIA’s dismissal of Pratt in 1904 from his post as Superintendent was irrelevant to Carlisle’s future, as the institution could not have significantly expanded enrollment unless the plan to enroll one thousand Puerto Rican students with government support had worked. However, before the BIA forced Pratt out, he used The Red Man to broadcast the sentiments of the people whom he believed were still loyal to him—the white, religious, business-owning “friends” of the school. While their monetary donations to the school declined to an insignificant fraction of school revenues after 1893, Pratt still needed them to provide places of employment for the Outing program. By the turn of the century, Carlisle had become financially dependent on the BIA. For the Bureau, Pratt’s institution had become too expensive for the superintendent to publicly criticize its policies without political consequences, and Pratt’s misunderstanding of whom he could not afford to anger was precisely what precipitated his forced retirement. The Firing of Pratt and the Decline of Carlisle In May 1904, Pratt lectured on behalf of Carlisle at a ministers’ conference at Lake Mohonk, New York.138 There, he lamented that federal policy toward indigenous people had shifted since the Dawes Act, and that Congress no longer sought
to destroy the reservation system. This upset Pratt, as his publicly stated justification for founding an off-reservation school was that the reservation system perpetuated Indian racial inferiority. He also made the throwaway comment that “the [BIA] is a barnacle that should be knocked off sometime.”139 The BIA moved swiftly to force Pratt to retire, and The Red Man made the announcement the next month. Before leaving office, Pratt published letters of support from his donors and “friends” of the Outing program. From their names, we see that local Protestant religious institutions, higher education leaders, and businesspeople were willing to stand with Pratt when his removal was a certainty—again highlighting Pratt’s political relationship with many mainstream publics.140 As one of the letters noted, Your sudden removal without investigation or trial from your position as Superintendent of the Indian School after twenty-five years of conspicuous service to the country of which we have been the daily witnesses, offends the sense of justice in our entire community. As pastors of the Churches and ministers of the gospel we give you this unshaken confidence in you and the cause you represent.141 However, pastoral support did not enable Pratt to maintain his positions as Carlisle Superintendent and the “man-on-the-bandstand.” According to Witmer, Pratt’s illconceived “defiance and hostile attacks toward his critics,” particularly the comment at Lake Mohonk, “brought about his own downfall.”142 This is a mischaracterization. Rather, Pratt’s egotism was readily apparent from the beginning of his tenure, when he verbally scolded Carl Schurz, the Secretary of the Interior, for appropriating “the shoddiest of shoddy clothing” for student use.143 If arrogance and insubordination alone were why Pratt was fired, it would have happened much sooner. The root causes of the Bureau’s decision were, rather, issues of money and long run bureaucratic planning that signaled the beginning of the demise of the off-reservation schools, rather than simple personality conflicts. In 1879, Carlisle drew very few resources from the federal government, and Pratt’s assimilationist mission fit well with the Congressional milieu that produced the Dawes Act eight years later. By 1904, the program to place indigenous students in public mission schools was nine years old, and the first BIA appropriations
137 In 1895, the BIA provided $4,087.40 for indigenous students to
study at the public schools operated by missions. This appropriation was renewed annually in smaller dollar amounts until 1905, when the government provided for 84 students to study at bona fide U.S. public schools. Stein Appendix A. 138 Lake Mohonk was also the site for the Mohonk Lake Conference, which was an annual gathering (1883-1916) of mainstream elites who were interested in social uplift for indigenous people and ridding the country of “foes to Indian civilization.” Notably, the conference is not known to have ever included a Native person in its ranks. Native participation in mainstream political debate on Native issues would only appear later, through the Society of American Indians (1911-1923). Proceedings, Mohonk Lake Conference: October 12, 13, 14, 1886, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887).
139 Witmer 51. 140 “[Signed] R.M. Henderson, President Carlisle Deposit Bank…Edward
Reed, President of Dickinson College…John Hayes, President of the Carlisle Gas and Water Company, President of the Manufacturing Company and Republican Presidential Elector 1904,” in “Why ‘Pratt’ Alone? The Following Correspondence Shows Indian Commissioner Jones has the Same Radical Notions that were the Alleged Cause of General Pratt’s Removal,” The Red Man, 24 June and 1 July, 1904, NP. 141 Ibid. 142 Witmer 51. 143 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 230.
86
to fund Native students to study at U.S. public schools would follow in the next year. In 1907, Thomas Ellington Leupp, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, remarked on the Bureau’s ultimate intention to send as many Native students as possible to U.S. public schools. As Leupp said, “whenever the doors of the district schools are opened by the State authorities to Indian children the opportunity is seized to give them the advantage of the same classes and under the same methods of instruction prevailing for white children.”144 The BIA’s decision to fire Pratt over the “barnacle” comment was merely a pretext to get rid of a man who, rather than just being a power-seeking administrator, also represented a possible political challenge to the burgeoning public school program. Pratt felt strongly that Native students needed to learn English before entering U.S. public schools—a step that the federal government was increasingly unwilling to fund.145 Pratt also made his opposition to the BIA’s plan to place indigenous students in public schools clear to students on the Carlisle campus. He suggested that doing so would perpetuate their racial degradation.146 But public schools, not an expansion of off or on-reservation schools, were the Bureau’s long run, less expensive solution to the Indian Problem. As an intermediate step, the BIA increased appropriations for on-reservation boarding schools, but public schooling remained the end objective.147 By 1930, 53 percent of all Native school-age children were enrolled in public schools, and, in 1934, Congress passed the Johnson-O’Malley Act, which provided additional appropriations to individual states to enroll indigenous children in public schools.148 However, the broader BIA transition from boarding to public schools was also a tumultuous period for Carlisle, which experienced a near-complete turnover in teaching staff. To replace Pratt, the BIA hired Captain William A. Mercer, a career soldier and reservation agent, likely because officials thought him less domineering and hostile to the reservation system.149 Witmer notes, however, that Pratt’s staff of teachers and assistant administrators soon deserted the school or transferred to other boarding schools en masse, and the school employed four different superintendents in the next 14 years.150 Witmer’s analysis of Mercer as an administrator is unfavorable, as he oversaw the “deterioration of the industrial and academic programs and an increased emphasis on
144 Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907).
145 Pratt’s claim was partially correct, but failed to escape the assimilationist
imperative, i.e. the question of “why must Native children learn English?” 146 “[Pratt] repeatedly told his students that ‘If I was sure you would fall into public schools, I would burn these buildings tonight,’” Witmer 50 and Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 250-251. 147 Witmer 59. 148 Davis, Survival Schools, 91. 149 Witmer 59. 150 Ibid.
87
athletics,” and voluntarily left the school three years later.151 Moses Friedman, a reform-minded administrator who was neither affiliated with the Army nor the BIA, replaced him. He proved extremely unpopular with students and faculty, and resigned in 1914 after he was acquitted in a Congressional investigation as to whether he misappropriated government funds for personal use.152 In 1918, after more than a decade of declining enrollment and government funding, the War Department, not the BIA, finally shuttered Carlisle on the pretense that the property was needed for wartime use.153 Three decades of Indian education in central Pennsylvania drew to an unceremonious end.154 Conclusion: After Assimilation After the boarding school period, the assimilationist imperative for Native students to adopt mainstream economic mores and conceptions of educational success were just as present as they were at Carlisle. In reference to the Native experience at public schools in the Twin Cities, Davis writes that the “‘buzz-word’ was now ‘integration,’” but “‘the objective was still assimilation.’”155 In public schools, predominantly white instructors again taught indigenous students. While some teachers were sympathetic to the structural poverty of many Native communities, they were fundamentally uninterested in altering their curricula to accommodate students with a cultural background that was not mainstream America—but which had a right to exist.156 Some Native parents wanted their children to receive educations that were primarily based in indigenous culture, and they were rightly disappointed when the “Open School” education model of student-centered learning developed in the 1960s did not meet those needs when practiced in public schools.157 Additionally, the experience for Native students in public schools was marred by violent conflict with black students. Animosity “between Indians and blacks” was noted by
151 Witmer 73. 152 Ibid. 82. 153 Ibid. 90. 154 The BIA’s policy shift from financially supporting off-reservation schools
to supporting Native attendance at U.S. public schools was not complete when Carlisle closed. Most of Carlisle’s peer institutions remained open as boarding schools through World War II; the Chilocco Indian School in Newkirk, OK, which remained open as a boarding school until 1980, had the greatest longevity of the group. The Haskell Institute, in Lawrence, KS, was reincorporated as a tribal college, Haskell Indian Nations University, in 1993. In 1928, the Meriam Report—a federally sponsored investigation of all of the boarding schools—curtailed some of the most blatant administrative abuses of indigenous students. Davis 57, Vuckovic 220, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prarie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 155 Davis 88. 156 Ibid. 80. 157 Ibid.
Minneapolis school authorities in 1969, and underscores the division between these two groups, despite the fact that mainstream authorities had “redlined” both into segregated housing, among other forms of oppression.158 The racial thinking espoused seventy years earlier in The Red Man was not the genesis of conflict between Native Americans and American blacks, but could only have exacerbated the division.159 In addition, federal Child Protective Services (CPS) was unsympathetic to indigenous students who refused to attend public schools, or to Native family structures that often did not resemble the mainstream Nuclear family.160 In Minnesota, CPS placed Native children in foster care between 20 and 80 times more frequently than it did for white children, and was called upon when indigenous students committed petty infractions in school.161 Unlike Pratt’s probable kidnapping of Native students to increase Carlisle’s enrollment, this form of dismembering indigenous families was state-sanctioned and legal. For Native parents, the situation in public schools and with CPS was intolerable. In 1972, the American Indian Movement (AIM) chose the Twin Cities as the sites for the Heart of the Earth Survival School (H.O.T.E.S.S.) in Minneapolis and Red School House in St. Paul, the titular “survival schools” that Davis aptly refers to as sites of decolonization.162 At the survival schools, educators believed that cultivating an interest in student learning was more important than conforming to Western standards of educational success. In lieu of grade levels, students were categorized by progress on learning modules, which they completed “at their own pace and in their own time.”163 Furthermore, the instructors were often the students’ parents and relatives—a setup that directly opposed the dismemberment of Native families that was characteristic of boarding and public schools.164 Bolstered by federal funding provided by the federal Indian Education Act of 1972, the two schools increased their enrollments through the 1970s. By 2008, both survival schools closed, but Davis correctly argues that their lasting significance was their presence as the first alternatives to the intergenerational assimilationist imperative that Native people faced in U.S. education projects.165 As Davis concludes, 158 Ibid. 69. 159 See Deloria Jr., Custer Died For Your Sins, 168-196. 160 “Many Indian families, even into the 1950s and 1960s, continued the
traditional practice of leaving their children in the care of extended family members—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or other people in the community—on a daily basis or for an extended period of time. Many White [sic] social workers did not consider these acceptable childcare arrangements,” Davis 86. 161 Ibid. 84. 162 In 1999, H.O.T.E.S.S. changed its name to Oh Day Aki, which is “Heart of the Earth” in Ojibwe. Ibid. 187. 163 Ibid. 108. 164 Ibid. 212. 165 Red School House closed in 1995 amidst allegations that its leadership had misappropriated federal funds. H.O.T.E.S.S. closed in 2008 after Joel Pourier, its finance director, was convicted of embezzling $1.38 million from the school. Ibid. 187.
[Communities] of belief came together to ensure the survival of indigenous difference in American society. Thus they worked against settler colonialism’s persistent ‘logic of elimination’ and furthered decolonization in ways that have continued after Red School House and Oh Day Aki closed their doors.166 By decolonization, Davis primarily refers to the survival schools’ structural opposition to the long-run dismemberment of Native families through U.S. education projects, their curricular emphasis on indigenous culture and history, and their philosophical disavowal of education as a pathway for economic success in mainstream circles. All of the above principles stood in stark contrast to the mission of the Carlisle Indian School, which sought to profit by literally presenting non-Native Puerto Rican children as Native Americans. Decolonization was not simply an educational theory in this context—it was a challenge to bad faith mainstream educational practice. Robert Utley impels the readership of Battlefield and Classroom to remember Pratt, the skilled administrator and political opportunist, as a failed social progressive who founded Carlisle in pursuit of his vision of Native equality in American society, as: Pratt’s true significance lies rather in his role as a determined, courageous, selfless worker in behalf of justice to a people suffering from four centuries of oppression by the dominant culture. He saw in the Indian another human being…he dramatized the plight of the red men as few others did, and he mobilized public opinion behind attempts, however misguided, to sweep aside the odious wreckage of more than a century of Federal mismanagement of the Indians…for this service, paradoxical as it may seem in view of his dedication to the extinction of Indian culture, Richard Henry Pratt is due the gratitude of all American Indians.167 Utley’s attempt at provocative social commentary is itself “odious,” as it absolves Pratt from responsibility for cultural genocide. Other historians, such as Bess and Fear-Segal, have completed the critical task of reaction by highlighting Carlisle students as agents within a colonial institution that ultimately failed to assimilate them. As of this writing, however, three questions on this subject remain unaddressed by extant scholarship, which I sought to address through an investigation of Carlisle’s long-run school finances. The first is the extent to which Pratt was central to the continued existence of Carlisle, and, similarly, how powerful he was relative to the BIA throughout his tenure. The second is what, exactly, shaped Pratt’s worldview on race, as 166 Ibid. 198. 167 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, “Introduction,” xvii. 88
expressed by his views in The Red Man. Thirdly, to what degree Carlisle students, as agents in oppressive physical and print environments, genuinely accept these administrative ideas of the value of assimilation, and the mutability of the Native race? Carlisle’s early history of private fundraising, its fiscal competition with the Hampton Institute, the abortive attempt to enroll Puerto Rican students, and the institution’s dependence on white publics for Outing shows that it was convenient for Pratt to adopt the racial positions he espoused in The Red Man. He believed that Native students could approach status as white Americans, American blacks could not become white, and non-indigenous Puerto Ricans were the same as Native Americans. Furthermore, students quoted in The Red Man articulated positions that agreed with Pratt’s end objectives of othering blacks and the Hampton Institute, but deviated from Pratt’s stances in the originality and depth of their biases. In effect, Carlisle students may have embraced anti-black bias as a form of indigenous identity production that preceded the first meeting of the Society of American Indians by two decades. Some Carlisle students also considered themselves a race apart from American blacks, identified with colonized people such as Puerto Ricans, and aspired to mainstream ideas of economic productivity and education, though true authorial intent is impossible to determine. All of the students that I refer to are deceased, and Pratt’s layered deceptions and half-truths permeate every issue of The Red Man. Pratt, the central figure of any narrative about Carlisle, ruled the school for 25 years as an authoritarian-yet-incomplete assimilationist. Referring to Carlisle students by their tribal affiliations and originally placing a Lakota title on the school newspaper, he even failed to maintain an Englishonly environment in forums that he ostensibly controlled. Richard Henry Pratt was a skillful fundraiser and lobbyist in high mainstream political circles. He operated with the conceit of an egoist who believed that Carlisle was his school—not a BIA project that “instructed” him to hold any political positions.168 As his tenure progressed, Pratt’s projection of this reality in print was increasingly unsupported by economic fact, as Carlisle was wholly government funded by 1903. This shift in Carlisle’s funding base, combined with long-running BIA plans to sponsor indigenous education in U.S. public schools, made Pratt politically expendable. Pratt does not deserve a legacy of credit for his racial positions—only for his creative and skillful fundraising efforts. Charity, government appropriations, and broadbased political support for Pratt ensured that Carlisle would endure as a particularly brutal symbol in a continuum of assimilation projects that were enabled by the complicity of U.S. publics. The school’s existence and mission was also
168 “‘Indian Civilization a Success,’ is the theme given to me by the directors of this assembly. I am not instructed to argue for or against,” in “Address of Capt. Pratt, Before the National Education Convention at Ocean Grove, N.J.,” The Red Man, August 11, 1883, NP.
89
palatable for indigenous people in a specific milieu of massive dispossession. Native families perceived few educational alternatives that would have enabled their children to survive in mainstream economies. Unfortunately, the rise of Carlisle—a Hobson’s choice in Native education—also further inhibited Native and black Americans from effectively resisting educational colonization in shared struggle.
Drinking the Sea Water: Franklin Roosevelt, Polish-Americans, Yalta, and the Downfall of a Civic Elite Matthew Schweitzer, University of Chicago Abstract In the early twentieth century, leaders of the Polish-American community, institutionally known as Polonia, sought to focus their compatriots’ energies toward the Old World. These civic elites promoted pro-Poland patriotism as the best means to overcome racial marginalization experienced in the United States governmental system. Poles felt themselves divorced from American political discourse, and sought patrons to whom they could express their aspirations, grievances, and policy choices. Following the achievement of Polish statehood at Versailles (1917), Polish-American leaders increasingly attempted to cast themselves as spokesmen for an entire community; during the interwar period, they fomented a broad sense of ethnic inferiority in immigrant communities to further this political strategy. Their failure in 1945 to affect Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to abandon Poland to Soviet influence at Yalta became the pivotal moment in their civic identity. It was this immense trauma that shattered the rarified group’s self-constructed fantasy of power, divorcing Polonia’s leadership from its pretensions to influence in Washington and helped solidify their alienation from American political and social affairs. I. Introduction
On 14 November 1944, a letter from Charles Rozmarek of the Polish American Congress (PAC) in Chicago arrived at the estate of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in New York. In it, the passionate leader of the most influential Polish union in the United States and key representative of the ethnic community’s civic elite — institutionally known as Polonia — reminded the President that “Americans of Polish descent voted for you...because in this crucial period of history, they regard you as not only the preeminent pilot of the ship of state but likewise as a friend.” Finishing with a prayer for Roosevelt’s “moral courage, strength and health,” he voiced the desire of six million Polish-Americans that the Atlantic Charter’s guarantees not be abandoned once the war was won.[1] The Charter’s promise of self-determination echoed Wilsonian rhetoric from the last peace, and hopes were high among prominent Polish leaders that the United States, their champion in 1919, would again protect their White Eagle. Woodrow Wilson’s support for an independent Poland after the First World War had shaped subsequent self-perception across Polonia’s establishment. In his 22 January 1917 “Peace Without Victory” speech, Wilson had declared that “Statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, indepen-
dent, autonomous Poland.”[2] His remarks marked the first time any American leader had engaged the “Polish problem” on the international stage. Emphasizing the role played by Polish musician and statesman, Jan Ignacy Paderewski, in shaping Wilson’s 1917 speech, Polish-American historians concluded that political friendships between American powerbrokers and Polish lobbyists were the best — and only — means to push American policy in favorable directions. Authors like Louis Gerson and Rom Landau thus pointed to the part Paderewski played in laying the foundations for Wilson’s support; Landau went so far as to argue that Paderewski was “directly and solely” responsible for the mention of an “independent and autonomous Poland” in the “Peace Without Victory” speech.[3] Perhaps self-servingly, elite Polish organizations funded many of these studies, and Polish-American leaders took their supposed lessons to heart throughout the interwar period. Wilson, who had never expressed any affection for Poland or the Polish people, had been brought to the “righteous cause” by “tireless efforts of great men and a friendship between equals.”[4] Although the American political system might not regard Polish-American aspirations favorably, the post-1917 victory convinced Polish civic elite that they could, by directly pursuing patronage rather than systematic lobbying efforts, guide Washington’s decisionmaking process. Such friendships, articulated in relation to underlying racial and social insecurities, would foster optimism among Polonia’s leadership that they might ensure their homeland’s future. They misread history. In February 1945 these soaring hopes were grounded. At the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt abandoned Poland to the Soviet Union. It soon became clear that the shattered nation was resigned to become a Russian colony on the European borderlands. This “damming spot” for which the “US must be held accountable” would redefine more than just Poland’s sovereignty.[5] At the conference, Roosevelt assented to Stalin’s desire for a referendum in Poland to decide the country’s future political alignment. Although the Allied powers had agreed to hold elections in postwar Poland, it was clear to observers that the affair would be neither “free” nor “fair,” as declared. The results were heavily shaped by the Soviet Union’s desire to construct a buffer zone of puppet and quasi-puppet states along its border in Eastern Europe. Stalin sought to institutionalize the current, pro-Soviet leadership in Warsaw. While Poland maintained nominal independence, the postwar government was tied at once to Moscow by bonds of ideological similarity, economic dependency, and fear. As Soviet forces pushed into Eastern Europe in 1944-1945, Stalin resurrected indigenous Polish communism that had been 90
suppressed under Nazi occupation. In 1944 these efforts culminated in the creation of the “Lublin Government,” born from surviving factions of the Union of Polish Patriots and the Polish Worker’s Party. This entity, which administered liberated Polish territory, had by February 1945 purged remaining political agencies of their western elements — those most likely to voice the desires of the western-backed exiled Polish government in London, which also enjoyed support from the PAC and other Polish-American organizations. Debates at Yalta regarding Poland’s future essentially revolved around which of these two competing governments should ultimately prevail — a conversation that wound intricately with other concerns regarding European reconstruction, security, and appropriate divisions of the War’s territorial spoils among increasingly suspicious allies. For the Americans and British, Poland seemed an acceptable sacrifice to maintain a broader geopolitical power balance across a fragile postwar continent. The results from Crimea made clear that the Lublin Poles would maintain their prominence after 1945: western powers voiced little protest to the skewed results from the subsequent 1946 Polish referendum, which put full political control into the country’s pro-Moscow hands. Roosevelt’s silence on communist accession in 1945-1946 insulted the Polish-American civic elite. For these leaders, geopolitical considerations were far less important than what Rozmarek described as “[Roosevelt’s] spiritual responsibility to do everything he could to help Poland be free.”[6] Yalta’s significance thus quickly grew immediately following the conference’s conclusion as Polish-American civic elites grappled with the implications of their relative impotence to secure Poland’s autonomy. Republican politicians, capitalizing on a sense of abandonment for electoral gain among key Polish-American constituencies, emphasized Poland’s tragic fate at Soviet hands. Likewise, the Polish-American leadership — headed by Rozmarek and the PAC — sought to rally sentiment around this anti-Democratic rhetoric. The elite’s inability to persuade a majority of Polish voters to switch political allegiance after 1945 — in fact, more “ordinary Poles” voted Democrat than turned against the Party — evinced a fundamental deficiency in communal leadership strategy hitherto practiced by elite Polish individuals, organizations, and press in the United States. It pointed to a fundamental paradox in the Polish-American process of ethnic identity construction that elites had promoted throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The pursuit of political friendships represented a coping mechanism by which Poles could overcome their experiences of marginalization and prejudice within the racialized American political system. Yet a closer examination of Polonia’s efforts in the 1930s-1940s to construct Polish-American identity indicates a more complex relationship between complex ethnic group formation and political strategy that relied on, rather than simply responded to, feelings of Polish inferiority in America. At the problem’s core lay a disaffected and bitter Polish-American community, which had been told repeatedly throughout the years preceding Yalta that its sole source of political representation were elites who could foster intimate relationships with American powerbrokers. These 91
figures implied through their publications, public statements, and correspondences that ordinary Poles, as a marginalized racial group, could not express their Polish nationalism within a hostile American system — but that such Old World patriotism was crucial for maintaining cohesion between Poles in America.[7] The civic elite’s strategy was premised on two assumptions that the Yalta results ultimately proved incompatible. Figures like Rozmarek insisted that American politics were inherently anti-Polish and the only way to clear this obstacle was to bypass the political system as a whole and operate through individual policymakers. Although Polish leaders applied it at a national level in 1944-1945, this strategy incubated within the milieu of 1930s urban politics, from which Polish-Americans had traditionally been excluded. The insecurity on which this policy was premised appeared equally as a construct of elite rhetoric as an experienced reality for the broader Polish-American community. Polonia fostered the sense of self-doubt that it subsequently used to justify its role as representatives of a disenfranchised population through myth and narrative construction during the interwar period — a process largely funded by organizations in Poland. These efforts drew inspiration from the racial prejudice encountered in the United States. By focusing their responses to political marginalization on the issue of Poland’s fate — rather than the unique social or political situation of Poles in America — the Polish-American civic elite unwittingly created the conditions for its own downfall. At Yalta, Roosevelt acted in the interests of the United States as he interpreted them; Polonia’s leaders had promised their communities that he would protect Poland’s future. The US “abandonment of Poland” in 1945 thus inflicted a remarkable trauma on Polish perceptions of belonging in the United States, as it became clear that the elites had misjudged their influence. Their racialization of political representation among immigrant populations worsened the blow dealt to Polish self-perception: the sense of insecurity Polonia promulgated remained, while the civic elite’s promise to overcome this challenge went unfulfilled. The Polish-American community retreated into itself, and operated under a pre-existing national “racial inferiority complex.”[8] According to Polish social commentator Karol Wachtl, the Pole, by 1945-1946, “was proud but subservient....[He was] defeated.”[9] The Polish-American community’s heritage in the New World would encourage this withdrawal of Polonia’s interest from larger American society.[10] It subsequently became by 1962 a “dysreference group” that channeled its interests only towards the old country.[11] Historiographical debate about the Polish-American lobby has centered on two broad questions: what factors characterized Polish-American communities in the interwar and World War II period, and how did the Polish diaspora leadership exert influence in Washington? James Pula’s Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community (1995) and Anna Jaroszynska-Kirchmann’s The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 19391956 (2004), along with Irwin Sanders’ and Ewa Morawska’s research on “Polish-American Community Life” (1975), addressed the latter question; Donald Pienkos’ For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf, 1863-1991
(1991) began to link the two, but is essentially a summary of the numerous primary documents included in the appendices.[12] Harold Abramson provided an important analysis of interracial tensions among immigrant communities in American cities during the mid-twentieth century.[13] Eugene Kusielewicz deepened Abramson’s study by providing a cultural analysis of Polish senses of “Americanness” in the twentieth century, particularly following Polish independence in 1919. He argued that Poles reacted with particular vigor against a sense of alienation from American politics by emphasizing shared ideals of freedom and democracy between Poland and the United States.[14] Sanders and Morawska supported Kusielewicz’s argument, noting American democracy had long been “attractive” to Polish immigrants arriving from the authoritarian Eastern European landscape with its “rigidly structured peasant villages.” Yet this heritage, combined with Polonia’s “institutional completeness,” encouraged the withdrawal of Polish interest from the larger society.[15] Many of these scholars have referred to this withdrawal as the product of an “inferiority complex.”[16] Jiri Kolaja concluded that Polonia responded to this insecurity by singularly focusing on old country developments.[17] Sociologist Arthur E. Wood introduced the impact of class and level of education on Polonia’s political efforts. He offered evidence of “viable, if not obsessive activity of Polish leaders in local politics.” This activity represented the stratification of the immigrant Polish community.[18] Although the situation engendered apathy among many working-class Poles towards American politics, the responsibilities of those with the most political leverage were magnified. The elites were seen as the “true” Polish-American representative body in local political affairs.[19] These two strands of argument passed each other in relative silence, yet neither provided an answer to the coincidence presented between Polonia’s removal from mainstream American political discourse — a process known as “ethnic distancing” — and Yalta. Nor did they adequately address the complicating variables of representation and community leadership. Who, really, was at the center of Polonia’s 1945 failure? By linking these two strands, a more coherent narrative of a socially stratified alienation from American politics is possible. Leaders of the Chicago Polish community felt themselves a bellwether for the broader national population. At the headquarters of the Polish American Congress, these notables worked in Polonia’s thought capital, and the PAC’s letters, bulletins, and numerous affiliated and semi-affiliated newspapers represented a broad cross-section of Chicago’s elite Polish opinion. Indeed, the PAC represented a conglomeration of representatives from Polish fraternal societies and professional organizations across the United States, and from its headquarters in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, it managed offices in 26 states. Most Polishlanguage newspapers across the country received copy from the PAC, and almost every publication reprinted editorials penned by PAC President, Charles Rozmarek. Yet these papers and editors represented the civic elite of the Polish-American community, and this fact complicated claims about whether they truly represented “six million Poles.” Ultimately, Polish ethnic identity in the US was closely intertwined with Poland’s fate. Through a complete study of PAC
Bulletins and representative canvassing of Polish newspapers from Chicago, the story of Polonia’s humbled elite emerges. Following Versailles, Polish-American leaders increasingly attempted to cast themselves as spokesmen for an entire community, and their failure to affect Roosevelt at Yalta became the pivotal moment in their civic identity. It was this immense trauma that shattered the rarified group’s self-constructed fantasy of power, divorcing Polonia’s leadership from its pretensions to influence in Washington and helped solidify their alienation from American political and social affairs. II. Little Kosciusko and Jesus: Racialization of Poles in America, Polish-American Political Participation, and Ethnic Distancing The betrayal at Yalta cut particularly deep in a community that had not yet fully discerned a role within the American political or social context commensurate with its sense of influence. Polonia’s “personal politics” was born from the fragile racial self-perception that defined Polish identity during the interwar period. Polonia’s leading figures pointed to Polish immigrants’ separateness from American society, employing rhetoric that emphasized the inferior racial strata Poles occupied. They impelled Polish-Americans to focus on their homeland’s fate: according to the civic elite, support for Polish nationalism was the most effective expression of the immigrant community’s political will within the United States’ political milieu. This developing narrative was critical in 1945, as Polish elites asserted their ability to again protect Polish homelands from European machinations. Poles in the United States premised their ethnic identity on advocacy for Poland’s statehood rather than an incipient sense of citizenship that penetrated beneath superficial Americanization. “It would be a mortal sin,” Rozmarek declared in a 1945 PAC editorial reprinted on the front page of Polish language newspapers in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, “to go out of our way, carrying the heart of America on our banners only to return with an admission of failure and frustration.” Clearly explicating the civic elite’s role in this “moment of judgement,” he concluded: “We are in a position to defend the queen or to become a queen and decide the outcome of the game.” In other words, Polish-American leaders could either serve as pawns for strictly American interests and political groups, or they could themselves pursue a political agenda focused on Poland’s liberation. In Rozmarek’s view, Polonia’s leadership must “assert and protect Polish claims in America for the benefit of the Polish people.”[20] Conceptions of race and loyalty that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century weighed heavily on Polonia’s consciousness, and in turn guided its strategy through 1945. During the hectic months before Yalta, Polish language newspapers conjured a rich legacy of Polish heroism in the New World.[21] A PAC editorial reprinted across Illinois and New York described the “psychology and condition of the Polish people in America: We shall stand guard over our heritage of democracy...and establish moral leadership in the United States, never forgetting our heroes Pulaski, Kosciuszko, Krzyzanowski, Karge, and Pa92
derewski.”[22] For historians of Polish-American history writing in the mid-twentieth century, this legacy assumed near-mythical significance. Polish-American scholars described the immigrants’ connection to the United States’ independence struggle — and “a shared passion for self-determination between the two peoples.” This “deeper narrative of unrequited Polish heroism,” as the PAC would note in 1945, “made Poland’s case a criterion of international morality, of our aims and achievements in this war and all those in which Poles have proven themselves amongst America’s greatest patriots.”[23] According to these authors, Poland’s and the United States’ fates had been intertwined since the late eighteenth century. It was with “few perfunctory tears” that the “materialistic [eighteenth] century greeted the fall of Poland” in 1795, on the eve of the country’s fateful partition amongst Prussia, Austria, and Russia.[24] As Walpole wrote, “…whichever gets the better, the people will still remain slaves; I am pretty indifferent to which side (King or noble) the power of tyranny falls.”[25] Thinkers in the United States, however, fostered a different view from the outset of Poland’s fate. The traditional narrative of Polish-American identity — premised on the similarities between Polish and American nationalist causes — was born from this emergent relationship. For example, partition, and especially the failure of Thaddeus Kosciuszko’s 1794 revolution the year before, deeply affected Thomas Jefferson, who denounced the division as a “crime and an atrocity.”[26] Jefferson’s attachment to Poland was born during the American Revolution, when Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski served with distinction for the American cause. Kosciuszko’s career, more so than Pulaski’s, left an enduring impression on United States society. He was “both the military associate and personal friend of George Washington [and] his liberal ideas won him the lifelong friendship of Jefferson.”[27] His illustrious service in America helped spark a singular friendship between the revolutionary leaders in the young United States and those seeking independence in Poland. As Abbé Venceslas de Tworkowski recognized, the “friendship between Washington and Kosciuszko was stronger than historical alliances….Their parent was spiritual. Both dedicated their lives to the consecration of liberty.”[28] This passage illustrates how, for both Washington and Kosciuzsko, whose nations existed on the imperial arena’s periphery, the definition of liberty centered on national independence from great power politics. This “spiritual relationship” would be strained as Poles immigrated in increasing numbers to American shores during the mid-to-late nineteenth century.[29] By 1914, Poles had become an integral part of the American social landscape, particularly across the US northeast and midwest. The connection of which Tworkowski spoke had created a unique Polish-American identity at the turn of the twentieth century, one composed of “preeminent Americans.”[30] As the Polish leader Michael Kruszka declared in Milwaukee, “I am an ardent Pole and at the same time an American. I do not see where one contradicts the other — and I do not see why one must negate the other.”[31] Despite their sense of ideological or spiritual connection to American history, Polish-Americans in the early 1900s immediately confronted hostility from better assimilated or long-es93
tablished groups. For example, Germans — arguably the largest immigrant community in post-World War I America and a dominant group in Chicago — had for at least two decades accepted “an invitation to become old stock Americans” on the basis of belonging to one of the two northern white races of Europe (British and Teutonic). As Russell Kazal described, this tactic allowed German-American communities to differentiate themselves from the waves of new immigrants from Eastern Europe. Starting in the interwar years and accelerating in the post-World War II period, Germans assumed an identity as “white ethnics” to express their solidarity with fellow Italians, and to a lesser degree, Irish — in turn solidifying their opposition to the growing presence of African Americans in their neighborhoods.[32] Describing Italian immigration, Thomas Guglielmo noted that this assimilation process was characterized by a bifurcated system of racial categorization: “color race” comprised social constructions of blackness and whiteness, while “race,” according to which Germans and Italians were measured, included “acceptable” groups like Mediterranean, Nordic, Hebrew, and Celt.[33] Critically, Poles were not considered within the latter classification. Descriptions of Polish immigrants often emphasized the “darkened masses” and “dark peoples” arriving from Eastern Europe — rhetoric that served to categorize Polish-Americans within the much more divisive “color race” framework. Germans and Italians successfully integrated into American society and politics because they could assert whiteness. While both communities certainly experienced prejudice, they were spared the crushing marginalization to which Poles were subjected. The hybrid identity Kruszka described thus emerged as emigres sought to reconcile experienced prejudice with the “American and Polish values of liberty, expression, and control of destiny” they ardently shared. As immigrant communities grew, Polonia’s thought-leaders turned this schizoid identity into a political trope. Their efforts were tied closely to the debates raging throughout the United States regarding the proper lens through which to view foreign peoples at home, and their “fitness” or “unfitness” for democratic governance in “civilized society.” There was a prevailing notion that “alien peoples” were, as Prescott Hall argued to the United States Immigration Commission in 1909, from races and countries that “had been relatively useless for centuries.” He further used heredity as justification for the superiority of certain races over others.[34] Eugenics as a scientific avenue of inquiry had become overwhelmingly popular in the early twentieth century Atlantic world, and a distinct cadre of researchers devoted their energy to finding the genetic basis for democratic ability, amongst other qualities defined as critical to “civilized man.” As Harvard professor Nathaniel Southgate remarked in a nativist publication, America, “The truth is that a man is what his ancestral experience has made him.”[35] Even Woodrow Wilson, who would later champion Polish independence, wrote in A History of the American People that, men of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe had made up the main stream of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the coun-
try….But now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class, men of meaner sort from Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if [their] countries were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.[36] These hereditary conceptions of a person’s inherent ability remained potent throughout the early twentieth century. They were best expressed in the racial policies adopted by groups like the Immigration Restriction League, which used literacy as its preferred tool to measure civic acceptability amongst immigrants.[37] An unsuccessful series of immigration restriction bills were proposed to Congress (1897, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1907, 1909, 1913, and 1915) that would have limited immigration only to those who could read and write in their native tongues.[38] Each was voted down or defeated by veto. Presidents Cleveland, Taft, and Wilson invoked rhetoric along the lines of Cleveland’s statement, that “within recent memory...the same [derogatory] thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants...now number among our best citizens.” The decision finally agreed upon — quotas based on a percentage of any given group’s US population in the 1890 census — did not “exclude all foreigners from years to come,” but “it did nearly exclude all those who, according to the racial doctrines of the time, were most problematic in terms of their fitness for self-government and their promise for the general level of civilization in the republic.” This policy worked well for its progenitors; the immigration commissioner noted “with satisfaction after the National Origins Act (NOA) had become law [in 1924 that] the immigrants daily disembarking at Ellis Island now all ‘looked exactly like Americans.’”[39] It was this environment of racialization that, ten years before the NOA was codified, allowed Mary Antin to write, “the average immigrant of today, like the immigrant of 1620, comes to build...a civilized home under a civilized government, which diminishes the amount of barbarity in the world.”[40] It had taken years of experimentation to reach such a “satisfactory conclusion.” Polish immigrants bore the heavy burden of xenophobic tendencies. The Poles were among the last ethnic groups to arrive in large numbers before World War I and NOA choked immigration, and thus felt the heaviest brunt of the new laws’ restrictions. While “old immigrants” in the mid-nineteenth century had come mostly from northwestern Europe — where, according to one unnamed Washington legislator, traditions of political democracy echoed American values — rising political upheaval along the continent’s eastern and southeastern periphery in the late nineteenth century had brought new waves of emigrants from Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Poland. On the eve of the United States’s entrance into the First World War, policymakers were scrambling to find “a list of causes for exclusion” that included physical and mental health, work ethic, industriousness, and ability to perform contract labor. They focused specifically on the unstable Eastern European regions, where by
1917-1918 it was clear that traditional imperial systems would eventually dissolve. The expected influx of “unfit peoples” would stress existing modes of exclusion, precipitating new criteria to screen “the darkened Eastern masses.”[41] Stopgap measures designed to “curtail the flood of immigrants” culminated in the failed 1921 Quota Act. As the first law to put numerical limitations on immigration, the Quota Act laid groundwork for framing American immigration in terms of national origin. According to the 1921 law, immigrants needed to meet two criteria for admission. First, they had to pass a “certain standard of admissibility [comprising] the most inclusive list of human frailties to be found anywhere in the English language.”[42] Second, they must have adhered to the specified number of the proper national origin to be admitted per year.[43] An annual quota of 357,803 was allotted to countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia; only 3 percent of immigrants from a given foreign-born nationality could achieve citizenship, according to the 1910 census. During the three year period for which the law was designed, only 155,956 Eastern Europeans were admitted, many of them Poles.[44] While initially effective at curbing immigration, the Quota Act was by 1924 due to expire. In its stead policymakers drafted even more restrictive measures to cope with the “omnipresent deluge.”[45] That year Congress passed the NOA; by basing its admission rates on the 1890 census, the new law allotted 86 percent of the quota to countries in Northwestern Europe, leaving only 14 percent for all other regions. While significant for its effect on Eastern European intake rates, the Act’s reliance on national origins quotas pointed to deeper shift in immigrant-state relations in the United States. Policymakers claimed that national origins plans allowed for “the automatic selection of new citizens in a nondiscriminatory manner, as all nationalities are treated equally.” Yet for affected foreign-born communities, restrictions represented a clear effort to limit the immigrant’s voice within American politics. The process by which legislators set admission percentages struck particularly deep within a Polish community that had tried to assert its integral role in American political development since the Revolutionary Era. Acting along partisan lines, policymakers repudiated Woodrow Wilson’s attempts to introduce the United States into the global community. The 1924 Act created a Presidential Commission of six experts to determine “the number of inhabitants in continental United States in 1920 whose origin by birth or ancestry is attributable to the geographic areas covered by Congressional quotas.”[46] It took five years for the group to develop an acceptable system. For Poles, who had long revered Pulaski and Kosciuzsko, the result negated their contributions to the “ideals of freedom shared between the Polish and American people.”[47] After deducting non-white races from the overall figure, there remained a population of 94,820,915, which was then divided into “colonial — those whose ancestors were enumerated in the 1790 census — and immigrant stock.” At final count, postcolonial estimates numbered approximately 53.5 million persons, out of which only 27 percent were of Eastern or Southeastern European origin.[48] The total estimates for postcolonial stock were used to establish national origins of the white 94
immigrant population. Poles appeared relegated to the bottom rungs of an unofficial socio-economic immigrant hierarchy that placed greater value on even other marginalized white ethnicities — Germans and Italians most importantly — against which Poles were often compared.[49] Polish leaders were particularly quick to note this system’s thinly-veiled attempt to preserve United States ethnic composition by “selecting foreigners whose tradition, languages, and political systems were only superficially akin to those in the New World.”[50] As Polish historian Joseph Parot concluded, “they seemed to be subjected to far more than their share of prejudice and discrimination, bred mainly by fear — chiefly economic insecurity.”[51] Polish-Americans reacted against prejudice by emphasizing both aspects of their hyphenated character. The American and Polish war hero, Kosciuszko, who fought in the American Revolution, embodied this dichotomy, and his likeness was captured by figurines kept on the altars in many Polish homes next to paintings of Jesus. Another popular poster, casting the general against a backdrop of Polish and American flags, declared: “Poles! Kosciusko and Pulaski fought for the liberty of Poland and other nations. Follow their example. Enlist in the Polish Army!” (see appendix).[52] This sense of a double-belonging sparked nationalistic sentiment amongst the immigrant Polish community, tying them at once to the United States and the Old World. Polish émigré Agaton Giller first described this oddity in 1879 when he theorized that the average Polish immigrant “feels foreign and misunderstood here [in the US]...and so he looks for people who would be able to understand him.”[53] These immigrants were “particularly ripe for enlistment in nationalist causes because their experience abroad sharpened for them...the sense of distinct ethnic or national peoplehood.”[54] Ultimately, as Giller described, “if [the immigrant] is found by one who is able to...make him recognize the obligations which go along with his character — then this simple man, hitherto passive and dim to the national cause, changes into an individual consciously serving [these] ideas.”[55] The “idea of independent Poland” increasingly became the bulwark against racial suppression for Poles in America. Poles were at once Americans and Polish, identifying strongly with both their homeland and, to a lesser degree, their adopted nation. This mood appeared in a particularly revealing 1920 exchange between a newly-arrived immigrant and Polonia’s representatives welcoming him. When the former, who was seeking housing assistance, declared, “We fall into the category of being white, but we do not reap the benefits of being white,” the Polish organizer present replied: “Our duty as Americans, our duty to our forefathers — as we helped America be America — is to help Poland be Poland.”[56] At once Polish immigrants understood their marginalization from white American society, and sought amelioration from their communal leadership. The Polish-American civic elite actively fostered this ethnic insecurity by emphasizing transatlantic linkages through which disenfranchised and dislocated Poles could find comfort. Polonia’s leadership never pushed emigres to seek full assimilation or “Americanization.” Instead they established a connection between immigration and pro-Polish patriotism, thus encouraging Poles in America to re95
Appendix: 1917 recruitment poster for the Polish Army, printed in Polishlanguage newspapers across the United States (Library of Congress).
main separate from their host society in both political interests and expression. The process by which Polish-American communities experienced political distancing was primarily racial. It was defined by a combination of political and ethnically based factors, and informed the Polish perception of their role in American government. This framework was further nuanced by class and level of education; wealthier American Poles (educated in England, France, and the United States), and especially men, played a highly active role in governmental affairs. Several studies conducted on attitudes in the late 1920s and early 1930s offered evidence of “viable, if not obsessive activity of Polish leaders in local politics.” This activity represented the stratification of the immigrant Polish community, and the concentration of communal sentiment at the highest levels of Polonia’s socioeconomic spectrum. As sociologist Arthur Wood concluded, “The furthering of political ambitions was one of the chief functions of numerous social clubs from which the laboring people were excluded because of the expense.”[57]
Although the separation engendered disinterest among many working-class Poles toward American politics, the responsibilities of those with the most perceived political leverage were magnified. The elites were seen as the “true” Polish-American representative body in local political affairs, a role that eventually was broadened to the national stage. Many ordinary Polish immigrants could not read English, and relied on their better-educated peers to translate, distribute, and filter national news and commentary. The rapid expansion of the Polish-language press in the interwar period — often funded by Polish organizations — fueled this sense of dependency. The organizations these elites led were presented in sweeping terms, tying the Polish-American community to the ethnic homeland. The Polish American Congress, which would in 1944 gather most of Polonia’s disparate community groups under a single political umbrella, was thus described: “We, representing six million Americans of Polish extraction, the only truly free community of Poles today, [should] be invited to act as Consultant and Trustee of the rights and interests of the Polish nation.”[58] Polish leaders not only asserted their prominence over Polish communities in the United States, but established transatlantic linkages that bound them to Old World leaders as well. Central to these groups’ lobbying efforts was the “intense interest amongst all Poles in America in the affairs of Poland which were constantly played up in the local Polish newspapers.”[59] By 1940, male students in Polish-American Student clubs at high schools in Chicago were eager to “follow the career[s] of ethnic politicians who focused on Poland’s fate” while avoiding the “influence of corrupt [non-Polish] political leaders in the community.”[60] Polonia’s elite exalted itself as the group with ability to exert influence in Washington. Certainly by 1945 it had constructed itself into a political bloc, standing above but ostensibly representing the broader Polish-American community. Its influence was twofold. By virtue of its intellectual and financial prowess it saw itself as both the representative of “enlightened PolishAmerican opinion” and as a powerbroker in the White House. The elites argued that they were “uniquely fitted to appreciate and enjoy American liberty....[Divided under] Russians, Prussians, and Austrians.”[61] For these thought-leaders, the United States became a source of a dual identity. Polonia’s principal figures emphasized their nationalist fervor within the framework of patriotism, evoking emotions that “American people could understand and to which they might relate.”[62] The community’s attempts to reconcile disparate pressures would by 1939-1944 — through the perceived victory of Woodrow Wilson’s successful creation of independent Poland at Versailles — shape the way in which Polonia’s leadership framed its advocacy and sense of American identity. The “moral relationship” between the United States and Poland was founded on personalized sentiment. Speaking retrospectively, PAC writers filtered their interwar experience through the lens of pre-Versailles Polish leadership. Their claims built on narrative promulgated throughout the 1930s; in print, their editorials often reprinted or quoted sizable portions of literature produced during the interwar growth of Polish-language periodicals in the United States. For example, one PAC commentator quoted an article
from the interwar University of Warsaw journal, Kwartalnik Instytutu do Badań Emigracji i Kolonizacji: “We do not want to see the Poles turn away from America, where their heroes Pulaski, Kosciuszko, Krzyzanowski, Karge, and countless others have for more than a century ago laid the foundation of a most ideal friendship between Poland and America.”[63] As highly educated and wealthy individuals, these leaders felt privileged to the ear — and expected at least the respect — of the American government. They framed their advocacy with near-constant allusions to “friendship” and “amicability” between individuals rather than ethnic groups. The racialization of democratic participation, and Polonia’s subsequent search for “people in government” who understood its unique dual identity, was manifest in a focus on individual politicians, not political party. Interviews conducted with Polish youth in Chicago during the 1930s revealed that second-generation American Poles, mirroring their parents’ voting patterns, tended to support “the man” rather than a party. [64] For example, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak advanced Polish political fortunes with representation on the Democratic Party’s slated ticket in 1931: of Cook County’s top political positions, 6 percent were given to Poles, earning Cermak 85-90 percent of the Polish-American vote among both first- and second-generation immigrants. Yet, when asked whether this support translated into affinity for the city’s Democratic machine, only 20 percent of Polish voters responded affirmatively.[65] Other contemporary studies confirmed this trend. Although Polish Americans were “rabidly democratic,” they had been “more interested in men than in parties.”[66] Analyses of voting patterns through the Polish-Catholic Church found that 70 percent of American Poles would vote for ethnically relatable candidates. [67] Polonia’s politics was personal, and served as a framework on which its leaders maintained dominant positions at the expense of broader communal participation — a reflection of the highly stratified spheres in which they operated. Although PolishAmericans qualified as “typical Democrats” because of their low socio-economic and cultural status, surprisingly few outside the group’s rarified echelons engaged in political activities. Nearly 67 percent of Poles living in Buffalo did not belong to political clubs; this figure was mirrored even in Chicago, where Polonia’s activities were most intense. Nationally, 85 percent of surveyed Polish-Americans “never held nor showed any interest in holding political office,” and only 20 percent of registered voters could name more than “one or two” non-Polish politicians.[68] These data indicated a fundamental split between civic elite and the populations they ostensibly represented. While “common” Poles maintained distance from United States political discourse through the end of the Second World War, individual ethnic figures emerged as both the voice and mind of Polish America. This small group filled Polish-American political horizons and narrowed avenues for political expression. The high non-participation rate among poorer American Poles indicated broad-based disenfranchisement tempered only by the frantic actions of a few socially-mobile and Europe-minded elites. To exert influence, these leaders sought companions within the American political apparatus who might appreciate their standing.[69] This strategy resonated within the Polish-American community; after years of 96
imperial experience, it understood and respected political hierarchies. Poles thus invested their trust in a rarified faction. Polonia’s ethno-political character informed the other half of this story. Studies conducted in Chicago during the 1930s indicated that the magnified importance placed on the individual was born from the community’s broader disenfranchisement in party politics. The search for an individual hero was a search for a twofold friend: one who would champion Poland’s cause in the United States and allow Polonia to circumvent the hostile representative system in which “painful” and “discriminatory” experiences were commonplace.[70] Polish-American leaders placed an incredible amount of trust in these individual politicians, although most were often ethnically Polish to begin with. The few instances in which the community identified a non-Pole were the hinges on which Polonia’s identity truly revolved, and onto which the civic elite latched themselves. Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 was such a figure.[71] This sentiment fueled heartfelt appeals to the President’s “humanity” throughout the War. Writing in the PAC Bulletin, under Rozmarek’s close editorial eye, the Polish Roman Catholic Union’s (PRCU) John J. Olejniczak and Stephen S. Grabowski could frame their advocacy with the President thus: Above all, Mr. President, the executive council of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America resolves unanimously to continue strongly and loyally to support all the war efforts of your government [emphasis added] in the victorious fight against Japan for the establishment of a lasting and just peace on earth. We believe unshakingly [sic] that you, Mr. President, as a champion of freedom, security, and the rights of nations will not allow harm to befall Poland, and will not permit that enslavement be the reward of this brave and trustworthy ally of the United States. We remember Versailles. Therefore we place the fate of Poland in your able hands and august judgement.[72] At once PRCU notables connected Roosevelt’s actions to his predecessor’s in 1917-1919, appealing to the same “moral guide” that they believed had driven Wilsonian policy. These and similar editorials articulated American policy as the product of presidential magnanimity rather than systemic negotiation or political process. In an “Open Letter to the President,” Alfreda Borucka echoed this sentiment: “I send to your hands a pleading request — to help our poor Polish brethren…who are not enjoying freedom. Dear Mr. President! — I ask you to take these few words of a Polish-American woman into consideration.”[73] Although many lobbyist groups used similarly personal letters during the Roosevelt presidency, the Polish leadership relied on such an intimate strategy to the near-exclusion of all others. Through such personal appeals, displayed in the elite-dominated press, the Polish-American leadership carefully excluded themselves from the political milieu. While Polish thought-leaders felt they could exert influence in the Oval Office, they made no effort to penetrate beyond the executive, especially in the lead-up to Yalta. Polonia felt excluded from the broader American political discussion: Washington housed “your [the President’s] government,” an entity to which they expressed little belonging. They were divorced, at least rhetorically, from broader American wartime strategy or goals, as well as the institutions driving these policies. 97
The individual political “friend” was thus a bandage over Polonia’s wound of discrimination. He was the mechanism by which Poles in America attempted, during the 1920s and 1930s, to overcome the prejudices leveled against their ethnic group. Although evidence in Chicago to support the claims of political impotence leveled by Poles is not complete, “[t]he very feeling of discrimination, even if not caused by frustration of personal interest” may have resulted in what sociologists later described as a “lower Polish-American self image” in the 1930s and 1940s. [74] Polish ethnographer Jozef Chalasinski found in his 1935 examination of Chicago-based Poles that many demonstrated “a keen oversensitivity about their relations with dominant society.” These communities expected to be derogated, and thus avoided contact with “other ethnic or American groups.”[75] Their fears were not unfounded. Throughout the interwar period, scholars in Poland and the United States complained that the Polish contribution to American history and culture had been persistently neglected in public schools, textbooks, and university course catalogues. This absence led preeminent historian Eugene Kusielewicz to complain, “though Poles were among the first to arrive in America, though they helped to establish the first industries here…no mention of these facts appear in textbooks used in our schools, where things Polish are merely ignored or distorted.”[76] The sense that Poles had been ignored in American society contributed to the group’s unfavorable self-image and identitydistance, a feeling that persisted into second and third generations.[77] Polonia’s negative ethnocentrism led many Poles to foster a self-orientation that at once preserved basic loyalty while incorporating derogatory racial conceptions common across American society. This sentiment, while prevalent nationally, was most virulent among Chicago-based Poles, informing the area’s demographic and political character.[78] Polish-Americans expressed their insecurity through marked humility. According to data collected in the 1950s, a major form of reaction against negative Polish self-image was name-changing: Poles were the most likely of any ethnic group in interwar America to alter surnames upon arrival.[79] As early as 1919 sociologists noted this “humility of American Poles toward the dominant culture and society.”[80] While Polonia’s leadership extolled the virtues of nationalist fervor, they also encouraged superficial Americanization, driven by high status consciousness. The proclivity toward outside reference group formation interacted with feelings of low ethnic status to reinforce a generationally-transmutable Polish inferiority complex.[81] Stanley Krajewski thus concluded his 1971 paper on the Polish-American condition by linking Polonia’s experience with the cross-period appeal, “We want to be heard!”[82] Community insecurities translated into Polish-American political participation. Chalasinski’s data indicated that Poles felt discrimination most in the “unspecified area of public offices,” leading to feelings of transparency in American politics. While many ethnic leaders — like, for example, the Irish political bosses in Chicago — gained entry into political discourse at the municipal level, Poles never achieved legitimacy as viable political actors in that arena. The issue of political recognition remained pertinent in the lead-up to Yalta, particularly among the most active figures in American Polonia.[83] The rare push in the 1940s
to find a non-Polish champion in the White House represented an incredible gambit by Polonia’s leadership. The strength of the lobbying effort at FDR was significant, and represented more than simply the necessity of approaching the President to affect change in US diplomatic affairs. The avenues and language Polish-American leaders used revealed a community whose desperation was masked by confidence. This confidence was partly born from the successful “use” of Woodrow Wilson to achieve Polish statehood in 1919. Although subsequent historiography suggested that Wilson’s decision was made long before Polish delegates arrived at the White House, interwar Polonia regarded Versailles as its greatest achievement.[84] These views shaped its actions in 1945, when it expected an equally momentous victory for Polish statehood.[85] The strange interplay of ethnic prejudice on a national scale, lowered self-image within the United States, and the apparent discovery of a friend of Poland in FDR gave rise to a complex relationship between Polonia and its American home in 1945. Polish-American leaders at once felt alienated from it as a whole, but also sought, and felt confident they could win, a friend in the highest circle of power. The vast majority of Polonia’s letters and petitions were addressed directly to Roosevelt, and more importantly, almost no attention was paid to influencing Congressmen or other Cabinet and State Department officials.[86] It is through this lens that the Polish-American effort in 19441945 Washington should be viewed. Polonia’s efforts during those two years represented a meteoric rise in Polish self-image, and then an equally cataclysmic collapse of that confidence after the “betrayal in the Crimea.”[87] This sentiment can be followed indirectly through language used in Polish newspapers and American media reporting on Polish affairs. Whereas grandiose claims to “international morality,” “justice,” and “America the light” were commonplace in 1944, terms like “beseeched,” “begged,” “pleaded,” “pained,” and “lost” characterized PolishAmerican descriptions of Polonia after Yalta. The civic community’s retreat into itself can thus be tracked through its loss in 1945. It faced the truth of its impotence in Washington, a realization it had tried to avoid since 1917-1919 and before. Yalta was the great trauma that forced this conclusion. III. “Help Poland be Poland”: Polonia’s National Ethos, Historical Narrative, and the Polish-American Congress The PAC’s comments point to the construction of an immigrant ethos — according to its progenitors among Polish elite organizations — that at once protected Poles from hostile American race-culture and valorized a mythic conception of independent Poland. This distinct national consciousness developed according to split Polish-American identity. Polish immigration to the New World peaked during a period in which the Poland as a nation-state did not exist. Yet Poles were not stateless in the same way that, for instance, Roma or Basques either never have had or had not yet succeeded in forming a state of their own: Rather, “as a conquered and colonized nation-in-the-making… the Poles have shared a longing for a national homeland, united, sovereign, and puissant.” Like other oppressed groups, Polish
emigres looked to history for the means of sustaining their aspirations. By 1900, Polish thought leaders believed that, although subjugated and partitioned by its neighbors, “Poland possessed an existence as a nation and as a state that anteceded, and might as easily succeed, contemporary international political arrangements and exigencies.”[88] Historical myth and memory was the foundation for Polish nationalism before 1914, and following Poland’s defeat in 1939 through to Yalta. The near-myopic focus on Poland’s fate was thus summarized in the masthead of the Polish immigrant newspaper, Echo z Polski: “First, you should know your ancestral history — both its defeats and its glories.” The paper, like many others across the country, focused exclusively on “Old World affairs.”[89] Polonia’s leadership fostered a national ethos without a nation, pushing the average Polish emigre to feel a more profound sense of displacement and loss than his contemporaries.[90] Such sentiment was cultivated purposefully. The elite network leading the nascent Polish-American community recognized the power of historical narrative as an ideological and political tool to achieve their goal of Polish independence. “Whatever the immigrant and ethnic experience,” Polish historian John Bukowczyk concluded, “it is through the social constructions and ideological formations of that experience that Polish immigrants have developed connections: To God, Country, and Polonia.”[91] Polish history writing in the United States was born at the junction of mass migration and late nineteenth century nationalistic fervor. Polish emigration in the early 1900s posed a serious challenge for independence leaders across divided Poland, and Old World scholars like Leopold Caro, Franciszek Bujak, and Józef Okołowicz monitored the volume and causes of their co-nationals’ mass exodus. [92] Many Polish nationalists condemned this “peasant exodus” as a political and economic ill, as it “reduced the rural labor supply, raised the price of agricultural labor, and drained away potential recruits to the Polish nationalist cause, the very lifeblood of the shackled Polish Nation.” Others took a different approach to the diaspora, including Endek leader Roman Dmowski, who conceded that by sending money from abroad, emigrant Poles provided invaluable capital for infrastructure and economic development. This latter view shaped Polonia’s efforts in the New World. Dmowski outlined the subsequent strategy in a treatise directed at Polish leaders in America: by bombarding emigres with images of their homeland’s suffering — both historical and contemporary — the Polish civic elite must offer Poles a chance to both “improve their tenuous material circumstances and become part of the political Nation.”[93] By 1914 Polish thought leaders in Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia had accepted the emigrants’ “political and economic utility.”[94] By 1917-1919, at the height of Polish lobbying efforts in Washington, vast community contributions to a new nationalist organization, the Polish National Alliance, earned it the nickname, the “Fourth Partition.” Following Poland’s resurrection at Versailles, the new state and its academic establishment developed a special interest in the Polish-American diaspora. New journals were published at the universities in Warsaw, Poznan, and Krakow, and the government funded several studies to decipher the causes and na98
ture of Polish emigration.[95] While these efforts were “cognizant of emigration as a demographic and economic hemorrhage,” the official line remained confident that Poland would receive considerable economic aid from Poles in the New World. These emigres were labeled Polonia zagraniczna, a collective noun that “reinforced the notion that Poles must remain bound to each other and to their homeland, the ojczyzna.”[96] In the United States a concurrent strand of scholarship emerged to describe the new Polish arrivals, and delineate their “otherness” from that of separate diasporic groups. American social observers, including Emily Greene Balch, Peter Roberts, and Robert E. Park, looked charitably on these immigrants; yet their writing was politicized, attempting to ameliorate the Polish social condition through “Americanization.” William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki penetrated the issue of “dysfunctional immigrants and adjustment” in their monumental work on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. This volume, the cornerstone of sociology’s so-called Chicago School, remains among the most influential books dealing with Polish immigration in the early twentieth century.[97] Although important when drawing later narratives on assimilation, these early academic efforts failed to illuminate the national ethos that Polish leaders sought to foster inside their own immigrant community. Because many Poles could not read English (if they could read or write at all), they remained heavily dependent on Polish-language periodicals — particularly the constructed mythology they promulgated. Many Polish immigrants would likely not have recognized themselves in the versions of their past offered by American universities and research organizations. Rather, peasant historical tales — which often recalled epidemics, wars, suffering, and displacement, couched in magical incidents and phenomena — represented the oral tradition common across Partitions, and were circulated widely in the Polish press to foster a sense of national cohesiveness. In the United States, this mythology helped “ease the pain of separation, reinforced ties to loved ones, village, and Nation, and helped make sense of the decision to emigrate.”[98] Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, prominent figures among the Polonia leadership founded book publishing houses to propagate Polish national myths and sentimentalism. Chicago’s Dyniewicz Publishing Company printed historical novels from renowned authors, including Henryk Sienkiewicz and Władisław Reymont.[99] The firm, as well as its successor, Smulski Publishing, also produced companion Polish-language textbooks and elementary school primers for children in Chicago’s public and religious schools. In Toledo, Antoni Paryski built “what has been called a publishing empire, reprinting virtually every work of Polish historical fiction he could find.”[100] These works vocalized Polish nationalist aspirations abroad, commanding the historical legitimacy only officially funded and distributed accounts could convey. This publishing machine allowed Polish elite to coordinate details of their nationalist message, creating a properly-tuned narrative that faced few dissenting voices. Yet at their core was a more fundamental question that underscored the “spirit of separateness” Polonia’s leadership fostered: what constituted a “true” Pole? The enduring answer, defended by leaders of preeminent 99
community organizations, focused exclusively on Polish Catholic individuals. One letter-writer to a Polish newspaper in Chicago, which was later quoted in the PAC Bulletin, hinted at this theme in a melange of symbolism: “Poland’s Christianity and Justice must form the bulwark to protect Europe as the refuge of Christian, Catholic, and Greco-Roman heritage.”[101] NonCatholics — including agnostics, atheists, the immigrant left, Protestants, and most importantly, Polish Jews — were systematically excluded from Polonia’s ethnic history. These groups did not fit the homogenous story of Polish oppression: many of their members had integrated well into both Partition and American societies. In the United States, Poland’s 1919 independence posed a fundamental challenge to Polonia’s leadership. Reunification undermined Polonia’s prewar raison d’être; those who had professed that their love for Poland superseded all else faced the difficult choice of whether to return. Yet few Poles left American shores. The reasons for their reluctance were rooted in the exclusivity of Polish identity and Polonia’s relatively powerful influence. Polish-American leaders quickly grew disillusioned with the new Poland’s political trajectory toward an inclusive “neo-imperial” model that recognized parity between various Eastern European ethnic groups. Although these political debates would, by 1930, compromise Warsaw’s fragile political establishment, the early sentiment alarmed Polonia’s leadership, which had advocated a populist “Poland for Poles” policy. In response, civic elite maintained their support for independent Poland, but introduced a new notion summarized by the slogan, “Wychodźtwo dla wychodźtwa” (Emigrants for themselves).[102] This hybridized ethos emerged against the backdrop of Polonia’s success in 19171919, and subsequent interest among American scholars in Polish-American dynamics. The interwar period witnessed the birth of Slavic and Polish Studies as a distinct discipline within US academia, helping Polish-Americans transition from “an ethnic problem to a topic of scholarly interest.” The Polish-American lobby had seemingly proven itself a powerful force in American politics, deserving of attention. Polish immigrant publicists, politicians, editors, and intellectuals recognized in this shift the potential for assimilation among second-generation Polish youth. While Polonia’s elders celebrated their influence over Wilson, few interpreted the Versailles moment as heralding a new period of Polish “disappearance into American society.” Rather, 1919 provided ample proof for many leaders that Poles in America were best served by maintaining their exclusivity, and in turn, their ability to exert political force in Washington.[103] Polonia’s elite, confronted by both a disappointing independence in Poland and the threat of diminishing influence over Poles in the United States, reacted strongly against assimilationist tendencies within the community. Prominent community leaders spearheaded a reinvigorated Polish-American historical project in the late interwar period. Most importantly, the effort allowed Polonia to maintain and strengthen its ties with upper echelon families in the Old World. Scholarship emphasized Polonia’s ability to affect policy in the United States through personal friendships, and assured Polish-Americans of their leaders’ sagacity. Rather than focus on integrating into American society, elites
encouraged Polish immigrants to maintain distance from their host country’s political discussion. Accordingly, only around 30 percent of Polish immigrants had achieved US citizenship by 1930. Jewish immigrants from Poland present a counterexample to the Polish reluctance to integrate into US society. Questionnaires filled out in 1922 by subscribers to the Jewish-Yiddish newspaper Forverts indicated that well over 80 percent were either naturalized or had filed applications to become citizens. The paper commended the efforts of special Jewish-Polish bureaus established to assist in the citizenship process, and urged Jews to “utilize every possible opportunity to urge their readers to become American citizens.” That year, the editors ran a series of advertisements for a Yiddish translation of the US Constitution, labeling it the “little Torah...the high road to citizenship, employment, and success.”[104] By contrast, efforts to institutionalize Polish studies in the United States earned middle-class Poles some approbation from America’s cultural elite, although the existing status hierarchy within Polonia experienced little alteration. In 1926, wealthy Chicago Poles organized the Polish Arts Club, first in a series of high culture organizations that would emerge throughout the 1930s-1940s. These groups, which showcased work that comprised Poland’s belles lettres, bolstered the social status of Polonia’s social elite from the “hybrid kiszka-beer-and-polka culture of their working class co-nationals.[105] Through sponsored discussions and speakers series about Polish literature, politics, and language, elites within the Polish-American community enjoyed a point of contact with their “native-born social betters, access to the bottom rung of a longer and higher social status mobility ladder, and thus a possible escape from the ‘ethnic mobility gap.’”[106] When these salons fostered historical debate, it always centered around Polish — definitively not Polish-American — narratives and values.[107] The Second World War’s outbreak in September 1939, and Poland’s defeat the following month, abruptly pushed Polonia back to their original cause of Polish statehood. The scholarly tradition that emerged throughout the interwar period shaped the process by which Polish elites re-engaged with Poland’s uncertain fate. The influx of Polish refugees in the early 1940s, which included a number of renowned Polish scientists and historians, reinvigorated Polonia’s direct ties with the Old World. On 15 May 1942 exiled Polish scholars and members of the Polish Academy of Sciences founded the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA). Their stated mission was to “assemble, preserve, and harness for posterity the values of a nation and to represent Polish thought in the world.” Within a year of its foundation, PIASA President Jan Kucharzewski launched a special Commission for Research on Polish Immigration, ordered to examine the “dynamics of departure and arrival for Polish people in the New World.” The group, headed by the famous historian Miecislaus Haiman — who administered the Polish Roman Catholic Union Museum and Archives — held its first meeting in Chicago on 29-30 December 1943, and soon established its headquarters there.[108] In 1944 the Commission launched its flagship journal, Polish-American Studies (PAS), and rechristened itself the Polish-American Historical Association (PAHA).
Though initially designed as an “independent scholarly society,” PAHA strengthened its ties with the Polish Institute; two prominent Polonian organizations, the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America and the Polish Women’s Alliance, paid for PAS’ first issues. The journal’s emigre editors seized the opportunity to, as Stefan Włoszewcski wrote, “represent an alternative to the cultural vacuity of America” — a theme founded on “ethnic cultural uniqueness” that existing figures in Polonia’s leadership heartily supported.[110] These interwar trends would culminate in 1944, as PolishAmerican civic elite began intensifying their lobbying efforts on Poland’s behalf toward Roosevelt. That year PAHA convened a meeting in Buffalo — the third largest city in the United States in terms of Polish-American population — to establish an “umbrella political lobby under which Poland’s historical right to statehood” could develop. Several days of discussion eventually produced the Polish-American Congress, Polonia’s most powerful political tool in the late wartime period. Charles Rozmarek, who had attended as a Delegate at Large from Pennsylvania, was appointed the PAC’s first president. Immediately the organization declared its interpretation of Polish history, building on interwar ethnic exclusivity and insecurity: The psychology and condition of the Polish people in America has been damaged by constant slogans and declarations of disloyalty….All this is a travesty of historical justice, but it thrusts deeply into the heart of American Polonia.[111] By employing psychological terminology, civic elite revealed that they ascribed wholeheartedly to the notion of immigrant inferiority. Polish-Americans were tied to their ethnic homeland, effectively denied a place as American citizens in favor of one as Polish patriots. Poles were placed into the European milieu, as defenders of the continent’s liberty in the twentieth century. These statements ignored the reality experienced by many Polish-American immigrant communities, which by this time were in their second generation, had little practical memory of Poland, and no lived connection to the post-1919 Polish state. Yet, by linking the “psychology and condition of the Polish people in America” with the “moral strength” exhibited across the Atlantic, Polish elite reinforced their connections to the Old World. Rozmarek, a Pennsylvania native and Harvard-educated lawyer, exemplified this dynamic. His efforts on Poland’s behalf, to the exclusion of fostering a real Polish-American identity, ingratiated him into the Polish state’s hierarchy. The interwar period demonstrated that Polonia’s leadership had emerged as essentially a selfcongratulatory construct, potent when its ethos was reinforced by actual politics. The 1919-1944 period was such a time, during which Versailles’ afterglow colored historical narrative and mythology. Speaking in this climate, Rozmarek declared in his inaugural PAC editorial that “Polish blood drenches the battlefields of the world.” Addressing Roosevelt directly, he continued: The fate of the democracies is tied up with the fate of Poland….Only a peace based upon the foundation stone of the Atlantic Charter can be enduring. In 1919 Poles earned the right to live as free men in free Poland, and it it is up to you to protect that privilege. [109]
100
The new PAC effectively mobilized the Polish-American elite’s ties with their homeland, fostered throughout the interwar period by belles lettres societies and nationalist historical organizations. Against the backdrop of Polish-American national unity, PAC leaders situated their organization as the primary thought leader in a repressed ethnic community. Poles, who had watched their “spiritual homeland steamrolled by German steel, felt displaced in a country to which they had not fully integrated, and which had never truly encouraged their integration.”[112] Constant references to insecurity and psychological pain helped reinforced ethnic solidarity and subordinate assimilatory tendencies. While the PAC also sought to address concerns that its ethos negated Polish-American contributions in the United States, it did so through the lens of personal friendship that had defined its post-1919 self-conception.[113] Polish-American historical narratives in the interwar period had reinforced this notion of elite diplomacy between equals. The increasingly stratified atmosphere in which Polonia’s leadership operated throughout the 1920s and 1930s denied American Poles the opportunity to develop a comprehensive understanding of Polish identity in the United States. Instead, focused exclusively on Old World power hierarchies, Polonia’s principle figures were ill-equipped to maneuver through the many-layered American political system, preferring to distance themselves from all but the most powerful individuals. Interestingly, throughout the development of Polish historical scholarship in the United States, little real attention was paid to the 1917-1919 moment; Polish-American writers preferred “stories of national myth.” This dearth of self-examination points to an underlying dynamic of self-negation within Polonia’s political heart. The civic elite accepted the success of Polish elite lobbying efforts after the First World War at face value, preferring not to interrogate the moment too intensely. Traditional explanations promulgated in the Polish-American press throughout the 1930s and 1940s emphasized that Paderewski won Wilson to the Polish cause by promising him Polonia’s vote in 1916. Thus, PolishAmerican leaders were “catapulted to the acme of political influence” — a position, however self-conceived, they were reluctant to lose.[114] Between the World Wars these individuals worried that by analyzing the roots of Polonia’s political influence, they might uncover unsavory realities: although Paderewski was the subject of countless celebrations, Polish-American elites knew that it was he, and not they, who had determined Polish interests in Washington and after the War. To maintain the crucial facade of friendship between Polish civic elite and powerbrokers in Washington, it was imperative to avoid this conclusion lest Polonia lose its command over the Polish-American community. By 1944-1945 this effort was under intense strain. With the PAC’s formation Polonia had finally created a true political lobby — but had failed to transform the ethos of Polish political participation accordingly. Feelings of protective paternalism toward the Old Country, and a perceived threat to Polonia’s status within American society, motivated the new organization’s first declarations in its “About Us” editorial, which served essentially as an assertion of Poland’s right to independence, the PAC’s commitment to this goal, and American Poles’ responsibility to 101
follow suit.[115] Yet the interwar period’s focus on national myth at the exclusion of true self-examination handicapped the organization. The community, although consulted by Roosevelt for domestic political reasons, lacked effective political pressure to influence either the administration’s actions or those of Congress. Whereas Polish-Americans formed large constituencies within the Democratic Party and labor unions, they were practically absent from these organizations’ leadership; the ten or twelve Poles in Congress rarely spoke together, “settling for politically valueless patriotic declamations for the Congressional Record.”[116] These shortcomings would become painfully clear in the months preceding Yalta, highlighting both the centrality and limitations of interwar PolishAmerican historical efforts to define Polonia’s self-identity. IV. Roosevelt’s Betrayal: The Failure of Political Friendship and the Collapse of Poland’s Civic Leadership The Yalta Conference brought processes of racial distancing and historical myth-construction to a head, pushing the Polish civic elite to realize the limits to its influence — if not fully understand their roots. For Charles Rozmarek, the failure to influence Roosevelt in 1945 highlighted the boundary conditions for Political legitimacy in Polish life. Polonia’s legitimacy was inextricably bound to developing international affairs. At Yalta Joseph Stalin imposed his will upon Poland. Winston Churchill, during secret talks in Moscow, agreed to recognize the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and to Stalin’s unilateral demand that Poland’s boundaries be moved west.[117] The Polish nation was thus “picked up like a carpetbag and set down a few hundred miles to the West,”[118] “satisfying Russia’s appetite, penalizing Germany, and sacrificing Poland in the same process.”[119] From the Polish-American perspective, Roosevelt did nothing to stop these unilateral actions. Upon hearing news of the “betrayal in the Crimea,” Rozmarek waxed derisive, calling Roosevelt’s actions an “injustice...committed not just against Poland but also against the United States.” In fiery invective, he charged: “[at] Yalta the United States behaved more in the manner of Poland’s historic European partitioners.” The Conference had, in the PAC’s official opinion, “ratified the country’s fifth partition.” In a rhetorical turn, attending organizers expressed their belief that America, demonstrating similar behavior to Germany and Russia (as well as Britain and France), had become a traitor to the Polish State. Polish-Americans were stunned: how could the British and Russians, thoroughly shattered by war, wield such power over the relatively untouched Americans?[120] They concluded that conspiracy had robbed them of attaining their goal. Roosevelt had abandoned the grand promises outlined in the Atlantic Charter to which Poles held so tightly in favor of playing into Moscow’s, and to a lesser degree, London’s hands. This disgust led the Polish poet Adam Wazyk to recall in 1955: Our leaders drank the sea water, And they shouted: “It tastes like Lemonade.” Then quietly they crept to their homes To retch and vomit.[121]
Summing up the terror of the postwar decade in Poland, he condemned the international community for accepting Stalin’s lie. Roosevelt in 1945 drank freely of this deception. Yet ten years before Wazyk poeticized his elegant accusation, Rozmarek and the PAC were echoing this language: “The President had a thirst for Russian lies.”[122] As news emerged of the decisions reached at Yalta, the PAC reacted by retreating into the racial framework it understood. In that month’s Bulletin the editors defended passionately their identity as Americans: Nobody can accuse us of being hyphenated or disloyal because of our interest and love for Poland, just as nobody can accuse a child of being hyphenated or disloyal because it loves its mother as well as its father. Love does not diminish when shared. It grows the more it is shared.[123] In an accompanying article, Rozmarek cited “Our American instinct for justice and equity” that “cannot permit us to sanction the division of Europe into masters and slaves.”[124] Yet behind these bold statements lay uncertainty. Even as they professed love for the United States, the PAC leadership feared the community into which they were committing. Notions of ethnic distancing began to peek through the group’s rhetoric before the complete story had been formed of what happened at Yalta. Rozmarek thus needed little prodding to launch an offensive against the “bigoted” society in which he and “six million other Americans of Polish extraction” were “constantly” prejudiced: “We have been fed by slogans these many long years, slogans emanating from vicious or innocent propaganda sources. These slogans were designed to break us psychologically and force us to accept what is unacceptable.”[125] Ultimately, he placed his true confidence in Poland, not the United States, concluding that “it was Poland’s moral strength, the example of unreserved sacrifices that saved Europe...while she stemmed the deluge of German might with the blood of her manhood and the ruins of her land.” He had, most importantly “lost confidence” in “Roosevelt’s willingness or ability” to leverage US support for Poland.[126] It was thus the declared policy of the Polish American Congress after Yalta to pursue an international network rather than a single benefactor to protect their homeland.[127] “Morality,” and lack thereof, was the basis on which the PAC founded its anger. The Congress was so angry that Roosevelt was failing in this regard that it sought to replace the President as the United States’ moral compass: “[speaking of the] psychology and condition of the Polish people in America....We shall stand guard over our heritage of democracy...and establish moral leadership in the United States.”[128] Rozmarek personally took this argument one step further in the Chicago Herald American, referring openly to America’s slave past in his most colorful remonstrance: “America cannot again become a partner to any conspiracy aimed at selling free people into slavery and giving away their lands....”[129] These remonstrances also demonstrated the underlying nature of betrayal. Roosevelt had not only abandoned Poland, but had forsaken the ideals of shared destiny, self-determination, and individual friendship on which
Polish-American friendship had been founded since the First World War. One letter-writer to the Toledo-based Ameryka-Echo concluded: “Perhaps someone will tell, did Poland — apart from former President Wilson — have any defenders? Yes. There was one who said: ‘Poland is the inspiration of nations!’ And then he gave Poland over into communist slavery.”[130] Roosevelt had mimicked Wilson’s speech, but failed to demonstrate worthy intentions. Yalta was tied to Versailles, forming the bookends for Polish experience in mid-twentieth century American politics. February 1945 was a moment of disorientation for the entire Polish-American community in Chicago, and the city’s Polish newspaper editors shared Rozmarek’s shock at Roosevelt’s actions. These publishers were willing to invoke ethnic and inflammatory language that even the PAC was reluctant to conjure itself, but nevertheless condoned. The editors of the Roman Catholic Narod Polski declared that “the indomitable slavic spirit of the Poles will never acknowledge defeat.” Poland, they concluded, “was the litmus test of America’s wartime rhetoric, war aims in Europe, and moral foundation.”[131] An op-ed in the secular Polish Morning World voiced this anger in even more explicit terms. Speaking directly to American policymakers — and, even though he was not named, Roosevelt (“Churchill’s best friend in the United States”) — PolishAmerican soldier Richard Chesner promised that, although the “fifth partition....meant another eclipse for Poland,” like the “ever-living Christ, she shall have her day of Resurrection while her enemy smothers in Hell.”[132] In a subsequent letter to Ameryka-Echo, Józef Anusz declared “I take as a model for myself the lives of the Great Men of Poland….I will not drown in a foreign mass, and remain a Pole aways and everywhere!”[133] And for readers of Dziennik Zwiakzkowy, the “abandonment of Poland was the clearest stab in the back yet dealt to us by the United States.” A cartoon alongside this editorial depicted the “Big Three” seated around a poker table, with Churchill and Roosevelt gazing admiringly at Stalin. “Doesn’t he play wonderfully?!” Roosevelt mused; “Quite right!” was Churchill’s reply as the Soviet leader collected chips labeled “dignity,” “freedom,” “morality,” “loyalty,” and on top of the heap, “Poland.”[134] The sense of betrayal exhibited in these and other newspapers was deeply personal. No longer did Polonia comprise “Americans of Polish Extraction” alone. Hyphenated labels increasingly appeared in print, a sharp and noticeable departure from Rozmarek’s claim that no such identities existed in the community. Polish-Americans were becoming Poles of American extraction rather than the opposite. Hyphenation reinforced the community’s “Polishness” as a qualification for American citizenship and belonging. A poem in the Polish Morning World three months after Yalta summed up the prevailing sentiment shared by editors across the city: Poland, my mother brave She gave me courage, freedom She gave me heart undaunted To face the Foe, his hate To fight for her alone.[135] 102
The United States was no longer the perceived environment of liberty it had been for Poles in the late 1910s through the 1930s, nor was it the environment in which the “blessings of liberty” had meaning.[136] The Polish press ran articles defending the “fruits of a rich Polish heritage” with increasing regularity, while pieces advocating for total loyalty to Polonia’s adopted nation all but disappeared in Chicago.[137] One year after Yalta, Polish-American readers of Narod Polski (not, anymore, “American Poles” or “Americans of Polish extraction”) were “melancholy...guilty only of the crime of loving [their] country. Yet in America [they are] called despicable ‘nationalist[s].’” A symbolic cartoon entitled, “Our Great America,” printed next to this depressed commentary depicted only a foldable raincoat with the caption, “protecting themselves.”[138] Polonia’s efforts on Poland’s behalf had become to Americans as annoying as rain. One writer poignantly summarized this personal feeling of loss in a powerful lament to Ameryka-Echo: I ask all Poles to join forces to defend and save Poland. Our friends have disappointed us, and in this the President. We gave him our children who are dying in such numbers on the war fronts, we give our money, and so many Polish fighters have already died and despite everything our Poland is dying. Where is the loudly shouted justice of the President? Now please excuse me for this ineptly written letter, because I have rheumatism in my hands.[139] The author, a member of the interwar generation who remembered triumph at Versailles, was nevertheless consumed by anger at the President’s actions. His words drew energy from Polish interwar concerns regarding assimilation, concentrating on the human sacrifice Polish-Americans made to the United States war effort. Polish children, the source of great anxiety among Polonia’s leadership for their tendency to “Americanize,” were lost in a twofold battle against European fascism and American disregard. Polish leaders portrayed the Second World War as a crusade for Poland’s independence in the face of a new German, and then Bolshevik, threat. Polonia was confident that Roosevelt had understood and honored this struggle. Focus thus shifted away from an espousal of American principles to an obsession with Roosevelt’s failure to adhere to “moral” obligations and promises after 1945.[140] The emotion exhibited in the newspapers masked the deeper sense of FDR’s personal duplicity that infuriated Polish leaders like Rozmarek. Appeals to Roosevelt after February struck at his character and dedication to the Atlantic Charter’s “moral” ideals even as the broader American public favored the President’s policies. [141] The language of morality would reemerge throughout PolishAmerican discourse after Yalta, and highlight the sharp break between cordial pre-1945 letter-writing and the angry invective common after. In late 1944, Rozmarek was optimistic about American support for Poland, seeing it not as a probability but a certainty based on Roosevelt’s promises in the Atlantic Charter. Before news of Yalta agreements reached American shores in February, the PAC asserted that the Polish question “thrust[ed] deeply into the heart of America.”[142] In November 1944, just after Roosevelt’s reelection, Rozmarek personally congratulated the President by reassuring himself that “the age old friendship with Poland will not allow the principles of the Atlantic Charter to be violated by puppet regimes forced again onto Poland.”[143] Importantly, he made sure to point out that “as the election returns from the localities in which 103
they [Poles] reside conclusively prove, they cast their ballots for your reelection....They regard you as a sincere friend.” By believing in the “noble ideals of the Atlantic Charter initiated by you [FDR], and in keeping with the principles of ‘fair play’ of which you are an ardent believer and follower,” Poles in America were willing to “put their faith” wholly in Roosevelt’s presidency. Linking the President’s responsibility to Poland back to Kosciuszko in the eighteenth century, he asserted the President’s support for the “God-given right to freedom.” Indeed, Rozmarek was confident that “from the assurances given, we have every reason to believe that the Atlantic Charter will not be abandoned.”[144] As Rozmarek reminded Roosevelt, during the 1944 elections this trust had translated into Democratic votes. According to newspaper accounts in the 1940s, labor organizers believed that “Poles and other Slavs occupied 50 percent of industrial jobs in the United States,” and constituted huge segments of the Democratic Party.[145] After 1941, particularly in coal mining, rubber, auto, electrical equipment, and steel industries, Poles constituted a sizable segment of workers in most wartime factories.[146] While these reports may have cited exaggerated figures, the emphasis on Polish contributions to heavy industry nevertheless indicated PolishAmerican prominence in critical economic sectors. Rozmarek and the PAC represented a breath of fresh air for this population, as it had traditionally relied on non-Polish officials to represent its interests. Although Roosevelt had appointed M.S. Szymczak to the Federal Reserve Board, and a bloc of 10 or 12 Polish congressmen won seats in the 1940s, Poles lacked any Senate representation. Non-Polish figures like Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg carried Polonia’s banner, but did so ostensibly to ensure electoral support. With the PAC’s friendship in Washington, Polonia thought its cause was finally reaching beyond their ethnic enclaves. Comparisons to Woodrow Wilson in 1919 were common. Thirty Congressmen spoke of Polish bravery on Constitution Day in 1943, a number which tripled in 1944.[147] In the elections that year, Rozmarek urged his fellow Poles to vote for Roosevelt as the “true friend of our homeland.” His efforts were successful; in Chicago’s Polish wards, the President won by a three to one margin. As the afterglow from November 1944 gave way to twilight in February 1945, PAC leaders grasped onto the disappearing vestiges of their pre-Yalta optimism. Rozmarek felt most betrayed, especially given the energy he expended for Roosevelt the previous year. In February his request for a meeting with the President was declined without explanation. Roosevelt refused to discuss Poland or Yalta with members of the Polish community.[148] Ignoring Polonia’s platform, he declared to Congress in March 1945 that “there will be a more stable political Europe than ever before.... One outstanding example of joint action by the three major allied powers in the liberated areas was the solution reached in Poland.” Having essentially given Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence, he concluded vaguely, “the whole question of Poland was a potential source of trouble...as it has been sometimes before, and we came to the conference to find a common solution. We did — even though everybody does not agree with us, obviously.”[149] The casual casting aside of Polonia’s entire platform in this single sentence bared to Rozmarek and other leaders the fragility of their position in the United States, and the feelings
towards their cause in Washington. They saw their “spiritual connection” cast aside as politically unpalatable sentimentality. In a “message to the great powers,” the PAC summed up this anger: “You are wrong! You have failed to be great! We want to be on record in claiming that America has lost her way, that you have again missed, miscalculated, squandered and frustrated and deeply hurt the heart and soul of America.”[150] Rozmarek lamented most poignantly that “[w]e have been forced into a position of humiliating subservience in matters vital to the future of the world....”[151] This “humiliating subservience” gave way to the racial distancing that sociologists described as the “defining characteristic” of Polish-American communities by the 1950s.[152] Polish leaders “placed the fate of Poland in [Roosevelt’s] able hands and august judgement,” and watched as it slipped through his fingers.[153] There was hope that Truman could reverse the trend set by Roosevelt, but these sentiments were always lukewarm and came across in print as exhausted. By mid-to-late-1945, Polish leaders wondered why they had supported the United States through the war at all. Bemoaning the “amount of blood spilled by the “sons of immigrants and Americans of Polish descent,” Rozmarek and others wondered, “for what principles their sons had died?”[154] American newspapers reinforced these doubts, describing the Polish-American community as “pleading,” “begging,” and “beseeching.”[155] This frustration translated into disbelief. Polonia seemed unable to fully accept that Roosevelt had conspired against Polish independence. Instead, they sometimes argued, the Americans had been duped by British machinations and Churchillian rhetoric.[156] These arguments were never central to the Polish-American response, but nevertheless illuminate the broad loss of faith in American principles and protection for Poland. As Dziennik Zwiazkowy noted, “the manner in which the Polish question is settled presents the truest test of the sincerity of the United States.” To Polonia, Roosevelt had shown his “truest” colors as a “sell-out,”[157] leading prominent Poles to lament, even in victory, “how low American prestige has sunk in Europe.”[158] Polonia’s anger at Roosevelt complemented a shift in language used to describe Poles in the United States, and sentiments expressed in the Polish press. As early as late February 1945, the Polish Morning World published an excerpt from a “Diary of a Polish Soldier,” not Polish-American, describing the “soldiers of Narvik, the civilian fighter of Warsaw, [and] the defenders of the Westerplatte.”[159] These selected passages glorified Polish national efforts, and were completely silent about the fact that the fighter was enlisted in the American army. This distancing at the front lines was shared on the home front in Chicago. In a letter to the editors of the Polish Nation, Anne Maria Zajal declared: “Next to parental love, I have known no greater love than for Poland.”[160] Two months later, the editors of all three main Polish newspapers in Chicago each published commentaries derisively referring to the newly-declared “I am an American Day,” sarcastically urging American Poles to “celebrate it if they can bring themselves to the task.”[161] A new organization called Sarmatia, advertised in the Polish Morning World, was founded to “defend Poland’s rights whenever and wherever she is unjustly attacked.”
This group exulted the “contribution of people of Polish blood [not Americans, although that was the target population] to human progress, culture, and the war efforts of the United Nations.”[162] By 1946, Sarmatia had shifted its focus almost exclusively to the Polish refugee crisis in Europe. After the illegitimate Polish elections in 1947, Yalta became mythology. As Polonia shifted its attention back to Europe, the Crimean tragedy was not forgotten, but rather mobilized as a political lever within the Polish-American community. “Yalta was the postwar Munich!” declared an anonymous editor of the Polish Morning World; the article concluded: “Freedom shrieked in the Crimea. Whom can we trust now?”[163] The divisive language used in this and similar editorials was instructive. Separations between us and them were finally formalized as the civic leadership came to terms with its impotence. The social studies conducted in the 1950s suggested that the sense of betrayal at Yalta pulled the entire Polish-American community into itself. Yet evidence offered by newspapers and PAC bulletins, when read against the sociologists, suggest a more complex dynamic at play in 1945. At the heart of this new interpretation was Polonia’s elite. There was an ethnic distancing after Yalta, but for which group? The civic leadership had much to lose after Roosevelt’s betrayal, and were thus the most vocal commentators on the Crimean tragedy. Polonia’s realization that it could not affect change at the White House compounded a forced acceptance of its diminished importance within the Polish community. Rozmarek’s claims in late 1944 of speaking for “six million Poles” were undermined by his failure a few months later to achieve what these Poles likely wanted. A letter published in America-Echo introduced this concept, admonishing the PAC for its tone-deaf efforts in the months before Yalta: “At various conventions and in the press it was explained that President Roosevelt will settle everything propitiously for Poland….Nobody, however, told Polonia that President Roosevelt is before all the President of the United States and not Poland.”[164] The limitations of Polonia’s political friendship were cast into sharp relief against Poland’s enslavement that year. While few could understand Roosevelt’s betrayal, the elite’s role in this tragic confusion was most damaging. Yalta, above all, represented a breakdown of the civic elite’s elevated position as thought leaders within the Polish-American community. The conference became a trope of Polish-American dissatisfaction in the United States. In 1944 Rozmarek felt that he had mobilized Chicago Poles for Roosevelt. Determining whether this interpretation was true will require more extensive statistical research, but the sentiments at its heart were important. Rozmarek would never be able to achieve such electoral cohesion with the Polish community again, and he knew it. Especially after the widely-condemned 1946 elections in Poland, Yalta became a rhetorical device Republicans deployed in collaboration with PAC leaders against the Democratic Party.[165] During the US elections that year, the Republican Party capitalized on the “Yalta betrayal” across dominantly Polish neighborhoods. In a nationally distributed handbook, the chairman of Cook County’s Republican Committee pressed his party’s precinct work104
ers to “intensify their campaign efforts in Polish districts.” He claimed that Polish-American resentment over Yalta provided the “opportunity to cut into what had been a solidly Democratic vote.”[166] Wisconsin Congressman Alvin O’Konski echoed the Cook County memorandum, actively campaigning for Republican candidates in cities with large Polish populations by conjuring the “Democratic betrayal” in the Crimea. Local and Congressional elections were proving grounds for this new Republican rhetoric. In 1947, Senator Wayland Brooks and Congressman O’Konski urged Chicago Poles to support the Republican mayoral candidate, Russell Root, because of “the Democrats’ betrayal at Yalta.” The conservative Chicago Tribune argued that a Democratic victory would provide “encouragement to continue the policies of loot, starvation, and exile that have brought despair to the peoples of Poland.”[167] These early invocations met limited success. Republican Party leaders in Chicago were invited, purportedly for the first time, to meetings with leaders from the PAC and other Polish community organizations. Condemning the Democrats’ unwillingness to disavow the Yalta agreement, the War Veterans Committee for a Free Poland urged Chicago Poles to vote Republican. Rozmarek adopted the same line, alongside the former PolishAmerican president of the Wisconsin Young Democrats.[168] In the 1948 presidential election, Republican nominees Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren expressed their disappointment with Democratic mistakes in judgement at Yalta. The pair appealed to Polish-Americans on the Yalta issue, attributing Poland’s “tragic fate” to the “Roosevelt Administration’s secret diplomacy.”[169] In their reelection campaigns, Senator Wayne Brookes and Governor Dwight Green were even less restrained in their admonishments, “bitterly assailing the Democratic betrayal at Yalta.” All three platforms were defeated by Democratic candidates, with a healthy left-leaning margin in every Polish district. When Dwight D. Eisenhower used the rhetoric of abandonment four years later, the same Polish groups that had put their weight behind Roosevelt wholly shifted to the Republican platform. Rozmarek penned commentaries for the conservative Chicago Tribune and met with right-wing politicians to discuss the Crimean tragedy.[170] By 1953 mentions of Yalta by Republican politicians had reached a high point, a theme which continued throughout the rest of the twentieth century among Polonia’s diminishing elite.[171] Election results indicated that only the Polish-American elite were convinced by Republican oratory. The shift in Polonia’s attention from Roosevelt’s Democratic Party to a slew of Republican politicians represented a deeper floundering of their position in the United States. Unlike in 1944, no significant number of Poles voted for Eisenhower in 1952 and Rozmarek was unable to influence the Polish-American community to participate in the election, let alone mobilize the vote for his preferred candidate. [172] Ordinary Poles had recognized their civic leadership’s impotence, a revelation strengthened by a postwar desire to reverse the interwar period’s damaging racial separation.[173] Perhaps in sympathy with New Deal domestic policies, many PolishAmericans rejected the overall Republican position on domestic economic, labor, and social issues: rather than show affection for 105
Poles or their community’s grievances, Republican politicians appeared obsessed solely with criticizing Roosevelt. Their rejections of Yalta were tempered by staunch opposition to the displaced persons immigration bill (later ratified in 1948), which disproportionately assisted Eastern European refugees. In fact, as Rozmarek’s efforts to bring Poles to the Republican platform intensified throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, average Polish voters tended to become more Democratic. By 1972 in Chicago, over 75 percent claimed Democratic affiliation, as opposed to 50-60 percent a decade earlier. Only Poles who were upwardly mobile, who looked to the elite for a social model, moved to the right. Yet this cohort was tiny compared to the mass working class population in cities like Chicago.[174] The emergent divide between the Polish-American community and their civic elite indicated the latter’s disappearance from a discernible leadership role. After Harry S. Truman’s surprise victory in 1948, Republican politicians, and not Polish-American elites, dominated the anti-Yalta lobby. Most damaging to Polonia’s credibility, Republican figures assumed the Polish nationalist mantle. For example, using Polish national observances — including Polish Constitution Day, the anniversary of Pulaski’s death, the 1939 German attack on Poland — Senators Homer Capehart, Joseph McCarthy, and Congressmen Joseph Martin, Jr., Hugh Scott, John Lodge, and Kenneth Keating “hammered incessantly at Yalta and Democratic foreign policy.”[175] In 1950, Republican partisan focus on foreign policy had precipitated a refined effort to exploit Polish national sentiment for their domestic electoral gain — a policy closely tied to anti-Communist denunciation. For Polish-American civil elite, the effect was disastrous. While they had hitherto represented the necessary link between Polish national aspirations and the American political establishment, the ease with which Republican figures coopted this position effectively sidelined Polonia’s function in national politics. Tireless efforts during the interwar period to overcome racial legacies, find effective political friends, and assert the Polish-American voice in national discourse had resulted in naught. The Polish-American electorate’s divide, particularly after 1952, highlighted general disillusionment among Poles regarding both their elites’ ability to influence American politics, and their ownership of issues long considered undeniably Polish. V. Conclusion: The Civic Elite, Humbled By the mid-1950s Rozmarek and his colleagues were humbled men. For most Poles, apathy, even disgust, replaced anger at US abandonment. The causes which Polonia’s elite had championed in the 1940s were no longer pressing for PolishAmericans generally. One sociologist noted in 1968 a seeming absence of nationalist ties and “supra-territorial peoplehood” between Poles living across the United States, a development that ran against the grain of the PAC’s universalist rhetoric. [176] Sociological studies conducted in mid-1950s Chicago were finding a community supportive of perceived American values — self-determination above all — but deeply hostile to the actual US society and population. Its inferiority complex, expressed in the 1930s and 1940s through misplaced notions
of friendship with Roosevelt, had been laid bare. The issues unearthed by these studies raise a fascinating question of how scholars can expand the data to the broader community. Who are the sociologists really talking about? A new interpretation of the sociology emerges in which the social scientists themselves become constructors — through a myopic focus on the civic elite’s position — of the widespread Polish ethnic inferiority complex. Polonia’s elite were most estranged from American politics after 1945, yet remained highly vocal. Studies conducted in the late 1940s would have unknowingly tapped into this anger, for many were funded by Polish-American political organizations — and even by the PAC itself — and were conducted by members of the Polish-American intellectual elite. Ethnic distancing might well have been a top-down rather than a bottom-up process by which the civil elite reinforced their anger at dispossession through scholarship. Historians and sociologists may have construed this sentiment throughout the 1950s and 1960s, applying it to the broader Polish-American community. Yet the evidence presented above also indicated that it may be too simple to merely attribute the notion of Polish-American inferiority to sociological models imposed decades later. Polonia’s decline after Yalta evinced a critical reality: ethnicities have narratives. They are not static or enduring, but rather change — mutate, alter, metamorphose, and disappear. During the interwar period, the civic elite attempted to harness these historical processes, constructing and shaping a sense of Polish-American community in the New World. Their efforts were premised on conscious ethnic self-negation as a means to assert legitimacy over a marginalized population. Unlike other ethnic groups, Polish-America emphasized its alienation from the American governmental discourse as the defining characteristic of political participation. Subsequent scholarship reflected their unfulfilled aspirations, and may have let a fallen leadership to express their confusion, anger, and frustration. The dual forces — sociological studies and elite-imposed ethnic identity — are difficult to discern within the Polish-American narrative between 1919 and 1945. Slippage can occur between accepting sociological models at face value and divorcing pre-Yalta Polish experience from post-1945 developments — a result of describing racial frameworks that were at once constructed in vivo and ex post facto. However, it is crucial to understand the twin forces shaping Polish-America, and their roots in civic elite political machinations, before a more comprehensive understanding of Polish ethnic group formation and dissolution can emerge. Polonia’s downfall illustrated the shortcomings of communal representation and construction through strategies of alienation: they unknowingly made certain that they could never overcome their political failure in 1945. If ethnic distancing did take place, the next step is determining from which direction. To begin an answer, it is useful to look at the developments inside Polish-American communities beginning in the post-Yalta period. New arrivals from communist Poland helped clarify the marginalization of Polonia’s leadership, and its inability to adapt in response to postwar realities. Starting in the mid-1950s, a new wave of Polish emigres arrived in the United States, leaving what had, under Stalin’s direction,
become a Soviet satellite along the East European borderlands. The environment into which they settled differed significantly from that to which earlier immigrant communities had adapted. Experiencing a rising climate of ethnic pluralism in the 1960s and 1970s, “new” Polish-Americans began to view their heritage as a source of pride — and access to public funds for restoring parishes and neighborhoods. The newcomers, who were better educated than their co-nationals before the Second World War, fit well into the period’s anti-Communist hysteria. Owing to residual legal immigration restrictions, numbers of immigrants admitted remained constant, but incidence of “vacationers” (wakacjusze) traveling on tourist visas — and often working illegally in American industry — doubled to nearly 24,000 annually by 1970. These groups were later joined by those seeking economic and ideological refuge, following the Solidarity movement’s rise in the 1980s. Of all newcomers, these refugees tended to be most politically active, serving as organizers for Polish national groups and working on behalf of Poland’s liberation from Soviet influence: “It was they who maintained a concrete…connection to the opposition movement and who could, therefore, become the conduit through which resources could flow back to Poland.”[177] This new immigrant community had, by the 1980s, assumed roles similar to those played by Polish civic organizations in the pre-Versailles period. Interestingly, existing Polish-American communities seemingly viewed these newcomers through the same self-negating lens that had defined Polish ethnic distancing in the interwar period. Older-generation Poles thought newcomers wanted handouts, and interpreted their behavior according to an ethnic framework that emphasized communal marginalization and political impotence. For the PAC, refugees from communist Poland represented a challenge to the group’s already diminished leadership role in the Polish-American community. The older Polish cohort criticized newcomers for not joining existing civic organizations, blaming their reticence on communist suspicion. In turn, the arrivals excoriated the PAC and its affiliates for being too autocratic, formal, and centralized. As one emigre noted in 1971: “the do-nothing leadership was too reminiscent of the Soviet gerontocracy.”[178] Both sides considered themselves the superior, and emergent class distinctions emphasized educational, occupational, and cultural divergences between “Old World” and “modern” Poles. Existing communities tended to espouse a Poland that had disappeared at the end of the long nineteenth century; they spoke with outmoded colloquialisms and celebrated historical holidays like Constitution Day (3 May) that had no modern Polish resonance. Newcomers, on the contrary, embraced contemporary language and political symbolism. In many respects, these groups were not speaking the same language.[179] Although cooperation did eventually develop between existing civic elite and newly arrived Poles, the PAC was never able to mobilize existing communities to support these efforts. Second- and third-generation Polish-Americans were suspicious of their co-nationals’ political and cultural leanings. While Rozmarek and subsequent PAC presidents emphasized ethnic fraternity, the broader Polish-American community grew increasingly 106
uninterested in their homeland’s affairs. Following Yalta, many older Poles had asked: who leads Polonia? Challenges to the civic elite’s status that were posed by new immigrant groups, as well as Polonia’s post-1945 floundering, offered a bleak answer. By the mid-1980s, PAC influence had effectively disappeared. When, for instance, the media approached the Congress about events in Poland, secretaries referred callers to groups established by newlyarrived Poles — including most prominently organizations like Pomost, Freedom for Poland, Brotherhood of Dispersed Solidarity Members, or the Polish-American Economic Forum.[180] And during the lead-up to Polish elections in 1989, PAC leaders were remarkably silent. While the newcomers remained outspoken in their support for Poland’s liberation from Soviet influence, their lobbying efforts never revitalized existing Polish-American voices. Nor did they foster any Polish-American identity: following the collapse of Poland’s communist government in 1989-1990, all but four percent of newly-arrived Poles interviewed in Chicago said they would return to their homeland.[181] The failure in 1945 had thus dealt a powerful blow to Polonia’s leadership, such that a “temporary” diaspora in the 1970s-1980s could easily displace their residual political influence. While Polonia’s elite had focused on the content of Polish identity — language, cuisine, historical mythology — their rhetoric ignored emergent processes of identity formation in the New World. The question of Polish ethnic distancing is ultimately a tantalizing one tangled in the binds of education, rhetoric, academic method, anger, and apathy. As another Polish nation fell in Europe, its diverse Diaspora in the United States was thrown into the dizzying whirlwind of international politics at the birth of the Cold War. As Poland became communist, her exiled elite experienced a humbling revolution of its own. Understanding the nature of their divorce from the broader Polish-American community after Yalta thus opens a window onto the complex social and political dynamics of a disorienting moment for a downtrodden elite watching their homeland, and status, destroyed again. Charles Rozmarek to Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Congratulatory Letter to FDR on his Reelection” (14 November 1944), reprinted in Donald Pienkos, Polish American Efforts on Poland’s Behalf (East European Monographs, 1991), p. 273. [2] John Bach McMaster, The United States in the World War (D. Appleton and Company, 1919), p. 310-311. [3] Rom Landau, Ignace Paderewski, Musician and Statesman (New York: Crown, 1934), p. 118-119. [4] Louis L. Gerson, Woodrow Wilson and the Rebirth of Poland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 70-71. [5] Charles Rozmarek, “Telegram to US Secretary of State George C. Marshall from President Rozmarek on Polish Election” (20 January 1947), reprinted in Pienkos, Polish American Efforts, Ibid., p. 288. [6] Rozmarek, “Telegram to US Secretary of State George C. Marshall,” Ibid. [7] Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939-1956 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), p. 1-2. [8] Harold J. Abramson, “Ethnic Pluralism in Central City,” in Ethnic Groups in the City, ed. Otto Feinstein (Lexington, Mass.: Heath Lexington Books, 1971), pp. 17-28; Eugene Kusielewicz, “Reflections on the Cultural Condition of the Polish-American Community” (Lecture delivered at Convention of Polish-American [1]
107
scholars at Alliance College, 1969). [9] Karol Wachtl, Polonia w Ameryce: Dzieje i Dorobek (“Polonia in America: History and Realizations.” Philadelphia: Polish Star Publishing Co., 1945), p. 290. [10] Irwin T. Sanders and Ewa T. Morawska, Polish-American Community Life: A Survey of Research (The Community Sociology Monograph Series, Vol. II, 1975), p. 62. [11] Jiri Kolaja, “Dysreference Group of Polish-American Laundry Workers” (Polish Review, pp. 37-47, Winter 1962), pp. 37-38. [12] James Pula, Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community (Twayne Publishers, 1995); Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, Ibid.; Sanders and Morawska, Community Life, Ibid.; Pienkos, Polish American Efforts, Ibid. [13] Abramson, “Ethnic Pluralism,” Ibid. [14] Kusielewicz, “Reflections,” Ibid. [15] Sanders and Morawska, Community Life, Ibid., p. 62. [16] For example: T.W. Krychowski, ed., Polish Canadians, Profile and Image (Polish Alliance Press, 1969); Kusielewicz, Reflections, Ibid.; Wiktor Turek, “Emigracja Polska w Kanadzie,” in Rocznik Polonii Zagranicznej (1960), pp. 51-95. [17] Jiri Kolaja, “Dysreference Group of Polish-American Laundry Workers” (Polish Review, pp. 37-47, Winter 1962), pp. 37-38. [18] Arthur E. Wood, Hamtramck, Then and Now: A Sociological Study of a PolishAmerican Community (New Haven: College and University Press, 1955), p. 219. [19] Ibid., pp. 185-186. [20] “Editorial: Poland on the Chessboard” in Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, Vol. 1, No. 1, (February 1945), pp. 1-3, retrieved at the Polish Museum of America (hitherto referred to as PMA). [21] Henryk Frankel, Poland: The Struggle for Power, 1772-1939 (London: L. Drummond, 1946), p. 30-31. [22] Declaration of Policy of the Polish American Congress,” in Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1945), p. 6, retrieved at PMA. [23] “An Open Letter to the Newspapermen of America,” in the Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, and reprinted across the United Polish Press of America, Vol. 1, No. 2 (18 February 1945), pp. 5-7, retrieved at PMA. [24] Ibid., p. 1. [25] D.B. Horn, British Public Opinion and the First Partition of Poland (Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1915), p. 13-14. [26] Frankel, Poland, Ibid., p. 2. [27] Gerson, Woodrow Wilson, Ibid., p. 38-30. [28] Abbé Venceslas de Tworkowski, Wilson et la Question Polonaise (Saint Moritz, St. Augustine, 1919), p. 10. [29] Fisher and Brooks, p. 47-48: According to a curious legend in the PolishAmerican historical memory that became popular during World War I, the Poles had come to America 16 years before Columbus landed in the West Indies. In 1476 John of Kolno reputedly commanded a flotilla of Danish ships which sighted the coast of Labrador. Somewhat later, and more authentic, reports claim that the Dutch colonists hired a Polish schoolmaster in Manhattan. Others, including Albert Soborowski, filled roles as interpreters with Native Americans, frontiersmen, and Protestant settlers in the Passaic and Raritan Valleys at the turn of the eighteenth century; Poles may even have served as indentured laborers in Virginia. [30] Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 202. [31] Victor Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 1800-1910: Marginality and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 119. [32] Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 109-151, 197-213. [33] Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 7, 13-14: Italians “did
not need to become white because they were perceived as such upon arrival.” [34] Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, Ibid., p. 199. The United States Immigration Commission was established in 1907 to respond to growing concern about immigration to the United States. The body had concluded by 1911 that immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe posed a serious threat to American society and culture. Its overall findings provided the rationale for immigration restriction acts in the 1920s, including the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which favored immigration from northern and western Europe. [35] Quoted in: Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 93. [36] Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York City, 1901), vol. 5, pp. 212-213. Perhaps horrified by the level of violence precipitated in Europe, Wilson would by 1917 change at least his public countenance. [37] Literacy tests were essentially a useful proxy to measure class and assimilation into “true Americanism.” [38] Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, Ibid., pp. 93-95: Since the early 1880s a strengthening cohort in Congress had advocated including a literacy test as “the surest way to to curb immigration from southeastern Europe.” In 1917 these voices triumphed, leading to a rapid and haphazard strengthening of restrictive immigration policy. Yet between 1918 and 1920, only 6,142 aliens were excluded due to reading deficiency — a figure comprised mostly of Mexican, French-Canadian, and Italian individuals. By 1921 less than 0.5 percent of arrivals were turned away because of their inability to read. [39] Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, Ibid., 200-201 [40] Mary Antin, They Who Knock at our Gates (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), p. 56-57. [41] Helen F. Eckerson, “Immigration and National Origins,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 367 (September 1966), pp. 5-6. [42] Henry Pratt Fairchild, Immigration (London: The Macmillan Company, 1930), p. 390. [43] Eckerson, “National Origins,” Ibid., p. 7. [44] Ibid.: Northwestern European immigration numbered slightly less, at 155,787, and immigrants from other quota countries totaled only 615. [45] Fairchild, Immigration, Ibid., p. 396. [46] Ibid. [47] Quoted in: Mary Patrice Erdmans, Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976-1990 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 15. [48] Ireland, Germany, Great Britain, and Northern Ireland were considered principal sources of postcolonial immigration. [49] Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” in The Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 1 (June, 1999), pp. 67-92. [50] Eckerson, “National Origins,” Ibid., p. 7; Erdmans, Opposite Poles, Ibid., p. 17. [51] Joseph Parot, The American Faith and the Persistence of Chicago Polonia, 1870-1920 (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1971), pp. 206-207. [52] Wladyslaw T. Benda, “Poles! Kosciuszko and Pulaski fought for the liberty of Poland and other nations — Follow their example — Enlist in the Polish Army!” Lithograph in Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, POS-US. B45, no. 9 (1917). [53] Quoted in: Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imaginations of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 18.
Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, Ibid., p. 215. Quoted in: Jacobson, Special Sorrows, Ibid., p. 18. [56] Quoted in: Erdmans, Opposite Poles, p. 17. [57] Wood, A Sociological Study, Ibid., p. 219. [58] Polish American Congress and Charles Rozmarek, “Byrnes Warned that Yalta Carries War Seed,” Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, Vol. 3, No. 6 (February 1947), retrieved at PMA. [59] Wood, A Sociological Study, Ibid., pp. 219-220. [60] Ibid., pp. 185-186. [61] Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, Ibid., p. 202. [62] Wood, A Sociological Study, Ibid., p. 201 [63] “Editorial: Our Delegation in Europe,” Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, Vol. 3, No. 6 (February 1947), pp. 1-2, retrieved at PMA. [64] Charles F. Emmons, Economic and Political Leadership in Chicago’s Polonia (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1971), p. 227. [65] Tomasz Inglot and John P. Pelissero, “Ethnic Political Power in a Machine City: Chicago’s Poles at Rainbow’s End,” Urban Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4 (June 1993), pp. 526-543. [66] Arthur E. Wood, Hamtramck: A Sociological Study of a Polish-American Community (College and University Press, 1955), p. 220; Benjamin Brody, Relationship between Slavic Ethnicity and Psychological Characteristics of Psychiatric Patients (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1949), pp. 188-191. [67] Theresita Polzin, The Polish-Americans; Whence and Whither (Pulaski, WI: Franciscan Publishers, 1973), p. 214. [68] Eugene Obidinski, Ethnic to status Group: A Study of Polish-Americans in Buffalo (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1968), pp. 76. 125-127, 129; Danuta Mostwin, The Transplanted Family: A Study of the Social Adjustment of the Polish Immigrant Family to the United States after the Second World War (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 1969), pp. 5-19. [69] Sanders and Morawska, Community Life, Ibid., p. 66. [70] A hero like the mythical eighteenth century revolutionary, Kosciuszko, of whom nearly every Catholic Polish-American family kept a figurine next to their portrait of Jesus. [71] Emmons, Economic and Political Leadership, Ibid., p. 23; Floyd Hunter, “Persons of Lesser Influence” in Floyd Hunter, Community Organization, Action and Inaction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1956), pp. 5369. [72] John J. Olejniczak and Stephen S. Grabowski, “A Petition to the President by the Polish Roman Catholic Union,” Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1945), retrieved at PMA. [73] Alfreda Borucka, “An Open Letter to the President,” Ameryka-Echo (6 August 1944), in Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, ed., Letters from Readers in the Polish American Press, 1902-1969: A Corner for Everybody (Lexington Books, 2014). [74] Sanders and Morawska, Community Life, Ibid., pp. 74-75. [75] Jozef Chalasinski, “Parafia i szkola parafialna wsrod emigracji polskiej w Ameryce,” in Przeglad Socjologiczny, Vol. 3, no. 3-4 (Warsaw, 1935), pp. 633-771. [76] Kusielewicz, “Reflections,” Ibid. [77] Helena Lopata-Znaniecki, “The Polish American Family,” in Charles H. Mindel, Robert Wesley Habenstein, eds., Ethnic Families in America: Patterns and Variations (Prentice Hall, 2nd ed., 1981), pp. 17-42. Many scholars have referred to this phenomenon simply as an “inferiority complex.” For example: T.W. Krychowski, ed., Polish Canadians, Profile and Image (Polish Alliance Press, 1969); Kusielewicz, Reflections, Ibid.; Wiktor Turek, “Emigracja Polska w Kanadzie,” in Rocznik Polonii Zagranicznej (1960), pp. 51-95. [78] Emmons, Economic and Political Leadership, Ibid., p. 97-99. [54] [55]
108
Thomas Borkowski, “Some Patterns in Polish Surname Changing,” in Polish American Studies ((January-June, 1963), pp. 14-16; Robert J. Kotlarz, “Writings about the Changing of Polish Names in America,” in Polish American Studies (January-June 1963), pp. 1-4; Stanley A. Magiera, “Some Reasons for First Name Changes,” in Polish American Studies (January-June, 1963), pp. 8-9; LopataZnaniecki, “Polish Family,” Ibid., p. 12; Sanders and Morawska, Community Life, Ibid., pp. 76-77. [80] Mieczyslaw Szawleski, Wychodzstwo Polskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Ameryki (Biblioteka Ossolinskich, 1924), p. 220. [81] Abramson, “Ethnic Pluralism,” Ibid., p. 21; Chalasinski, Parafia, Ibid., p. 290. [82] Stanley Krajewski, “The Polish-American Condition,” in Otto Feinstein, ed., Ethnic Groups in the City: Culture, Institutions, and Power (Heath Lexington Books, 1971), pp. 335-337. [83] Ibid., p. 21. [84] Pienkos, Polish American Efforts, Ibid., p. 71-72. [85] Joseph A. Wytrwal, Behold! The Polish-Americans (Detroit: Endurance Press, 1977), pp. 362-363, 399. [86] “About Ourselves,” Polish American Congress Bulletin (Vol. 1, No. 1. February 1945), pp. 3-4, retrieved at the PMA. [87] Charles Rozmarek, “When Poland was Not Invited to San Francisco” in Polish American Congress Bulletin (Vol. 1, No. 2, March-April 1945), pp. 8-9, retrieved at the PMA. [88] John J. Bukowczyk, “Polish Americans, History Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” in John J. Bukowczyk, ed., Polish Americans and their History: Community, Culture, and Politics (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), pp. 1-2. [89] Quoted in: Wacław Kruzska, A History of Poles in America to 1908, Part I, trans. Krystyna Jankowski (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1993), p. 258. [90] Wytrwal, Behold! Ibid., p. 360. [91] Bukowczyk, “History, Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” Ibid., p. 2. [92] For example: Leopold Caro, “Die Statistik der österreichisch-ungarischen und polnischen Auswanderung nach den Vereinigten von Nordamerika,” Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik, und Verwaltung, no. 16 (1907), pp. 68-113; Franciszek Bujak, Wieś zachodnio-galicyjska u schyłka XIX w. Wieś polska (Lwów, 1905). pp. 53-111; Józef Okołowicz, Wychodźtwo i osadnictwo polskie przed wojna swiatowa (Warsaw, 1920). [93] Roman Dmowski, Wychodźtwo i osadnictwo (Lwów, 1900): When Poles abroad helped themselves, they helped Poland. See also: Benjamin P. Murdzek, “Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 1870-1914” East European Monographs, vol. 33 (East European Quarterly, 1977). [94] Bukowczyk, “History, Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” Ibid., p. 3. [95] Journals included: Kwartalnik Instytutu do Badań Emigracji i Kolonizacji (Warsaw); Przeglad Emigracyjny (Warsaw); and Annales Missiologicae (Poznan). [96] Bukowczyk, “History, Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” Ibid., pp. 4-6; Edward R. Kantowicz, Polish-American Politics in Chicago, 1888-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 104. [97] W.I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group, 5 vols. (Boston, 1918-1919): This work came at the tail-end of the First World War, during which the issue of Polish immigration touched on national security concerns. As citizens, respectively, of Austrian and German partitions, many Polish emigres were considered “enemy aliens.” When considering Thomas and Znaniecki’s work, it is important to remember that their studies were colored by both racial conceptions of Poles in America, but also the [79]
109
exigencies of conflict. [98] Jan Słomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842-1927, trans. William John Rose (Minerva Publishing, 1941), p. 28; Bukowczyk, “History, Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” Ibid., p. 5. [99] Sienkiewicz, who was born (1846) into an impoverished noble family in Russian-Congress Poland, won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for “outstanding merits as an epic writer.” His most famous works focused on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, linking it to the Roman Empire’s achievements — a glorious history that featured prominently in Polish-American historical “propaganda” throughout the pre- and post-1914 period. [100] Helena Chrzanowska, “Polish Book Publishing in Chicago” in Polish American Studies, vol. 4 (1947), pp. 37-39; Bernard Pacyniak, “An Historical Outline of the Polish Press in America” in Frank Mocha, ed., Poles in America: Bicentennial Essays (Worzalla Publishing, 1978), p. 518. [101] Quoted in: “About Us,” Bulletin of the Polish-American Congress, Vol. 1, No. 2 (March-April 1945). [102] Bukowczyk, “History, Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” Ibid., pp. 9-10. [103] Ibid., p. 10. [104] Susan Cotts Watkins, ed., After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the census (New York, 1990), pp. 99-100. [105] Piotr Taras, Angela T. Pienkos, and Thaddeus Radzialowski, “Paul Wrobel’s Our Way — Three Views,” in Polish American Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (Spring 1980), pp. 42-51. [106] Bukowczyk, “History, Writing, and the Organization of Memory,” Ibid., pp. 12-13. [107] Miecislaus Haiman, “Polish Scholarship in the United States, 1929-1947,” Polish American Studies, Vol. 4, no. 3-4 (July-December 1947), pp. 65-78: It is important to note that Haiman, a Polish scholar, was writing in Yalta’s aftermath, and his views of interwar Polish history construction were colored by this event. [108] Polish American Historical Association, 1942-1951, Including Program of the Eighth Annual Meeting (Polish American Historical Association, 1951); Frank Mocha, “The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Its Contributions to the Study of Polonia,” in Mocha, ed., Poles in America, Ibid., p. 709. [109] Mocha, “The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America,” Ibid., pp. 709-711. [110] Stefan Włoszewcski, “The Polish Sociological Group in America,” in American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 4, Nos. 8-9 (1945), pp. 156-157; Rev. Francis Bolek, “Integration of the Polish American Group” (address delivered at the PAHA annual conference, 29 December 1944). [111] “About Us,” Polish American Congress Bulletin, Ibid., p. 1, retrieved at the PMA. [112] Charles Rozmarek, “Poland and the Atlantic Charter,” in Chicago Herald American (20 November 1944), pp. 9-13, reprinted in the Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1945), p. 14, retrieved at PMA. [113] “Declaration of Policy of the Polish American Congress,” Bulletin of the Polish American Congress, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1945), pp. 5-6, retrieved at PMA. [114] Stanislaus A. Blejwas, “Polonia and Politics,” in Bukowczyk, ed., Polish Americans and their History, Ibid., p. 129. [115] “About Us,” Polish American Congress Bulletin, Ibid., p. 1, retrieved at the PMA. [116] Blejwas, “Polonia and Politics,” Ibid., p. 143. [117] S.M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (Viking, 2010), pp. 190-215; Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), pp. 524-525. See also: “Historical Note. Joking at the Summit,” Time (20 August 1973), p. 33; “Churchill’s Secrets Bared,” Detroit Free Press (2 August
1973), p. 12-F. [118] Charles Rozmarek, “A Memorandum on the Crimea Decisions Concerning Poland,” Polish American Congress Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 2 (March 1945), pp. 10-18, retrieved at the PMA. [119] Wytrwal, Behold! Ibid., p. 404. [120] Wytrwal, Behold!, Ibid., pp. 400: Surprisingly, polls conducted in the late 1940s suggested that Americans were most weary of the war, even though their territory had remained unsullied by conflict. [121] Adam Wazyk, A Poem For Adults (1955). [122] “Polish American Congress on San Francisco,” Polish American Congress Bulletin (Vol. 1, No. 2, March-April 1945), pp. 1-4, retrieved at the PMA. [123] “About Us,” Polish American Congress Bulletin, Ibid., p. 3, retrieved at the PMA. [124] Charles Rozmarek, “Death of Free Poland Foreseen Under Rule of Soviet,” Ibid., p. 15, retrieved at PMA. [125] “About Us,” Ibid. [126] Ibid., p. 4 [127] “Declaration of Policy of the Polish American Congress,” Polish American Congress Bulletin (Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1945), pp. 5-6, retrieved at PMA. [128] Ibid., p. 6. [129] Charles Rozmarek, “US Polish Chief Demands America Halt Red Grab” (Chicago Herald American, 17 December 1944). [130] S. Damiencki, “From Such Defenders, God Protect Us,” in Ameryka-Echo (30 May 1945), in Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, Letters, Ibid.: This paper (19021971), although published in Toledo, was also distributed across Cook County, Illinois, under first the Polish Roman Catholic Union, and then PAC, aegis. [131] “Yalta,” Narod Polski (Vol. 1, No. 59, 23 February 1945), p. 4, retrieved at the Center for Research Libraries (hitherto referred to as CRL). [132] “Food For Thought,” Polish Morning World (13 May 1945), retrieved at the CRL. [133] Józef Anusz, “Why and How I Love Poland,” in Ameryka-Echo (16 October 1945), in Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, Letters, Ibid. [134] “In Defense of Rights of Poland,” Dziennik Zwiazkowy (February 1945), p. 4, retrieved at the CRL. [135] Lee Sobanski, “Poland, My Mother,” Polish Morning World (Chicago: May 1945), retrieved at the CRL. [136] Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, Ibid., p. 202. [137] “The Fruits of a Rich Heritage,” Polish Morning World (8 April 1945), p. 22, retrieved at the CRL. [138] “The Melancholy Poles,” Narod Polski (10 January 1946, Vol. 60, No. 2), retrieved at the CRL. [139] K. Kruzel, “When will the Wolves Finally be Sated,” in Ameryka-Echo (18 February 1945), in Jaroszynska-Kirchmann, Letters, Ibid. [140] Ibid. [141] Pienkos, Polish-American Efforts, Ibid., p. 118-119. [142] “About Us,” Ibid., p. 4. [143] “Congratulatory Letter to FDR on his Reelection,” Ibid., pp. 273-274. [144] Ibid., p. 273 [145] The New York Times (22 June 1942), p. 6. [146] Eric Estovik, “Polish-American Politics,” in The Nation (20 May 1944). [147] Peter H. Irons, “The Test is Poland: Polish Americans and the Birth of the Cold War,” Polish-American Studies Vol. 30, no. 2 (Autumn 1973), p. 9. [148] Ibid., p. 37. [149] Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address to Congress on Results of Yalta” (15 March 1945). [150] “Polish American Congress on San Francisco,” Ibid.
Charles Rozmarek, “An Open Letter to the Newspapermen of America,” in Polish American Congress Bulletin Vol. 1, No. 2, edited, endorsed, and distributed by the United Polish Press of America, Chicago (March 1945), pp. 5-7. [152] Sanders and Morawska, Community Life, Ibid., p. 78. [153] John J. Olejniczak and Stephen S. Grabowski, “A Petition to President Truman by the Polish Roman Catholic Union,” Polish American Congress Bulletin (Vol. 1, No. 3, June/July 1945). [154] Polish American Congress Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 3 (June/July 1945). [155] Ibid. [156] Dr. Melchior Palyi, “Year End Defeats,” Polish Morning World (9 January 1945), retrieved at the CRL. [157] “In Defense of Rights of Poland,” Ibid., p. 4. [158] Palyi, “Year End Defeats,” Ibid. [159] “The Diary of a Polish Soldier,” Polish Morning World (18 February 1945), retrieved at the CRL. [160] Anne Maria Zajal, “Letter to the Editor,” Polish Nation (11 March 1945), retrieved at the CRL. [161] Editorial, Polish Morning World (20 May 1945), retrieved at the CRL. [162] Polish Morning World (11 February 1945), retrieved at the CRL. [163] “Thrown to the Wolves?” Polish Morning World (April 8, 1946), retrieved at the CRL. [164] S. Smietana, “The Bitter Truth,” in Ameryka-Echo (25 March 1945). [165] Irons, “Test is Poland,” Ibid. [166] John Leonard East, Republican Precinct Workers Handbook (National Precinct Workers, Inc., 1946), p. 76. [167] Chicago Tribune, 24 March 1947, p. 1; Athan Theoharis, “The Republican Party and Yalta: Partisan Exploitation of the Polish American Concern over the Conference, 1945-1960,” in Polish American Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1, (Spring 1971), p. 8: It is important to note that Democratic Congressmen from Polish-American districts often invoked the same bitter anti-Yalta rhetoric as their Republican counterparts, albeit without the partisan emphasis. [168] Athan Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in US Politics, 1946-1955 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1970), p. 34; Chicago Tribune, 25 April 1946, p. 18; 14 October 1946, p. 5; 27 October 1946, p. 8; 28 October 1946, p. 1; 31 October 1946, p. 8. [169] “Dewey in ’48: He Gets Things Done,” in the Chicago Tribune (31 May 1948), p. 13. [170] Theoharis, “The Republican Party and Yalta,” Ibid., p. 9. [171] Pienkos, Ibid., p. 384: In his speech on the anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Ronald Reagan centered his commentary on a repudiation of Democratic foreign policy at Yalta, and the PAC continued to hammer home their betrayal to the Bush Administration in 1990. [172] Pienkos, Ibid., p. 189. [173] Sanders and Morawska, Community Life, Ibid., p. 79. [174] Emmons, Economic and Political Leadership, Ibid., p. 232. [175] Theoharis, “The Republican Party and Yalta,” Ibid., p. 10-11. [176] Obidinksi, Ethnic to Status Group, Ibid., p. 129: Although conducted in New York, this study had implications for the US national Polish-American community, which it addressed explicitly. [177] Patricia A. Gajda, “Review of Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976-1990,” Polish American Studies, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 97-103. [178] Erdmans, Opposite Poles, Ibid., p. 89. [179] Ibid. [180] Erdmans, Opposite Poles, Ibid., p. 91; Gajda, “Review,” Ibid., p. 101. [181] Erdmans, Opposite Poles, Ibid., p. 93. [151]
110
Legitimizing National Identity through ‘Transnational Existences’: Post-war Kosovo and its Relationship with the European Union, 1998-2008 Mirela Kadric, University of Sydney
The act of remembering plays a crucial role in constructing national identity.1 So too, do transnational linkages arising from a pluralization of political spaces. These transnational linkages strengthen connections between various actors, both state and non-state. The questions that arise from this interconnectivity are: what is the future of national identity in the age of transnationalism? What happens to the ‘nation’ at a time where notions such as ‘state sovereignty’ and the ‘nation-state’ are being contested? These questions, although valid, implicitly de-emphasize the role that nationalism and national identity play in constructing transnational connections. While the concept of the nation-state is constantly changing, it does not completely eliminate the role of the nation in developing transnational relations. For instance, various nation-states rely on transnational relations with either other nation-states or institutions (such as the EU) to legitimate their national sovereignty as well as their national identity.2 This is the case with Kosovo and its relationship with the EU, where the EU’s dual identity as an ‘imagined community’ and a ‘transnational existence’ emerges.3 The former presents the EU as a ‘national’ body whose ‘European’ ideal—a multinational EU with member states sharing common ‘European’ 1 2
3
111
For constructive analysis on ‘identity’, see Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 28-64. While the EU is a politico-economic union, I will refer to it as an institution. By adopting this perspective, I will be able to combine the status of the EU as a union of 28 states together with its four main institutional frameworks: the European Parliament, the European Council, European Commission and the Council of the European Union. This will allow me to adopt the viewpoint of the EU as a ‘national’ actor with a unified transnational agenda, instead of a combined union with conflicting transnational interests. For analysis on the status of the EU, see John McCormick, Understanding the European Union: A Concise Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 6th ed., 2014). Benedict Anderson uses the term ‘imagined communities’ to refer to the way nations are formed based on representation—that is, the nation is a representative body that does not attach itself to the personal life of individuals, but rather their imagined connections to each other. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006). The term ‘transnational existence’ is used by Akira Iriye to refer to international organizations or institutions that attempt to establish connections across national boundaries despite existing as separate entities from nation-states. See Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15.
traits—has revealed itself as an objective for the European future of its member states, becoming the basis for the reimagining of Kosovar national history and memory.4 It is the EU’s status as a transnational entity that has enabled this ‘European’ ideal to influence the national politics of Kosovo.5 The result of this idiosyncratic interplay between Kosovo and the EU raises the question of what kind of ‘identity’ is desirable for Kosovo.6 This paper will explore the way the category ‘nation’ is shaped and reshaped, institutionalized and framed, how history and memory is restructured along national as well as transnational lines, and how transnational relations force a nation to reimagine its national history and memory. As such, my aim is twofold: to examine the extent to which Kosovar Albanians forged an identity through the act of remembering to legitimate their claims to national self-determination, and to examine how the EU defines the memory of the Kosovar nation through its status as an ‘imagined community’ with the power to recognize statehood. I begin by discussing the origins of the political problems of sovereignty in Kosovo and why they resurfaced in the 1980s as a contentious issue, drawing on the historical tensions between Albanians and Serbs. I examine how the Kosovo War influenced the emergence of new ways of thinking about Kosovar identity, that is, how a national myth became the symbol of Kosovar resistance. I then tie this issue of sovereignty and memory by looking at how it became subject to further reimagining as a result of Kosovo’s transnational link with the EU. In this instance, Kosovars began to identify with the idea of being ‘European’. Finally, I examine the implications of this relationship on other nation-states as well as on the EU itself. I make the conclusion that it is not about whether or not Kosovo 4
5
6
Kosovo’s relationship with the EU is not based on its EU membership. In fact, Kosovo has still not joined the EU due to the political and national tensions between it and Serbia. In this paper, ‘member-states’ will refer to EU members, aspirants, and those under the influence of the EU, unless explicitly stated. While I do borrow the term ‘transnational existence’ from Iriye (see footnote 2), I will also refer to the EU as a transnational entity for the reason that ‘existence’ does not fit well structurally in some cases. As such, both ‘existence’ and ‘entity’ will be used interchangeably. See Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira, ‘The European Union as a Model Power: Spreading Peace, Democracy, and Human Rights in the Wider World’, in The Foreign Policy of the European Union: Assessing Europe’s Role in the World, eds. Federiga Bindi and Irina Angelescu (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), 293-305.
truly desires a national or international state-building project; rather, it is about the way transnational linkages between nation-states and institutions have the potential to affect the national memory and identity of a nation. Memory and the ‘National’ Question Nationalism or national sentiment is complicated by the fact that meanings of nationalism continue to be contested, resulting in a multitude of theories, concepts, and categorical attempts.7 Although complicated, this opens up opportunities for crossovers between discourses, or an emergence of new ways of thinking about identity formation. Indeed, memory and identity are interrelated concepts, and, as John R. Gillis has argued, ‘the core meaning of any individual or group identity … is sustained by remembering’, and ‘what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity’.8 Kosovar identity is determined by the relations between antagonistic nationalities inside Kosovo—Albanians and Serbs—who base their national identity on a single, shared event: the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.9 Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’— where nations are formed on representation through imagined connection—can be applied to explain how it is not what happened during the battle that is important, but rather the significance of its aftermath; for it is the representation of the battle as a legend that has enabled Kosovars reimagine their identity against Serbian nationalism. Florian Bieber has argued that with regard to the Battle of Kosovo, Serbian political discourse focuses on the political manipulation of memory due to the revival of perceived national suffering throughout the 1980s.10 Here, Kosovo as a national idea as well as a territory re-entered Serbian national consciousness after Kosovar protests emerged in 1981 calling for the recognition of Kosovo as a republic independent from Serbia.11 From this, historiographical disputes surrounding the Battle of Kosovo revolved around territorial claims. For Serbian nationalists, Kosovo is seen as the cradle of the Serbian nation, and the Battle of Kosovo, where
the Turks defeated the Serbs, became ‘a totem or talisman of Serbian identity’.12 For Kosovar Albanians, however, this battle was used to claim independence from Serbian authority. Kosovo for them became the cradle of their nation for it was in Kosovo in 1868 that the national Albanian movement was established.13 As such, when the war in Kosovo broke out in 1998, both nations claimed history to be on their side. In this perspective, memory was used to bind a national identity to history. Richard Handler has argued that nations, as ‘natural things’ in the real world, are bound by ‘definite historical origins… that can be traced back to an indefinite past’.14 Even before 1998, Kosovars and Serbs have used memory to legitimate their claims to sovereignty. In 1974 Communist Yugoslavia, Kosovar Albanians were considered to be a narodnost (nationality) rather than a narod (nation).15 This justification on the part of the Communist Party (KPJ)—the idea that their homeland was outside Yugoslavia, not within—denied Albanians a republic, which, in turn, fueled their desire for recognition as a sovereign state.16 However, as the 1980s neared, the Battle of Kosovo was increasingly used to foment Serbian nationalism in an attempt to suppress Albanian claims for independence.17 However, national identity can also be reconstructed and reimagined to suit a political goal not necessarily tied to an ‘indefinite past’.18 Eric Hobsbawm has termed this process ‘invented traditions’.19 These ‘invented traditions’ are usually formed on the basis of ‘national sentiment’ that connects one group of people while differentiating it from another, leading to a sense of national identity and the development of collective memory.20 While the Battle of Kosovo is an important event in understanding Kosovar identity, it is the recent myth developed during and after the Kosovo War (1998-2008) that really shaped Kosovar memory. When the war erupted, the political party governing Kosovo—the Democratic League of Kosovo (DLK)—was at war with a rising resistance group known as
12 Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: Harper Collins, 7
Most notable historical works of nationalism include, though are not limited to: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation, trans. Ida Mae Snyder (Paris: CalmanLevy, 1882); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). For an overall assessment of various theories on nationalism, see John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 8 John R. Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. 9 For historiographical comparison on the Battle of Kosovo, see Anna di Lellio, The Battle of Kosovo 1389, trans. Robert Elsie (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 10 Florian Bieber, ‘Nationalist Mobilisation and Stories of Serb Suffering: The Kosovo Myth from 600th Anniversary to the Present’, Rethinking History 6, no. 1 (2002): 97. 11 Bieber, ‘Nationalist Mobilisation’, 99-100.
1998), 58.
13 Jelle Janssens, State-Building in Kosovo: A Plural Policing Perspective (Antwerp: Maklu, 2015), 51.
14 Richard Handler, ‘Is “Identity” a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?’, in 15 16 17 18
19 20
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 29. Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 39-40. Bieber, ‘Nationalist Mobilisation and Stories of Serb Suffering’, 100, 102. Ibid., 102. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1. Ibid.
112
the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).21 The KLA surfaced from the desire to create a sovereign state, and instigated small-scale guerrilla attacks against Serbian police and those who collaborated with them. On the other hand, Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of the DLK, refused to escalate Kosovar Albanian resistance to the level of armed confrontation. His reasoning was based partly on his Gandhian belief in non-violent resistance, and partly because he feared that the Serbs would use Kosovar resistance as an excuse for the mass extermination of the Kosovar population.22 Nevertheless, it was the KLA that gained the approval of the people upon the death of KLA’s militant leader, Adem Jashari. His death signaled a new turn in Kosovar memory as Kosovar Albanians began to label him as the new national hero. The imagery of Jashari became a mainstay in post-war Kosovo, becoming known as the komandant legjendar (the legendary commander): ‘a national hero who binds past and future generations of Kosovars to the nation’.23 But why did this figure emerge as the new national hero? Some historians have argued that national myths and claims on national identity usually result from trauma experienced after war.24 Such trauma manifests a ‘shared self-understanding’—a collective memory—of an ‘oppressed nation looking for political and psychological deliverance’.25 For Kosovar Albanians, this new hero symbolized a promise of a new statehood based on national suffering. Indeed, at the end of the war, Jashari emerged as the ‘builder of a new era’, whereupon he symbolized a historical shift in Kosovar history: the shift from Serbian oppression to national self-determination.26 Adem Jashari’s surviving nephew interpreted Jashari’s mythical status clearly, when he stated in an interview that Each nation has a saint and a story that is the foundation that forms the society, its basis. My family’s story is the link of a chain, a historical movement […] Albanians have always been under oppressive foreign power […] and there have been many moments of fighting for freedom: this is the Albanian national question in the Balkans.27 Here, the Kosovar Albanian struggle is presented as a long historical struggle for the national revival of an oppressed nation.
21 In Albanian, the DLK is called Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës (LDK) 22 23 24 25 26 27 113
while the KLA is referred to as Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës (UÇK). Ronald Dannreuther, ‘War in Kosovo: History, Development and Aftermath’, in Kosovo: Perceptions of War and its Aftermath, eds. Mary Buckley and Sally N. Commings (London: Continuum, 2001), 17. Anna di Lellio and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, ‘The Legendary Commander: The Construction of an Albanian Master-Narrative in Post-war Kosovo’, Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 3 (2006): 514. See Patrick Finney, ‘On Memory, Identity and War’, Rethinking History 6, no. 1 (2002): 1-13. Anna di Lellio and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, ‘The Legendary Commander’, 514. Ibid., 516. Quoted in Ibid., 517.
While it becomes clear that Adem Jashari represents a link to memory, his image was not entirely accepted at the grassroots level.28 Many Kosovar Albanians felt disenfranchized with the status of Kosovo and its history, preferring to look beyond the trajectory surrounding the Kosovo War and inclining toward the European ideals espoused by the EU.29 While Valur Ingimundarson argued that the refusal of the international community to address Kosovo’s sovereign status seriously from 1999 to 2005 made it inevitable that Albanians would focus more on the past than on the future, he failed to emphasize the growing attachment of Kosovo to international institutions, particularly to the EU, as it was the policies of the EU that began to shape the national identity of Kosovar Albanians.30 While the objective was still based on national self-determination, this time, it was formed not from national myths, but from the desire to become a modern nation-state: nationhood was sought by getting close to ‘Europe’.31 For Ingimundarson, this shift came as a result of the realities of the Kosovo War.32 Far from being a narrative of ‘heroism and victimhood’, which itself is marked by ‘ambiguities, contradictions and selective memories’, the Kosovo War was fought in a ‘distinctly unheroic fashion’: air power by NATO, with ‘laser-guided bombs and precision guided weapons’. In other words, he concludes, it was ‘the antithesis to what the KLA was trying to project’.33 If the formation of collective memory is based on revitalization and the ‘invention of traditions’, then the reconstruction of both collective and individual identity in post-war Kosovo is nurtured more by new national inventions, and increasingly oriented toward an international presence in Kosovar national historiography and memory, than it is by, and toward, historical or ‘invented traditions’.34 The shift has moved from the emphasis of national history based on an indefinite past, to national history driven by the need to build an efficient, modern state. As Clifford Geertz has argued, the modern nation-state is driven by ‘allegiance to a civil state’ with other states and institutions, rather than traditions.35 The next section will explore how Kosovo’s transnational relationship with the EU led to the further reimagining of Kosovar identity. The EU’s Transnational Influence over Kosovo 28 Ibid., 518. 29 See Ruth Seifert, ‘Nationalism and Beyond: Memory and Identity in
30 31 32 33 34 35
Post-war Kosovo/Kosova’, in After Civil War: Division, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation in Contemporary Europe, ed. Bill Kissane (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 213-243. Valur Ingimundarson, ‘The Politics of Memory and the Reconstruction of Albanian National Identity in Post-war Kosovo’, History and Memory 19, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 2007), 98. Seifert, ‘Nationalism and Beyond’, p. 238. Ingimundarson, ‘The Politics of Memory’, 105. Ibid. Seifert, ‘Nationalism and Beyond’, 238. Clifford Geertz, ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’, in Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), 108, 110.
As a study of ‘movements, flows, and circulations’ and the way they cut across national boundaries, transnationalism began to challenge traditional notions of territory and national identity upon its emergence in the 1990s.36 It challenges how national boundaries are understood, leading to their reinterpretation, both in the territorial as well as the national sense.37 Hobsbawm hinted at this new change in 1992, asserting that the end of the twentieth century would see nationalism become ‘historically less important’ in conditioning public policies as new supranational structures take its place. This process itself will give rise to new entities unclassifiable as ‘nations’ in the classical sense.38 Simply put, transnationalism defines a nation not only by its immediate territorial space, but also by its relations with other nation-states and institutions. From the perspective of memory, Gillis was right to note that neither memory nor identity can be regarded as natural facts for ‘they are political constructs that are highly selective, inscriptive rather than descriptive, serving particular interests and ideological positions’.39 For Kosovo, it was the prospect of a European future—one away from the narrative of tradition—that motivated the emergence of a transnational link with the EU, in which the EU’s status as an ‘imagined community’ influenced the reimagining of Kosovar memory.40 However, the idea of ‘European identity’ remains ambiguous. It can refer to either the identity of Europe as a product of the unique historical and cultural process that led to the establishment of a European continent, or it can refer to the identity of the people as Europeans constructed through col-
36 Literature on transnationalism has expanded since coming to the
37
38 39 40
forefront of historical debate, with multiple historians across fields commenting on its influence on the study of history. Ian Tyrrell, ‘Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice’, Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (2009): 454; Chris Bayly et. al., ‘American Historical Review Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1445. For a general discussion on transnationalism see Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick and J. T. Way, ‘Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis’, American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September, 2008): 625-648; Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘A “Transnational” History of Society: Continuity or New Departure?’, in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, eds. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 39–51; C. A. Bayly, et. al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, 1440–1464. In the case of Kosovo, it is the latter that is affected by transnationalism for the reason that its link with the EU has challenged the nation’s idea about itself, its history and its memory. This will be explored within this section. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1992), 183, 191. Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, 3-4. Denisa Kostovicova and Natalija Basic, ‘Conference Report Transnationalism in the Balkans: The Emergence, Nature and Impact of Cross-National Linkages on an Enlarged and Enlarging Europe, 26-27 November 2004’, Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (November 2005): 585.
lective social imagining – that is, identifying with Europe as a nation.41 Gerard Delanty effectively distinguished between the two when he wrote that ‘the idea of Europe existed long before people actually began to identify with it and to see themselves as Europeans’ – the former is presented as an imagined geography, while the latter is an imagined community.42 Both definitions highlight how Europe is ‘embedded within connections and circulations’, which then ‘crystallized [Europe] into a construct that has received growing attention in the modern age’.43 In the case of Kosovo, it is the idea of Europe as a nation that influenced the ‘revival of a national identity in a new and different form’.44 Part of this motivation for a ‘European’ future can be ascribed to the confusion over the Kosovar identity by Kosovars themselves. Attempting to foster a new image for Kosovo a year before its declaration of independence, linguist and editor Migjen Kelmend put it rather aptly When you ask a Kosovar, ‘are you a Kosovar?’ They will answer ‘no, I am Albanian’. If you ask a Serb, ‘are you a Kosovar?’ They will answer ‘no, I am a Serb’. Then, who is Kosovar? 45 Even Kosovo’s Hashim Thaçi expressed that a ‘Kosovo identity does not exist’, however, he added, ‘but the taboo is beginning to crack’.46 Sure enough, upon gaining independence on 17 February 2008, old traditions—those defined by Serbian nationalism and Albanian historiography47—were recast, as third-generation Kosovar historians and locals began to think about ways to appear ‘European’ and place Kosovo under international sovereignty. Some Kosovar historians drove this shift as a result of their view of history as a political activity rather than a scholarly discipline. For example, Jahja Dran41 Józef Niżnik, ‘National Identity and the Process of European
Integration’, Polish Sociological Review 4, no. 132 (2000): 393.
42 Gerald Gelanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London:
43 44
45
46 47
Macmillan Press, 1995), 4. Michael Bruter also makes a distinction, stating that there is ‘a civic meaning attached to the EU and a cultural meaning attached to Europe as a civilisation.’ See Michael Bruter, Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), 110-11. Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Learning by Doing: Notes about the Making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational history’, Journal of Modern European History 6, no. 2 (2008): 177. Niżnik, ‘National Identity’, 385. See also Lisbeth Aggestam, ‘The European Union at the Crossroads: Sovereignty and Integration’, in Rethinking the European Union: Institutions, Interests and Identities, eds. Alice Landau and Richard G. Whitman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 75-92. Quoted in Dan Bilefsky, ‘A Difficult Question for Kosovars: Who Are We?’, The New York Times, December 9, 2007, accessed June 2, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/world/europe/09ihtkosovo.4.8660025.html. Ibid. For an overview of Albanian historiography, see Robert Elsie, Studies in Modern Albanian Literature and Culture (New York: Boulder, 1996).
114
qolli stressed that the time had now come to rewrite Kosovar history.48 But it was Jusuf Buxhovi, a former member of the DLK, who effectively placed Kosovo on the map of European historiography.49 Considering that the Albanians who inhabit Kosovo are of Pelasgian origin, he argued that Kosovo was not the cradle of the Serbian nation, as Serbs suggest; rather, it is the cradle of European civilization.50 In this way, Albanian history—and now Kosovar history—is presented as being part of the Occidental world. Although influenced by the politics of the DLK, Buxhovi’s approach to Kosovar identity is tied to KLA historiography which strongly emphasizes that it is only by gaining statehood that Kosovar history and memory can be independent from Albanian historiography.51 Ruth Siefert argues that this rethinking of Kosovar national identity is a natural process for newly formed (or acknowledged) nation-states, as once the ‘processes of nation-building have been initiated’, she argues, the ‘question of “what is the nation?” surges up.’52 Kosovar locals also identify with, and express, the need for Kosovar history and memory to be reimagined as a European one. Based on in-depth interviews with Kosovar Albanians, Seifert highlighted that many felt that by having their national identity and memory tied to Albanian discourse, Kosovo appears ‘not very advanced’.53 Some expressed that Kosovo is ‘too traditional and should adopt the good things from Western European culture’.54 Thus, according to one Kosovar, the only solution is to ‘become part of Europe.’55 Such aspirations for a European identity is linked to Kosovar memory as defined through collective experiences. Often, what is reimagined is closely linked to the reconstruction of the future. In this case, the will to move away from, or even forget, an Albanian past has led to the development of a desire to become European. For Kosovar locals, established memories remind them of a painful past, during which Kosovars were marginalized from the economic, social and political sphere because of their ethnic background as Albanians, leaving them subordinate to the
‘ethnic “majorities” around them’.56 As a result, these locals expressed that the only way to overcome this is ‘not so much seen in developing a national culture’—like that in Albania—‘but in making Kosovo European’.57 How else to do so, but to establish a strong transnational link with the EU?58 Indeed, the EU symbolized a new beginning, so much so that the new Kosovo flag that emerged on independence day resembled the flag of the EU: a map of Kosovo set against the backdrop of European blue with six yellow stars (representing six ethnic communities within Kosovo).59 By replicating the EU flag, Kosovo established a permanent transnational link with the EU and the European community in general. This is because the EU flag symbolizes European integration, going beyond the EU itself to incorporate ‘Europe’s unity and identity in a wider sense’.60 Although this desire for a European identity may seem like a conscious decision on the part of the Kosovars, another dimension in this complex relationship is the idea that the EU, as an ‘imagined community’, cultivates these ‘symbols’ (i.e. the flag) to transmit a European ‘meaning’ onto its member-states.61 The member-states disseminate this identity to their nation who then utilize these symbols to express a new national allegiance toward the EU. Thomas Risse has argued that by incorporating a European identity into the very content of their national identity, as in the case of Kosovo and its flag, national identities become—or appear—Europeanized.62 In a speech about shaping an effective EU foreign policy, Javier Solana highlights how this process of Europeanization (i.e. adopting a European identity) contributes to the growing interaction between the ‘national’ and the ‘European’ spheres.63 He states,
48 Bilefsky, ‘A Difficult Question for Kosovars’. 49 Oliver Jens Schmitt, ‘Historiography in Post-Independence Kosovo’,
56 Janet Rieneck, ‘Seizing the Past, Forging the Present: Changing
50
51
52 53 54 55 115
in Civic and Uncivic Values in Kosovo: History, Politics, and Value Transformation, eds. Sabrina P. Ramet, Albert Simkus and Ola Listhaug (New York: European University Press, 2015), 60, 62. Ibid., 67. Pelasgian: of Greek origin, or relating to Greek ancestry. See Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J. Fischer, eds., Albanian Identities: Myth and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Third-generation Kosovar historians are split into three schools of thought: the Tirana school is largely based on Orientalist discourse, with some historians claiming it to be conformist to Yugoslav nationalism; the Pristina school attempts to link Kosovar memory to the Albanian nation-state; and, the KLA strongly emphasises national self-determination. The DLK is less prominent, but still influential, highlighting Albanian links to Europe. See Schmitt, ‘Historiography in Post-Independence Kosovo’, 53-74. Seifert, ‘Nationalism and Beyond’, 213. Ibid., 234. Ibid. Ibid.
From the outside it looks like a loose ‘European model’ exists, both as a way of organizing our societies and in approaching international affairs… There can be
57 58
59 60 61 62 63
Visions of Self and Nation Among Kosovo-Albanians’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 11, no. 1 (1993): 105. Siefert, ‘Nationalism and Beyond’, 234. Kosovo’s relationship with the EU is not based on its EU candidature. In fact, Kosovo has still not joined the EU due to the political and national tensions between it and Serbia. See Eiki Berg, ‘Reexamining Sovereignty Claims in Changing Territorialities: Reflections from “Kosovo Syndrome”’, Geopolitics 14, no. 2 (2009): 219-234. Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo, 89; Tim Judah, Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144. ‘The European Flag’, European Union, accessed June 4, 2016, http:// europa.eu/about-eu/basic-information/symbols/flag/index_en.htm. Brent F. Nelsen and James L. Guth, Religion and the Struggle for European Union: Confessional Culture and the Limits of Integration (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2015), 327-8. Thomas Risse, A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 38. Dimitris Papadimitriou, et. al., ‘To Build a State: Europeanisation, EU Actorness and State-Building in Kosovo’, European Foreign Affairs Review 12 (2007): 225.
no simple export of whatever we think the European model is, but the EU is seen as a source of inspiration. And of course, imitation and adaption are easier than invention.64 This statement also exemplifies how, as a result of transnational linkages, the EU is able to take part in the national politics of its member-states. As such, in being ‘sustained by increasing transnational linkages and identities’, Kosovar politics has ultimately been reworked to suit the politics of its transnational influence—the EU.65 This reworking of Kosovar politics as well as the transmission of symbols can be ascribed to the EU’s insecurity over its lack of decision-making in Kosovo’s desire for independence from 1998 to 2008. The Spanish Minister for Europe, Alberto Navarro, expressed his frustration over the fact that the future of Kosovo was ‘decided in Washington…and not in Europe’, seeing as Kosovo’s claim for independence was essentially a European issue.66 The result of this inaction, however, led to the (semi-)permanent presence of the EU in Kosovo. Indeed, from 2000 to 2008, the EU implemented the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAP). The aim of SAP was to ensure that EU member-states ‘adopt and implement international and European standards’ along with ‘achieving stabilization and a transition to a market economy…for the preparation of EU accession’.67 But SAP was not established alone. Also in 2000, the European Agency of Reconstruction (EAR) opened in Pristina and has since been the largest and the most ‘visible’ actor of the EU in Kosovo. Its initial aim was humanitarian work after the Kosovo War, though it subsequently began to focus on EU institution building throughout the country. As a result, it became Kosovo’s largest foreign donor, channeling over 1.1 billion euros.68 This then led to the establishment of an EU office in 2004.69 For Anna di Lellio and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, this process of taking part in the politics of the nation is problematic. ‘The international agenda [the EU], in attempting to impose its own universalistic, abstract values, appears to be an obstacle to the local state-building project’.70 As such, they assert that the Albanian storyline, based on ‘heroic resistance’, reaffirms Albanian agency and its commitment to independence.71 By obstructing this process, Albanian history and memory that
64 Emphasis added. Javier Solana, Shaping an Effective EU Foreign Policy 65 66 67 68 69 70 71
(Brussels: Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 2005), accessed on June 2, 2016, http://www.kas.de/wf/en/33.6011/#. Natalija Basic, ‘Transnationalism in the Balkans: An Introduction’, Ethnopolitics 5, no. 3 (September 2006), 218. ‘EU Splits on Kosovo Recognition’, BBC News, February 18, 2008, accessed on June 6, 2016, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ europe/7249909.stm. Janssens, State-Building in Kosovo, 295. Papadimitriou et. al., ‘To Build a State’, 230. Ibid. Di Lellio and Schwandner-Sievers, ‘The Legendary Commander’, 527. Ibid.
defined much of Kosovo’s past becomes erased. Although valid, their argument fails to take into consideration the fact that it is Kosovar memory and national identity that is in the process of being reimagined—in opposition to Albanian discourse—for the reason that Kosovars are in the process of building a state where their nationhood is defined by getting close to ‘Europe’, not Albania. Nevertheless, they raise the contradictory impact of transnationalism in relation to Kosovo’s—or other nationstates’—quest for European integration, in that it is used as a stimulus for advancing yet hampering national self-determination. This then leads to a polarizing effect between and within nation-states. The last section of this paper will examine the implication Kosovo’s transnational link with the EU has on the institution itself. Kosovo and the EU: Implications Prior to becoming transnational, Kosovo was governed by ‘parallel institutions’ whereby the Serbian government built an administrative structure in Kosovo around Serbian law as part of its strategy to hold on to Kosovo and challenge the independence project built by Kosovars.72 When Kosovo declared its independence, its transnational link with the EU allowed it to rebuild the Kosovar state on its own terms, away from Serbian authority.73 This, however, only replaced Serbia with the EU. Thus, because of the EU’s status as an ‘imagined community’—that is, a European nation—Kosovo embodied its ‘fundamental freedoms’. Title 5, article 21 of the consolidated version of the Treaty on the EU reads, The Union’s action in the international scene should be guided by principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement, and which it seeks to advance in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms.74 While it may lead to a greater consciousness of European ideals, this objective of Europeanization is not straightforward. For example, in prioritizing its transnational link with the EU, Kosovo has neglected opportunities to strengthen transnational ties with Serbia. This neglect demonstrates the diminished potency of the emerging transnational links within Kosovo between different groups and, more broadly, between Kosovo and its surrounding neighbors. From this stems the process of na-
72 Chris van der Borgh, ‘Resisting the International State-Building in
Kosovo’, Problems of Post-Communism 59, no. 2 (March/April 2012): 31, 36-7. 73 Vedran Džihić and Helmut Kramer, ‘Kosovo after Independence: Is the EU’s EULEX Mission Delivering on its Promises?’, International Policy Analysis (July 2009): 3. 74 EUR-Lex, ‘Consolidated Version of the Treaty of on the European Union’, Official Journal of the European Communities 59, C 202 (2016): 28, accessed on June 9, 2016, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legalcontent/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:C:2016:202:FULL&from=EN.
116
tionalization, as nation-states are ‘forced to formulate national positions and vital interests’ to secure their national identity and memory.75 This is precisely what occurred. On February 21st, 2008, Kosovo’s independence instigated mass Serbian demonstrations: some 200,000 Serbs gathered in protest against the proclamation of a ‘false state’ on Serbian territory.76 Under a huge banner ‘Kosovo is Serbia’, they proclaimed What is Kosovo? Where is Kosovo? Whose is Kosovo? […] Kosovo – that’s Serbia’s first name. That’s how it has been forever […] There is no force, no threat, and no punishment big and hideous enough for any Serb, at any time, to say anything different but, Kosovo is Serbia!77 Patrick Hutton’s conceptualization of memory is useful in understanding the Serbian reaction to Kosovar independence. He states that the result of memory consists of two moments: repetition and recollection, in which the ‘past exists insofar as it continues to be in living memory [repetition], and it is so remembered as long as it serves the present need [recollection]’.78 For Serbia, to react this way was necessary, because Kosovo, ‘as an idea and a political problem’, has been the cornerstone of Serbia’s national identity and has been politically central to Serbia since the 1980s.79 In many ways, then, this protest highlights how memory becomes politicized in order to serve the current national interests of a nation-state as a result of another nation-state’s transnational link with institutions such as the EU, who are able to—directly or indirectly—influence the sovereign status of its member-states. The question thus arises: to what extent do transformations of memory and identity promote or hinder transnational linkages within and between nation-states? Further, what implications does this have on the EU itself? European integration has, in some cases, thwarted existing transnational relations in South East Europe (SEE) as SEE states are divided into aspirants on the one hand and EU candidates on the other.80 Kosovo’s independence complicated Serbia’s prospect of becoming a candidate of the EU, which hindered the EU’s integration project. Question 150 of Serbia’s
pre-accession questionnaire reads, ‘please provide an overview of your relations with Kosovo and your efforts to ensure effective cooperation on EU related matters and inclusive regional cooperation.’81 This question, implying that accession to the EU requires a resolution to the deadlock between Kosovo and Serbia, puts Serbia at odds with the institution. For Serbia, the objective of accession is to have Kosovo as Serbia’s constituent territory. Thus, ‘EU demands for the normalization of relations with Kosovo’ is seen a direct threat to Serbian sovereignty.82 This reaction can be partly be ascribed to the fact that in 2008, only 46 out of 192 UN and 22 out of 27 EU member-states formally recognized Kosovo.83 This gave Serbia the incentive to proclaim Kosovo was a ‘false state’, as not all recognize Kosovo.84 Seeing Serbia as the heart of SEE, the implication of this tension on the EU is that it threatens the stability of SEE, which would then directly affect the EU’s credibility as an ‘imagined community’—its image as a European nation—and its future chances of expansion. For Peter G. Mandaville, who uses Arjun Appadurai’s term ‘translocality’, the implications of national reimagining on the part of the Kosovars on the one hand, and the stringent hold onto national memory by the Serbs on the other, illuminates how a change in the nature of understanding boundaries has led to a disjuncture between ‘one’s legal identity as a citizen of a territorial state and one’s political identity as an actor in the public sphere’.85 Understanding the dynamics of memory and national identity requires going beyond thinking of the nation as ‘real’ phenomena to, instead, understanding how nationhood works as a practical category, is institutionalized, and how it can be viewed as a contingent event.86 As such, another implication can be drawn from Kosovo’s national reimagining and its transnational link with the EU: more communities within, or under the sovereignty of, nation-states are developing national consciousness. While the emerging desires for independence allows the ‘Eu81 European Commission, Questionnaire: Information requested by the
82 75 Basic, ‘Transnationalism in the Balkans’, 219. See also Karl Magnus
83
76 77 78
84 85
79 80 117
Johansson, ‘Europeanisation and its Limits: The Case of Sweden’, Journal of International Relations and Development 2, no. 2 (1999): 169–186. ‘EU Splits on Kosovo Recognition’. Quoted in Judah, Kosovo, 146. Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), 17; Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations 69 (2000): 132. Jelena Obradović-Wochnik and Alexander Wochnik, ‘Europeanising the “Kosovo Question”: Serbia’s Policies in the Context of EU Integration’, West European Politics 35, no. 5 (2012): 1166. Kostavica and Basic, ‘Conference Report Transnationalism in the Balkans’, 585.
86
European Commission to the Government of Serbia for the Preparation of the Opinion on the Application of Serbia for Membership of the European Union (November 2010), accessed on June 6, 2016, http://www.seio. gov.rs/upload/documents/upitnik/srb_questionnnaire_engl.pdf. Obradović-Wochnik and Wochnik, ‘Europeanising the “Kosovo Question”’, 1159, 1164. Since 2008, Croatia has become a member of the EU, totalling the number of member-states to 28. Berg, ‘Reexamining Sovereignty Claims in Changing Territorialities’, 225; Obradović-Wochnik, ‘Europeanising the “Kosovo Question”’, 1164. ‘EU Splits on Kosovo Recognition’. Appadurai used ‘translocality’ to refer to the ways situated communities become extended through the geographical mobility of their inhabitants across space. See Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Production of Locality’, in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 204; Peter G. Mandaville, ‘Territory and Translocality: Discrepant Idioms of Political Identity’, Journal of International Studies 28, no. 3 (1999): 657. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13-22.
ropean’ community to expand, it also challenges the identity of the EU as tensions between EU member-states and their de facto minorities increase. For example, Kosovo’s independence not only increased tensions between Kosovo and Serbia, but it led to the Republika Srpska – the Serb dominated entity in Bosnia – to demand the same rights of secession.87 Serbia’s leader at the time proclaimed: ‘we do not see a single reason why we should not be granted the right to self-determination’.88 On the other hand, while Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) believed a similar result like that of Kosovo can be achieved for them, the Turkish Cypriot president proclaimed that ‘there is no direct link between the situation in Kosovo and the Cyprus problem.’89 The People’s Party of TRNC thought otherwise, stating that ‘Kosovo’s independence brought a new chance to world politics, that a nation cannot imprison another people in its sovereignty’.90 Although TRNC declared independence in 1983, it is recognized only by Turkey. Their desire, this time, was to gain further recognition, though it placed them at odds with the EU candidate, Southern Cyprus.91 These two examples highlight the problem facing the EU as a result of its transnational link with Kosovo.92 By desiring independence, these two de facto states are: offering prospects for EU expansion as, according to Józef Niżnik, ‘the national identity of the people of Europe will inevitably have to come to terms with the European identity’; while also increasing instability within the EU due to conflicting desires within and between EU member-states.93 Kosovo’s declaration of independence, resulting from EU involvement in Kosovo since 1999, has encouraged both stateless minorities and inspired nationalists within nation-states to advocate for independence based on the Kosovo model. In this way, national identity and memory becomes politicized through transnational linkages. Pierre-Yves Saunier emphasized the significance of this interconnectedness between identity and transnationalism by arguing that, ‘history’s purpose might not be to substitute a history of the nationstate with a history without or against the nation-state, but to find a way to study how nation-states and flows of all sorts are entangled components of the modern age.’94 The EU’s sta87 Misha Glenny, ‘Black Cloud over the Balkans’, New Statesman,
88 89 90 91
92 93 94
December 6, 2007, accessed June 11, 2016, http://www. newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2007/12/serbia-kosovo-russiabalkans. ‘Dodik Insists RS has Right to Self-Determination’, B-92, March 9, 2008, accessed June 11, 2016, http://www.b92.net/eng/news/region. php?yyyy=2008&mm=03&dd=09&nav_id=48307. Quoted in Berg, ‘Reexamining Sovereignty Claims in Changing Territorialities’, 229. Ibid. Selçuk Çolakoğlu, ‘Time for Independence for Northern Cyprus’, Turkish Weekly, November 2, 2011, accessed June 12, 2016, http:// www.turkishweekly.net/2011/11/02/comment/time-for-independencefor-northern-cyprus/. For further examples see Rick Fawn, ‘The Kosovo and Montenegro Effect’, International Affairs 84, no. 2 (March 2008): 269-294. Niżnik, ‘National Identity’, 388. Saunier, ‘Learning by Doing’, 169.
tus as an ‘imagined community’ and ‘transnational existence’ provides insight into the way conceptions of identity—being European—can be transmitted across borders and within nation-states, to the point that this transnational linkage leads to the reimagining of a nation’s history and memory as they incorporate the image of Europe into their identity. Conclusion The national identity and memory of Kosovo has undergone a series of reconfigurations. This process emerged as a result of three key instances. Firstly, Kosovo’s historical tensions with Serbia fostered new national aspirations for an independent state and therefore a desire to shift Kosovo’s history away from Serbian sovereignty. Secondly, consisting of a predominately large Albanian population (92 per cent),95 Kosovar identity has been influenced by Albanian historiography. This resulted in the confusion over Kosovar identity, which then led to Kosovar historians and locals to emphasize a new national outlook— the idea of a European identity, structured in opposition to Albanian history and memory. Thirdly, Kosovo’s transnational relationship with the European Union solidified this new national reimagining as a result of the EU’s ability to disseminate a European outlook onto its member-states. The interplay between these three actors over Kosovo—Serbia, Albania and the EU—means that Kosovar national identity and memory can never be fixed. This paper argued that it is not about whether or not Kosovo truly desires either a national or international state-building project; rather, it is about the way transnational linkages have the potential to affect the national memory and identity of a nation. It analyzed the historiography of memory and transnationalism to argue how ‘national identification and what it is believed to imply’ can shift dramatically and quite quickly.96 Although referring to the Balkan region in general and how they perceive themselves, Diana Mishkova’s summary can be applied to capture the interplay between memory and transnationalism in Kosovo: ‘it is…easier to presume that just as the discourse of Balkanism has helped to shape the selfunderstanding of Europe, so too have Balkan perceptions of Europe shaped local narratives of collective cultural and social identity’.97 It is Kosovo’s adaptation of a European identity that will most likely result in a more stable self-conception of Kosovar identity.
95 Republika e Kosovës, Kosova në Shifra 2008 [Kosovo in Figures 2008] (Pristina: Enti i Statistikës së Kosovës, 2009), 10.
96 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 11. 97 Diana Mishkova, ‘Symbolic Geographies and Visions of Identity: A
Balkan Perspective’, European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 2 (2008): 239.
118
Ideas in Context: Conversation with Quentin Skinner Interview conducted by Hansong Li Chicago Journal of History (CJH): Thank you for joining us in this conversation. Let’s begin with a question about the discipline itself. How would you distinguish the work of an intellectual historian from that of philosophers, political theorists, and historians of ideas, among others, who employ different methodologies to study the same texts? Quentin Skinner (QS): I would say that the intellectual historian is someone who studies bodies of texts and aspires to understand them so far as possible in their own terms. Such an historian will consequently be recognizable as someone who respects certain technical constraints: not using translations, avoiding the modernization of texts, always taking care to use the best editions, and so forth. The distinctive task of such historians seems to me that of trying to situate the texts they study within whatever contexts help to explain what gave rise to the texts in question, and to identify what specific problems they were designed to solve. I should add that in speaking of texts I am using the term in a familiar but extended sense that encompasses not merely philosophical treatises and works of literature, but also films, paintings, buildings and other such artifacts, all of which for me count as texts.
Photo by Hansong Li
Quentin Skinner is an intellectual historian known for his pioneering work on early-modern European political thought. He was educated at Bedford School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Author of such works as The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) and Visions of Politics (2002) he served as the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, and currently as the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London. Professor Skinner has traveled worldwide to share his philosophical insights. Recently, he delivered a lecture at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium, entitled “How Should We Think about Freedom?” And on September 9th 2016, Professor Skinner discussed his intellectual journey and political visions with the Chicago Journal of History at his house in London. 119
You ask how I would distinguish this approach from that of philosophers and political theorists who often study the same texts. If we are speaking of historians of philosophy, I would say that nowadays many of them respect the same constraints and undertake similar tasks. But if we are speaking of social and political theorists, then some by contrast focus almost exclusively on the internal logic of texts and how their specific concepts and arguments should be understood. This kind of analysis can of course be highly illuminating, although the examining of such arguments without reference to the circumstances that gave rise to them sometimes looks to me strangely disembodied. There is also a danger of what my colleague Lea Ypi likes to describe as the sanitizing of texts. Suppose, for example, you offer a purely analytical account of John Locke’s theory of property and his views about the labor theory of value. Isolating the contents of his discussion in this way, you can hardly fail to occlude the extent to which his analysis was at the same time connected not merely with the denial of property rights to women but with slavery and imperialism. Such an approach, to repeat, inevitably sanitizes the text. You also ask about historians of ideas, although I am not sure that many scholars would nowadays want to describe themselves in those terms. There have been many histories of ideas, some of them celebrated in their time: for example, histories of the idea of progress, the great chain of being, the social contract, the perfectibility of man and so on. But in my mind this
approach raises many doubts. What do we mean by writing the history of an idea? Do we mean the history of the verbal expressions of a concept, or of the concept itself? If we simply link together those who have invoked some particular idea, how do we convey a sense of its role and place—marginal or central, agreed or contested—in different historical periods? Are we happy with the devaluation of agency involved in this approach? Is there really a history of ideas to be written at all, as opposed to a history of the changing ways in which ideas have been debated and put to use? CJH: In what ways do you think the field of intellectual history has changed since you first published “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” in 1969?1 QS: The discipline has been transformed in so many ways that it is impossible to survey them briefly. But I think the most important change is that intellectual history is much more widely studied than it was when I started out in the 1960s. One obvious reflection of this increasing popularity has been the emergence of new journals in the field: History of European Ideas in the 1970s, History of Political Thought in the 1980s, The Intellectual History Review in the 1990s, Modern Intellectual History about a decade ago, and several other similar initiatives. With this expansion, a number of sub-disciplines have risen to greater prominence. Perhaps the most important has been the history of science, which has also been the site of some of the most sophisticated methodological debates ever since Thomas Kuhn’s pathfinding work of the early 1960s.2 We have also seen the development of what might be called a democratized form of intellectual history, in which the focus of attention is not on professional thinkers but on the outlook of ordinary people. Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Davis and Keith Thomas have all written masterpieces in this genre.3 Meanwhile, everyone has been influenced by feminist intellectual historians, who have raised new questions as well as expanding the range of texts routinely read by students. A more recent development is that, like so much historical scholarship, intellectual history has increasingly become global in its reach. Among new approaches to canonical texts, I need to mention the important work done by Reinhart Koselleck and his associates in tracing the genealogies of key concepts in western thought.4 I should also like to speak up for what has come to be called the Cambridge School approach, with which I have been associated. We have been attempting to situate classic texts within the circumstances of their production, and in doing so to question 1 2 3 4
Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”. History and Theory, Vol. 8 (1969) Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922 – 1996), American physicist, historian and philosopher of science, author of the 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Carlo Ginzburg, (1939—), Italian historian; Natalie Zemon Davis, (1928—) Canadian and American historian; Sir Keith Vivian Thomas (1933—), British historian. Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006), German historian
the canon itself. Some major historians have worked in this idiom, such as my friends John Dunn and John Pocock,5 and a younger generation of scholars is now carrying this approach along new paths. CJH: In retrospect, what have you judged to be the strongest criticisms of your method in the past few decades, and how have you responded to them? QS: One of the recurrent criticisms to which I was originally subjected—for example by Howard Warrender—was that my questioning of the ‘perennial wisdom’ supposedly embodied in our philosophical traditions, and my insistence on the need for a contextual approach even to the most canonical works, rendered the study of the history of social and political ideas pointless.6 This criticism always seemed to me to embody a depressingly philistine view of the value of historical understanding. The suggestion appears to be that, unless the past can be used as a mirror in which we can see our own values and attitudes reflected, then it cannot be of any interest to us. But I don’t believe that many people think in these terms nowadays; our culture seems to have become much more historically-minded. I should add that there have been two main philosophical criticisms – if I may speak so grandly – that have repeatedly been levelled at my work. One is that I try to defend an indefensible equation between intended meanings and the meanings of texts. The other is that my approach commits me to a self-defeating form of conceptual relativism. Neither of these judgments seems to me warranted, but both need to be properly addressed—so far as I am competent to do so. I don’t want to give an excessively long answer to your question at this stage, but I very much hope we can come back to these objections at a later point in our conversation. CJH: What in your formative years first sparked your interest in early modern intellectual history, and for what reason did you focus on Anglophone political theorists such as Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes, and later the Italian Renaissance—notably Machiavelli? QS: My special interest in early-modern history was initially sparked at school. We were taught that there were two formative periods in British history, the sixteenth-century Reformation and the seventeenth-century constitutional revolution, and we studied both in considerable depth. This involved some examination of the intellectual background to politics, which is how I first came to read Thomas More’s Utopia as well as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and John Locke’s Two Treatises of
5 6
John Montfort Dunn (1940—), political theorist; John Pocock (1924—), historian of political thought Howard Warrender, (1922-1985) Professor of Political Theory and Institutions at the University of Sheffield. He authored “Political Theory and Historiograpy: A Reply to Professor Skinner of Hobbes” in The Historical Journal Vol. 22. No. 4 (Dec. 1979) pp. 931-940
120
Government. You ask how my interests then broadened in the direction of the Italian Renaissance. This development initially arose out of my teaching obligations at Cambridge. I was appointed to a University Lectureship in 1965, and asked to give a course on early-modern political theory, which in those days meant starting with Machiavelli. I had of course read him as an undergraduate, but as soon as I began to study him in depth I found myself instantly hooked. This didn’t by any means happen to me with some of the other theorists on whom I was asked to lecture, and I cannot satisfactorily explain what it was about Machiavelli that I found so riveting. But perhaps there is no great puzzle here, because finding Machiavelli riveting is not an uncommon experience. CJH: That brings us to our next question, which attempts to situate your work in historical polemics. In Visions of Politics you speak of the “performativity of texts and the need to treat them intertextually,” and suggest that the performativity of texts can “validly be treated as a property of the texts in themselves.” Is there also performativity in your intellectual work? In what way is your scholarship not only words but also deeds, to invoke your speech-act theory, and what kind of “intervention” have you intended to project into today’s ideological and intellectual polemics?7 In other words, what do you do, in thinking and writing? QS: One kind of intervention I’ve tried to make is methodological. If I were to express it in speech-act terms, as you ask me to do, I would say that in my early essays I was trying to raise doubts and to issue warnings about some prevailing ways of studying intellectual history, especially the history of political thought, and even to satirize and ridicule them. By the way, you refer to speech-act theory as if it were my own intellectual property, but my thinking about this aspect of the philosophy of language has at all times been overwhelmingly indebted to Wittgenstein’s insight that words are also deeds, and to Austin’s theory of performative utterances, especially as developed by Strawson and Searle.8
7
8
121
Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics, general preface; “Interpretation and understanding of speech acts”, in Regarding Method, P. 118; Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. “I approach Hobbes’ political theory not simply as a general system of ideas but also as a polemical intervention in the ideological conflicts of his time”; Hobbes thinks it is absurd to talk about ‘unfreedom’ without pointing at specific ways in which an impediment is imposed; Wittgenstein: words are also deeds (1958, 546, p. 146); Skinner: “…not merely what Hobbes is saying but also what he is doing in propounding his arguments…my governing assumption is that even the most abstract works of political theory are never above the battle; they are always part of the battle…seething polemics underlying the deceptively smooth surface of his argument.” preface, xvi. Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (1919-2006), English philosopher; John Searle (1932—), American philosopher; John Langshaw “J. L.” Austin (1911-1960), English philosopher.
More recently, however, I have become more interested in what I might call substantive interventions. I have come to feel that the range of concepts we currently deploy in talking about political issues has become unduly limited. Sometimes it looks as if the vocabulary of rights is being asked to do all the work. So, I have become interested in the project of trying to enrich our vocabulary by reference to the past. For example, we habitually speak about freedom as if it means nothing more than absence of constraint. I attempt to show in my book, Liberty Before Liberalism, that in earlier times the concept was far more broadly understood as the name of a status, the status of independent persons by contrast with slaves.9 To take another example, when we speak about the state, we usually treat the term as a synonym for government. I have tried in a number of recent essays to comment on the significance of the fact that, when the concept of the state first entered our political discourse, it was used to denote a particular kind of moral person distinct from both rulers and ruled. These are not merely historical excavations on my part; I want to ask how these and other rival conceptualizations came to be expunged from our political vocabulary, and to consider whether the outcome has involved gain or loss. CJH: In “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” you say that the study of classical texts should reveal “not the sameness, but the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments,” and in Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes, you say that “the study of the past need not be any the less instructive when it uncovers contrasts rather than continuities with the present.”10 In general, do you think that we could learn about human conventions and intentions from history without taking straightforward lessons on the so-called timeless truths? On the other hand, how should we read authors such as Thucydides and Machiavelli who believed they were indeed presenting timeless truths as gifts to humanity for all times?
9 Skinner, Quentin. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: 1998. 10 Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” P. 52; Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. P. 15, introduction. Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. “I am unrepentant in believing that the attempt to gain acquaintance with Hobbes’ intellectual world is an undertaking of far greater interest than the attempt to use his texts as a mirror to reflect back at ourselves our current assumptions and prejudices. One reason is simply that…Hobbes’ world is so rich and strange that, if we turn to it merely for answers to our own questions, we shall needlessly impoverish our own intellectual lives. A further reason is that, if we allow ourselves to approach the past with a less importunate sense of ‘relevance’, we may find our studies taking on a relevance of a different and more authentic kind. We may find, in particular, that the acquisition of an historical perspective helps us to stand back from some of our current assumptions and habits of thought, and perhaps even to reconsider them. P. 15, introduction.
QS: As I said in answer to your opening question, my basic approach consists of trying to recover the concepts used by the writers I study, and then trying to grasp how they put those concepts to work. If you adopt that approach, you will find that the concepts invoked by our forebears, and the meanings they attached to the terms expressing those concepts, sometimes look largely familiar to us. There have been major continuities, in other words, in our ways of thinking about political values and practices. But I am more interested in the fact that, as L. P. Hartley remarked in a much-quoted epigram, the past is a foreign country. The discontinuities, that is, often strike me as more instructive than the similarities. An obvious illustration is provided by the history of the concept of a right. It is doubtful whether, in classical antiquity, there was any ‘subjective’ understanding of rights by contrast with the idea of what is right. But at some later stage there emerged a view of rights as possessions, and later still as moral claims against others. Wouldn’t it be interesting to reflect on what it might be like to think about justice in the absence of any such theory of subjective rights? Given that, in contemporary political theory, the discourse of rights sometimes seems—as I’ve already said—to be doing too much work, might this perhaps be the most instructive question of all? I am even more interested in the possibility that, while our forebears may have shared much of our political vocabulary, they may sometimes have expressed unfamiliar concepts in familiar terms. Answering your previous question, I gave the example of individual liberty. We tend to think of liberty as a predicate of actions, arguing that people are free unless they are constrained in the exercise of their powers. But almost nobody thought in those terms before the age of the Enlightenment. As I’ve said, they thought of liberty as the name of a status, that of independent persons by contrast with slaves. What if we were to try to see things from that sharply different angle? We would be led to ask different questions about freedom and forms of government, and about the relations between freedom and social justice. We might even come to feel – as I have done myself – that this way of thinking about the concept is more fruitful and potentially useful than our current ways of talk. You are right to say that some political writers have sought to insist that their work should instead be seen, in Thucydides’ phrase, as a possession for all time. There is a sense in which Thucydides’ ambitions for his history have been realized, for many people still read Thucydides. But this is not to say that his modern readers necessarily endorse anything he says about politics and war. My whole point is to insist that, when we say that Thucydides remains worth reading, this need not be because his work contains any timeless truths. CJH: This is another methodological question on a theme central to your research. What is a historical context, and what are the particular things a historian studies in order to grasp a context to the fullest extent? On the one hand, you
have criticized the attempt to solve “perennial problems” by transcending the contexts of ideas as “not merely a methodological fallacy, but something like a moral error” in the 1960s; on the other hand, you agree that there are “apparently perennial questions,” perhaps in another sense.11 Why do we ask the same questions, even in completely different time periods and circumstances? And in this case, which one should concern a historian first and foremost, the same questions or different contexts? And do different forms of life, as Wittgenstein calls them, require a relativist approach to the study of human civilizations? QS: That is a very rich question, and indeed there seems to be three different issues here. So, I hope you will not mind if I try to separate them out. First of all, you ask about the idea of historical context. I would say that the context is whatever you need to reconstruct in order to understand some meaningful item in that context. This is circular, of course, but I am speaking of a hermeneutic circle. You need to think of texts as answers to questions, and the context as the source of the questions. I think of social and political life itself as setting the problems for social and political theorists. So, I’m much concerned with what one might call social contexts. But I also think of texts as always concerned with other texts. So, I tend to be even more concerned with linguistic contexts, and indeed some critics, like Mark Bevir, have described my approach as ‘linguistic contextualism’.12 I am saying, however, that both these contexts always need to be reconstructed. You also ask why we keep asking the same questions. But do we? Surely philosophy is a subject in which the questions as well as the answers continually change. But insofar as we do, this is surely owing to the fact that—as I’ve already intimated—western moral and political life has exhibited some astonishing continuities. You can go to an Italian city and visit the town hall, which in some instances will have been built as early as the thirteenth century but is still serving the same purpose. Sometimes the conceptual continuities are no less striking. We still ask, as Aristotle did, about the best constitution of the polity; about the grounds and limits of political obedience; and about other connected questions that, even if not perennial, have been meditated for a very long time. The third issue you raise is whether the different forms of life we study as historians require us to be conceptual relativists. This is what used to be called the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, and obviously, it plunges us into deep philosophical waters. But perhaps I can try to make two contrasting points. One is that there is a sense in which historians do, I think, need to be relativists. They need, that is, to relativize the notion 11 Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”. P. 52.
12 Bevir, Mark. “The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism” in History and Theory, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Oct., 1992), pp. 276-298
122
of rationality. Here I dissent from the approach recommended by a number of philosophers of history and social science—I am thinking of Martin Hollis, Steven Lukes and Philip Pettit in some of his earlier work.13 They invite us to begin by asking whether the beliefs we investigate as historians are true or false. The underlying suggestion is that true beliefs require to be explained in a different way from false beliefs. There is held to be no special puzzle about why people hold true beliefs. But false beliefs are said to point to failures of reasoning, so that the explanatory task becomes that of enquiring into the various forms of social or psychological pressure that may prevent people from recognizing the falsity of their beliefs. This approach seems to me nothing less than fatal to good historical practice. The reason is that it involves equating the holding of rational beliefs with the holding of beliefs that the historian judges to be true. This leaves no space for the possibility that there could have been good and rational grounds, in earlier historical periods, for holding a number of beliefs to be true, even though there would be no grounds for holding the same beliefs to be true in our own society. The contrasting point I want to make is that it is easy to carry this relativist thought too far. I do not think, that is, that historians should simply adopt a coherence theory of truth, as Thomas Kuhn sometimes appears to do, and likewise Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.14 Rorty argues that, if we ask whether it was or was not rational for someone to hold a certain belief in a society very different from ours, we are simply importing, in a kind of imperialist manner, a purportedly neutral and trans-temporal conception of rationality to which we cannot possibly have access. Rorty wants to say, for example, in the case of the debate between Galileo and the Catholic Church about the heliocentric hypothesis, that the point of view adopted by Galileo’s opponents was no less ‘objective’ than that of Galileo himself. But it seems to me important that the Churchmen’s contention that the sun travels round the earth was false, and thus that it is correspondingly important to ask whether it was rational for them to believe it to be true. Perhaps it was, but perhaps it wasn’t, and part of the historical task is to try to find out the answer. But this is not to impose an alien or anachronistic conception of rationality on the past. It is merely to ask whether the Churchmen were applying the criteria for the formation and criticism of beliefs current in their own society, or whether they were in some way ignoring or defying them. I am proposing, in short, that historians need to be relativists with respect to the idea of rationality, but not with respect to the idea of truth. We want to find out whether it may have ra-
13 James Martin Hollis (14 March 1938 – 27 February 1998) was an
English rationalist philosopher; Steven Michael Lukes FBA (born 1941) is a political and social theorist; Philip Noel Pettit (born 1945) is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. 14 Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: 1979.
123
tional for the Churchmen to deny the truth of the heliocentric hypothesis, even if such a denial would not be rational for us. But we don’t want to end up by saying that the heliocentric hypothesis was false for the Churchmen although it is true for us. It has never been true that the sun goes around the earth, although it may have been rational for the Churchmen to believe it. CJH: And in light of both this method of contextualization and your focus on intertextuality, you are certainly opposed to treating thinkers in intellectual isolation. For example, you have expressed skepticism toward the canonization of classical texts, and have refused to ignore the seemingly minor thinkers. But with regard to those reputed by many to have been “beyond their time”—that is, in your words, inventors of new “semantics” and “normative vocabularies,” those who created paradigms that are later followed by others—what is their special relationship with their historical contexts? Are they relatively unbound by them? Do you think there have been “masterminds” that have transcended or at least led their time, thus permanently influencing and even altering the direction of intellectual history, or do you think their “extraordinary” thoughts were after all generated out of ordinary debates, and are therefore not extraordinary?15 QS: I’m inclined to say that there may be a non-sequitur somewhere hidden in this question, because my prejudice is to suppose that even the most startling intellectual discoveries must of course have an explanatory context. The discovery will stem from the fact that something has been overlooked, or some implication of what is already known hasn’t been noticed, or some explanatory hypothesis simply hasn’t been entertained. For example, Copernicus’s heliocentrism picked up an ancient hypothesis and gave new evidence for it.16 Likewise, Einstein’s special theory of relativity supplied a new answer to an existing puzzle, the puzzle raised by the Michelson-Morley experiment. The experiment had been designed to establish how the direc-
15 Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. “Most recent studies
have focused exclusively on Hobbes’ texts, without asking what might have prompted him to formulate and reformulate his distinctive arguments, and thus without attempting to identify the nature of the disputes in which he was taking part. By contrast I have tried to show how Hobbes’ successive attempts to grapple with the question of human liberty were deeply affected by the claims put forward by the radical and parliamentarian writers in the period of the civil wars, and by Hobbes’ sense of the urgent need to counter them in the name of peace”. Preface xiv. 16 3rd century BC, Aristarchus of Samos; Archimedes, Ψαμμίτης: Ἀρίσταρχος δὲ ὁ Σάμιος ὑποθέσιών τινῶν ἐξέδωκεν γραφάς… Ὑποτίθεται γὰρ τὰ μὲν ἀπλανέα τῶν ἄστρων καὶ τὸν ἅλιον μένειν ἀκίνητον, τὰν δὲ γᾶν περιφέρεσθαι περὶ τὸν ἅλιον κατὰ κύκλου περιφέρειαν, ὅς ἐστιν ἐν μέσῳ τῷ δρόμῳ κείμενος, τὰν δὲ τῶν ἀπλανέων ἄστρων σφαῖραν περὶ τὸ αὐτὸ κέντρον τῷ ἁλίῳ κειμέναν τῷ μεγέθει τηλικαύταν εἶμεν… microform, Oxonii: E theatro Sheldoniano, 1676.
tion of light affects its speed, but it turned out to have no effect at all. There had to be an explanation, and Einstein supplied it. This is not in the least to say, however, that because Galileo’s and Einstein’s thinking arose out of a context of existing discussion and debate their discoveries were any the less remarkable. The effect in both cases was nothing less than the creation of what Kuhn would call a paradigm shift, and indeed these were the two major paradigm shifts that Kuhn liked to single out. CJH: When intellectual historians talk about the meaning of a text, is it important to distinguish between the intended meaning of the author and the meaning that is received by his contemporaries? How do you use historical and textual sources to obtain insights on both? Usually, how much of your work is biographical—that is, to explore the intellectual development of the author in order to grasp what he had in mind as he wrote a text—and how much of it is political and social history—that is, to study the community, society, and regime in which the author wrote his work in order to gain insight on what the author’s audience was trying to get from the text? QS: The study of what you call the received meanings of texts obviously constitutes a branch of intellectual history in itself. But I have always tried to avoid writing such histories of alleged influences. When you read a given text, you may often be inclined to infer the influence of some earlier texts. But in the absence of independent documentary evidence, it will always be impossible to distinguish such alleged influences from random resemblances, or resemblances arising from a wider intellectual background. Such so-called reception studies have become more fashionable of late, but I continue to be somewhat skeptical about their historical worth. Let me turn to your question about whether it is important to distinguish the meaning of a text from the intended meaning of its author. I have been taken by a number of my critics to equate the two. But it seems to me that we need to disentangle a confusion here. On the one hand, if by the meaning of a text you have in mind the meaning of the words and sentences contained in it, then I don’t make any equation with the intended meaning at all. I think there will always be what Paul Ricœur nicely called surplus meaning in texts.17 There will always be an intended meaning, but in complex texts there will always be far more, if only because our words often have multiple or contested meanings, so that often we cannot hope to infer authorial intent from usage. But on the other hand, if by the meaning of a text you have in mind how the text was meant to be taken, that is, what its author may have meant by it, then I do indeed make an equation between meaning and intentionality. This is because I take it that, when we ask what a writer may have meant by a given utterance, this is equivalent to asking about
the intentions that went into the act of uttering it. To put the same point another way, I think that recent theories of interpretation—including Derrida’s work and that of other deconstructionist critics—have been too much preoccupied with warning us not to look for intended meanings. I largely agree, as I’ve intimated, with Derrida’s skeptical observations about the possibility of recovering intentions in the face of polysemy and ambiguity. But it’s a mistake to infer from this that the study of intentionality must either be an irrelevance or a lost cause. I say this because, in addition to the purported meanings of texts, we also need to ask what any given writer may have been doing in issuing a given utterance, and hence what they may have meant by it. But here we are dealing not with meanings but with linguistic actions. And, as in the case of any other type of action, we identify the specific nature of any speech-act by way of recovering the intentions embodied in it. It is true, however, that the ascription of intentions to speechacts is always a matter of inference. J. L. Austin makes the relevant distinction very effectively in How to do things with words.18 If you place any speech-act within the context of linguistic and social conventions that makes sense of it, then you will have succeeded in recovering the force of the utterance. You will be able to show, for example, that a particular utterance had the force of a warning, say, rather than an order or a greeting or a prediction and so on. But it is another and further thing to claim that the person who spoke with the force of a warning was performing the intended act of warning someone. My response to this objection is that it will often be legitimate to insist on the inference. We can sometimes hope to show that, when someone spoke with a certain force, this was because they intended what they said to carry that specific force. This is what I tried to argue, for example, in my book Hobbes and Republican Liberty.19 I showed that Hobbes’s insistence on physical constraint as the antonym of freedom had the force of criticizing and repudiating the well-established claim that the antonym of freedom is dependence on the will of others. I inferred that Hobbes’s underlying intention was to undermine and set aside the widely-held account. Some critics complained that we can never hope to get into the mind of a dead writer (or even a living one) in this fashion, if only because such intentions are purely mental events. But I am claiming that they are not purely mental events. They are entirely in the public arena, and are susceptible of being recovered simply by intertextual comparisons and the inferences that can be drawn from them. You also ask about biography and social history. As I have al-
18 Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press 17 Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), French philosopher. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976)
(Cambridge: 1962), the William James Lectures Series (Book 1), P. 72, 75, 135, 146, 150 19 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: 2008.
124
ready declared, my basic operating assumption is that in the history of social, moral and political theory it is society that sets the questions, causing a certain and continually changing range of issues to appear problematic, and hence in need of philosophical attention. About the value of biography, I must confess I am something of a skeptic, especially because it sometimes seems that the huge popularity of biography in our time is chiefly a testament to the entrancing power of gossip. I am not sure that we really know how to write biographies. It is a genre that carries us away from the realm of intentions and into the much murkier depths of motivation and character. Here the problem is that we do not have agreed theories about the springs of action. As a result, biographies inevitably contain a lot of speculation, and are frequently condemned to operate merely on the surface of things. I should add, however, that there is one way in which biography seems to me a crucial tool for intellectual historians to wield. We need to discover as much as we can about the education received by the writers we are trying to understand. In the case of professional thinkers, it is surely obvious that a detailed awareness of their range of reading will be one of the best means of acquainting ourselves with the contents and limits of their mental world. CJH: Hence in several of your works on Hobbes, you have constantly referred to the books available to Hobbes in the Hardwick Library.20 QS: Yes. That’s right. CJH: This is a question on politics: you say in Hobbes and Republican Liberty that Hobbes denounced the soi-disant freedom-seeking mindset as a type of aristocratic ressentiment—the elites wished to attain honors from the commonwealth that the sovereign was not to hand out.21 Do you think that is characteristic of modern republican democracy? Is one of the sources of discontent with authoritarian regimes the fact that they do not let us fully realize our political ambitions?22 QS: I think it was certainly shrewd of Hobbes to observe that
20 See, for example, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
(Cambridge: 1996) and Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: 2008) 21 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. P. 81. ‘a sense of their want of that power, and that honour and testimony thereof, which they think is due unto them’, Hobbes 1969a, 27. 3, p. 169 22 Skinner, Quentin. Foundation of Modern Political Thought Vo. I. Preface xi-xii. “…And it is evident that, as long as historians of political theory continue to think of their main task as to interpreting a canon of classic texts, it will remain difficult to establish any closer links between political theory and political life. But if they were instead to think of themselves essentially as students of ideologies, it might become possible to illustrate one crucial way in which the explanation of political behavior depends upon the study of political ideas and principles, and cannot meaningfully be conducted without reference to them.
125
some of the dislike of absolutism in early seventeenth-century England stemmed from a sense on the part of the aristocracy that their standing was being debased, that they were being debarred from the exercise of traditional privileges. But I don’t feel that an inability to realize my political ambitions would figure at all largely on my own list of reasons for thinking that it would be terrible to live under a powerfully authoritarian regime. I must admit, however, that this may simply because I have never had any political ambitions at all. I have chosen a way of life that gives me a lot of autonomy, but even so I find it hard to live according to my principles as much as I should. To adopt politics as a way of life, in which you are continually asked to compromise your principles and treat politics as the art of the possible, would to me be unimaginable. CJH: To continue the conversation on contemporary forms of political life: since what scholars refer to as the fall of “medieval universalism” in the West—that is, the understanding of the cosmos as constructed in a fixed way according to the teachings of Christianity—has there emerged in the “foundation of modern political thought” a modern universalism in the context of globalism? Are today’s polities moving towards relativist ends or a comopolis? QS: I am no prophet, and I like Hobbes’s remark that the best prophets are merely the best guessers. But if I am allowed a guess, then it would be that the prospects for a modern form of universalism are set to recede rather than advance. It is true that neo-liberal economists have for a long time been urging globalization on us, and that this has helped to give rise to neo-liberal forms of the state that have actively encouraged this ideological project. But it now looks as if these developments may be arrested and even reversed by populist protests that are already visible on a large scale. Politicians who oppose the free movement of capital and labor are gaining mass support in the European Union as well as the United States from people who feel betrayed and marginalized by the neo-liberal state. The current trend seems to be towards a narrow nationalism rather than anything like a burgeoning cosmpolis. CJH: Your works have challenged us to see in greater light the different trends and traditions at work in early modern political thought, such as the neo-Roman and Hobbesian views of liberty, or the humanist and scientific approaches to knowledge, etc. At a macroscopic level, do you identify a general tradition of the West emerging out of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and is it still in place? What could be referred to as the western legacy, if there is one? QS: I agree that a particular self-image has developed in the west since the era of the Renaissance. We have been encouraged to accept a self-congratulatory narrative about the end of religious warfare, the growth of toleration, the pushing back of obscurantism by Enlightenment rationalism, the vast increases in wealth and welfare made possible by the scientific revolution and the triumph of capitalism, and so on. But surely very little
of this narrative now remains in place. We have been forced to acknowledge that all these benefits came with enormous costs, that the past century was perhaps the most barbarous in the history of mankind, and that the human race is currently threatening its capacity even to sustain its own continued existence. CJH: What constitutes the other for the west? Is there a non-western tradition, and how would an intellectual historian be able to compare them? QS: Of course, there are many non-western traditions, but they do not necessarily constitute self-conscious alternatives to western values, as opposed to merely offering different outlooks on life. As for how intellectual historians might compare such traditions, I hope it won’t be a consequence of the current globalization of intellectual history that we start asking questions of this kind. We can of course hope with profit to compare specific features of strongly contrasting ways of life. But to mount comparisons between entire traditions of thinking, to say nothing of entire civilizations, would surely be beyond the powers of even the most learned historian, and I don’t see how it could responsibly be done. CJH: Is that your point of view on Professor Toynbee’s A Study of History? QS: If I correctly remember, Arnold Toynbee revealed to the world that there have been nineteen civilizations, to which he added the offensive claim that Scandinavia is the site of an ‘abortive’ civilization, and that in the Ottoman and some other cases the march of civilization was ‘arrested’. One absurdity lies in Toynbee’s governing assumption that the term ‘civilization’ refers unambiguously to a distinctive form of life, so that lists of civilizations can be uncontentiously compiled. But the main absurdity is that he then proceeded to argue that his nineteen cases provide him with sufficient information to generate inductive and hence predictive generalizations about what causes civilizations to rise and fall. The whole project is statistically as well as conceptually illiterate. CJH: Let us then discuss another distinct method of doing history. You have on many occasions referred to the influence of Marxism on history as a discipline.23 Today we still talk about the Marxist branch of historicism, and refer to the Marxist method as a historical one. Since the decline of the Soviet Bloc at the end of the twentieth century, there has been a contemporaneous decline in Marxism’s influence on
the humanities and social sciences. How do you characterize that change, and what is your opinion on Marxist historians’ approach to the understanding of history? QS: I should begin by explaining why it was that, in my early years as a scholar, I devoted so much time to thinking about Marxist approaches to history. The reason was that such approaches were strongly in the ascendant at the time, especially in the work of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school in France, and in such prominent Anglophone historians as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, C. B. Macpherson, E. P. Thompson and others.24 They tended to assume that the leading motors of historical change will always be fundamentally economic in character. When they had anything to say about political theory, they tended to argue that the principles by which political actors commonly claim to be motivated are usually rationalizations of their socio-economic interests and general condition of life. This way of thinking clearly underpins C.B. Macpherson’s book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, which was published just as I was beginning research in 1962.25 It was said to follow that social and political principles can have no independent explanatory role in accounting for the processes of social change. The study of intellectual history thus came to seem of marginal significance. I remember that, when I arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1974 (where I stayed for four years) I discovered that intellectual history was regularly dismissed by Princeton historians like Lawrence Stone in precisely these terms.26 I came to feel that this approach embodies a misunderstanding of the complex role played by social and political argument in relation to social change. One obvious weakness arises from the unargued assumption that people’s professed principles are generally little more than rationalizations of their interests. This contention appears in some cases to be obviously false. Some people undoubtedly act out of normative principles that may be strongly at variance with their interests. But the main problem is that, even if we accept that professed principles are mere rationalizations, what the Marxist approach fails to recognize is that they nevertheless help to construct, and not merely to reflect, the lineaments of our social and economic world. We can see how this comes about as soon as we reflect on the crucial consideration that normally we can only hope to succeed in doing what we can manage to legitimize. As a result, we are generally committed to acting only in such ways as are compatible with the claim that we are motivated by our pro24
23 See, for example, Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding
in the History of Ideas”. History and Theory, Vol. 8 (1969); interviews such as: ‘Making history: the discipline in perspective’ Interview with Quentin Skinner: http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/ interviews/Skinner_Quentin.html; “Quentin Skinner on Encountering the Past”: http://www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/redescriptions/Yearbook%202002/ Skinner_Interview_2002.pdf
Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), French historian and a leader of the Annales School; Christopher Hill (1912-2003) English Marxist historian; Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), English historian; Crawford Brough Macpherson (1911-1987), Canadian political theorist; Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993), British historian, writer, and campaigner. 25 Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: 1962. 26 Lawrence Stone (1919-1999), English historian
126
fessed principles. But this in turn means that such principles will always have to be invoked when it comes to explaining our behavior. This is because our conduct will always in part be limited and directed by the need to legitimize what we are doing. The explanation of what we are doing will therefore need to make reference to the principles in the light of which we seek to legitimize our behavior. This was one of the claims I was most of all concerned to underline in my book, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.27 As I say, for me what is crucial about this argument is that it yields the conclusion that social and political ideas are not merely the products but one of the producers of social reality. But this is not necessarily because they serve as the motives of our social behavior. Rather it is because the need to legitimate our behavior requires that our actions must remain compatible with the claim that they are motivated by some already recognized normative principle, even in those instances (or rather, especially in those instances) where this is not the case. The need for legitimation, in short, is one of the constraints that helps to shape our social world. This is how it comes about that social and political ideas are among the constructors of reality, and this is what Marxist theories of ideology seem to me to miss. CJH: Thank you, Professor. At the closing of our interview, what would you offer as advice to undergraduate students, aspiring historians, and students of the social sciences and humanities interested in intellectual history? What should we pay attention to in our reading and research? QS: I am most grateful for the question. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m only a student of certain questions in moral and political philosophy, so maybe it will be best if I limit myself to addressing people like yourself who are interested in these specific issues. I think I only have two pieces of advice. One stems from my answer to your opening question. As I said, I think we should study the thinkers of the past so far as possible in their own terms. But I should now like to add that our motivation for studying them should, I think, come from here and now. This is the point I was trying to bring out when I spoke earlier about my book, Liberty before liberalism. If we turn back to the pre-modern era, we find that freedom was understood not as a predicate of actions, but rather as the name of a status, that of an independent person by contrast with the dependence characteristic of slaves. Once we have succeeded in reconstructing this earlier and unfamiliar story, I then want us to ask: what do we think of this alternative view? Might it be more useful to reconsider it rather than continuing to set it aside? My other piece of advice would be that, in selecting topics for research, you should never allow yourself to be too much in27 Skinner, Quentin. Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. 1, 2. Cambridge: 1978.
127
fluenced by what is going on in the discipline. Never select a subject simply because it is currently fashionable. One reason is that historiographical fashions change all the time, and sometimes with bewildering suddenness. Far better to stick with what you care about. But the most important reason is that the early years of academic life are often lonely and difficult, and it is easy to become discouraged. If you are not committed at an existential level to what you are doing, it is all too likely that you will lack sufficient determination to continue in discouraging times. The best way to endure and flourish is to concentrate on what matters most to you, not what currently captivates the profession. If your research is of sufficient interest, the profession will soon be captivated.
The Chicago Journal of History is published by undergraduate students in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. The journal brings together students from history and other fields for interdisciplinary dialogue. Current and past issues are available online at: http://cjh.uchicago.edu.