-Caveat Lector-
Treason in America -- From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman
ANTON CHAITKIN (C)1984
New Benjamin Franklin House
P. O. Box 20551
New York, New York 10023
ISBN 0-933488-32-7
--[16]--
-16-
Anthropologists Against
Indians
The Germans have seen them before.
When Green Party members riot against an American military base, assault a
civilian airport, or beat up their opponents on the street, they present
themselves deliberately as an ugly mob. The painted hair sticks out crazily,
the drugs are flaunted, the degree of contempt for civilization is itself a
weapon, the terror weapon used by the Nazis before them.
It is a movement with worldwide ambitions. The World Wildlife Fund, through
its president, Prince Philip of England, announces its determination to
prevent the deforestation of the tropics.(1) The fund enlists the agencies of
the United Nations against the efforts of underdeveloped nations to build
cities, farms, and factories. They coordinate with population specialists
whose clinics work relentlessly against childbirth.
The movement's goal of reversing "overpopulation" may be furthered through
the death of millions of Africans, now starving in droughts which could have
been averted by infrastructure such as canals, dams and reservoirs. The
movement, sponsored by companies otherwise interested in oil, minerals, and
real estate, condemns large-scale construction projects as unnatural
tampering with nature. "Let us preserve the ecological balance"�with the
death of impoverished humanity.
America, a great prize sought by the movement, is half conquered. The very
home of the Idea of Progress, the nation whose inventive genius subdued
nature and made freedom practical, has allowed an aggressively hostile and
alien philosophy to dominate American schools, news media and government
agencies, while tragically restricting the work of nation-building and
development Americans could be doing with the poorer countries.
We will outline here the origins of the environmentalist attack against the
United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From its roots
in the concocted science of "anthropology," to its emergence as the
Conservation of Natural Resources, the movement will be seen as a coldly
calculated offensive against human progress, against Reason itself, run by a
most bizarre collection of foreign agents and compulsive racists. The cult of
Mother Earth has indeed laid its eggs in America; but it is hopefully not too
late to step on them.
TR's Counterrevolution
A unique statue of President Theodore Roosevelt has long stood in front of
the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. A visitor may well
think it odd that such a statue has never been pulled down by an insulted
public. Teddy Roosevelt, the enormous Anglo-Saxon hunter, sits astride an
immense horse. On either side of him, walking in the dust, are half-naked
figures, his guides, one a black African, one an American Indian. Nearby the
words "soldier" and "conservationist" are carved in stone.
Historians have usually portrayed Teddy Roosevelt's regime (l901-1909) as a
progressive era for the United States, while conceding that, for the tropical
lands whose people Roosevelt held in contempt, this period may have been
something of a setback. Historians have given us a TR as consummate American,
who increased our national power and prestige, whose concern for the people's
welfare is shown by his role as the great champion of Conservation. When they
have been troubled by his obvious bullying tactics in foreign affairs, and
embarrassed by his racial attitudes, they have simply steered citizens'
attention toward his domestic progressivism.
That TR's rule was in fact a disaster for our country, a virtual
counterrevolution against the American System of Washington and Lincoln, is
perhaps best proven by his Conservation activities. Let us return to the
scene of this not-so-progressive movement. Let us view TR in action with the
perpetrators, the midwives of the movement, and then follow the trails of
these men and their collaborators back in time, and back and forth across the
Atlantic, as they prepared the birth of the movement.
It is May 1908. A great meeting is in progress in Washington, D. C. The
governors of all the states are gathered, at the request of the President,
together with the entire cabinet, and a number of distinguished guests. Every
member of Congress has been invited�but not the Congress as a body.
This is an extraconstitutional meeting, the first "governors' conference"
ever called. It is a carefully stage-managed national conference on
Conservation.
If any present are wondering about the legal status of the conclave, railroad
financier James J. Hill sets their minds at ease: "It is in effect a
directors' meeting of the great political and economic corporation known as
the U.S.A. The stockholders are the 87 million people of this country; the
directors are the state and federal officers."
This remarkable view of the American political system reflects the new
corporatist experiment in national life, carried out in the Teddy Roosevelt
years under the leadership of J.P. Morgan in the cartelization of industry,
and under the Conservation leaders in the reorganization of the government.
To get around the fierce opposition to his policies in the western states,
Roosevelt created various policymaking commissions, under the direction of
his Movement colleagues and completely out of the constitutional system whose
representative Congress may check the activities of the executive branch. His
administration also carried out a mass prosecution of his political opponents
on a scale never equalled in American history.
Mr. Hill's speech, like many others of the invited guests, was actually
written by one William J. McGee, a longtime Smithsonian Institution executive
called by admiring chroniclers of the Progressive Era the "brains behind the
Conservation movement.(2)
Now President Theodore Roosevelt speaks, also working from a draft by Mr.
McGee. He performs a breathtaking leap in logic, whereby the Founding Fathers
are transformed from developers and nationbuilders into Greenies:
Washington clearly saw that the perpetuity of the States could only be
secured by union, and that the only feasible basis of union was an economic
one; in other words, that it must be based on the development and use of
their natural resources.... The prosperity of our people depends directly on
the energy and intelligence with which our natural resources are used. It is
equally clear that these resources are the final basis of national power and
perpetuity.(3)
But in George Washington's day the principal natural resources of the United
States were wood, wind and waterpower. Now, within the living memory of the
conference attendees, the resource base of the American economy had been
transformed by science and invention. Coal and petroleum had entered the
picture, as would uranium a generation later. Coal, which had been of little
significance in 1776, was the dominant fuel of industry in 1908.
How could coal, or any other naturally occurring material or process be the
"final basis" of national prosperity? Only if the development of science and
technology, and the population growth which both compels and uses that
development, were forever halted, and the nation were reduced to the horrible
dilemma of slowly using up the fixed basis of its stagnant mode of production.
Such a fate for the American Union was precisely the goal of the
international strategists of Conservation. Chief among these was Gifford
Pinchot, the founder and director of the newly established United States
Forest Service. Pinchot, who usually wrote TR's speeches on this subject, had
planned the governors' conference with Mr. McGee.
The Test Tube Movement
Gifford Pinchot relates in his autobiography that in the previous year, he
and McGee together dreamed up the concept of "Conservation of Natural
Resources" as the basis of a social movement to be created under their
direction. The new propaganda word, "conservation," was itself designed by
Gifford Pinchot and his assistant, Overton Price. As a result of immense
public relations efforts of the Teddy Roosevelt administration, the word soon
entered the dictionary with the connotations desired by its inventors.
Actually the word had been lifted from the term "conservancy, " designating
an administrative regional unit of the British forest service in India.(4)
During the year of the governors' conference, the last full year of TR's
regime, Gifford Pinchot's new Forest Service stepped up its propaganda
campaign, deluging the country with pseudo-science and scare stories about
limited resources. The Forest Service had a propaganda mailing list of at
least 700,000 persons, concentrating on school teachers, newspapermen, large
landowners, and government officials. The newsmen, the school teachers, and
the politicians then regurgitated the phrases they had been fed, and the
Conservation movement was born.(5)
The story was slightly different for the large landowners: they were the
silent partners of the Movement. As we will see, an historic "deal" had been
struck between the Roosevelt government and western land barons, which
undermined the remaining opposition to Roosevelt's zero-growth policies and
sealed off more than a million square miles of the American west from further
development. "Forest reserves" in permanent government restrictive ownership,
and vast tracts under private trusts, would never be used for cities,
industry or family farms.
The 1908 governors' conference was, in a way, the announcement of the end of
the American frontier; it was Teddy Roosevelt dancing on the grave of the
victim.
The question of whether the new American society would be allowed to expand
west across the continent had been an important bone of contention in world
affairs since the Virginia colonists began pushing beyond the first inland
mountain range. The "Venetian" element in British aristocracy, the East India
Company men, had tried to block the colonists' westward settlement drive
while prohibiting the fledgling American manufacturing from developing the
basis for practical independence. These had been among the principal direct
causes of the American Revolution.
In later years southern slaveowners, spurred on by old Tory elements in
Boston and by the British, had tried to seize the western territories�and
Latin America�for the slave system. This was the principal direct cause of
the Civil War.
President Abraham Lincoln's wartime leadership and economic program built the
railroads and opened the west to massive settlement. Lincoln was conscious
that the American experiment was "something that held out a great promise to
all the people of the world to all time to come"(6). And the amazed world
watched the successful post-Civil War industrialization, the building of the
midwest and beginnings of migration still farther to the west.
But now, in 1908, the frontier was closed. The oligarchs of Europe exulted,
"Our science has stopped the mad march of progress. The American example will
not be quite so dangerous. "
How had Roosevelt done it? What was this oligarchical "science" which worked
at cross purposes with actual scientific and technological development, which
lent an aura of respectability to a movement for the crippling of
civilization itself? As we shall see, it was the same non-science which today
threatens to plunge the world into a nightmare of devoluted society, while
perhaps ending the American experiment for good.
The Savage Noble
To counter the American System's promise of universal human progress, the
European oligarchy offered the "noble savage" of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Man
in a state of nature was happier, they said. Urban civilization destroyed
man's spirit. Better to be a superstitious peasant or barbarian, who knew his
place and was content, than a citizen of the modern world, troubled by the
noise and clamor of factories and constant change.
The notion of noble savagery was more than a political or social construct.
It was an operational model in colonies, and former colonies, to prevent the
spread of the American challenge to the old nobility.
British military commanders deployed their allies in the Iroquois
confederation of eastern Indian tribes to raid and terrorize American
settlers and frontier soldiers during the American Revolution, until well
beyond the war's end. The British again deployed Indian warriors against
Americans in the War of 1812. To the British, the treaties ending these wars
meant only that covert methods would have to be found to accomplish the same
objective, keeping the settlers bottled in the east. This had been the aim,
and the tested practice, of the Jesuits against the French settlers in
earlier days. The Indian tribes were infiltrated, manipulated and guided to
warfare for the defeat of the Jean Baptiste Colbert settlement and
city-building policies.
But the Americans had different ideas, typified by the peace and assimilation
program of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin.
Why should not the Indians share in the progress of civilization, and help to
fulfill the Biblical injunction for all men, made in God's image, to "be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it"?
To the great embarrassment of the oligarchs and their supporters, it became
evident to the Americans that the "savagery" of the Indians was not only the
subject of British tampering and manipulation, but that the Indians
themselves had once had a higher civilization in both North and South
America, that this culture had to a great extent collapsed, and that this
collapse was being worsened by the crimes of the Indians' British "allies."
On a trip through the South in 1765, William Bartram (1739-1823) of
Philadelphia began writing about the ruins of ancient native society. His
father, naturalist John Bartram (1699-1777), was a friend of Franklin's and a
co-founder of the American Philosophical Society, originally a sort of
executive committee for strategists of American development.
Following a visit to the artificially constructed Mount Royal, on the east
bank of the St. Johns River in Putnam County, Florida, William Bartram noted
a "very considerable extent of old fields, round about the mount; there was
also a large orange grove . . . a noble Indian highway . . . led from the
great mount ... three-quarters of a mile [to] an oblong artifical lake....
This grand highway was about 50 yards wide . . . sunk a little below the
common level . . . [with] bank[s] of about two feet high erected on each
side."(7)
In 1773 Bartram found, on the east bank of the Ocmulgee River, near what is
now Macon, Georgia, "monuments" and "traces of an ancient town, such as
artificial mounds or terraces, squares and banks, encircling considerable
areas. Their old fields and planting land extended up and down the river 15
or 20 miles from the site."(8)
As settlers poured into Ohio after the Revolution, they passed among
thousands of mounds, forts, pyramids, highways, and earth sculptures built by
an ancient society. Writers such as Caleb Atwater (1778-1867) gave the
reading public an extensive description of the "mound builder" culture.
Atwater wrote in 1820 about the original structures found at the site of
Circleville, Ohio, where he grew up. There were two concentric circular
earthwork walls, the outer one a thousand feet in diameter, adjoined by a
square enclosure; the modern town had been laid out in the Indian circles.
The walls of the square, said Atwater, "vary a few degrees from north and
south, east and west; but not more than the needle varies, and not a few
surveyors have, from this circumstance, been impressed with the belief that
the authors of these works were acquainted with astronomy. What surprised me,
on measuring these forts, is the exact manner in which they had laid down
their circle and square; so that after every effort, by the most careful
survey, to detect some errour in the measurement, we found that it was
impossible, and that the measurement was much more correct, than it would
have been, in all probability, had the present inhabitants undertaken to
construct such a work."(9)
The Mound Builders had flourished in the Ohio Valley a millennium before.
Modern historical investigators working with archeological data have reached
certain tentative conclusions about the development of these and other native
Americans. (10) North American progress depended greatly upon the advances
made by those living in what is now Mexico, and the northerners' fall
apparently followed on the collapse of the southern culture.
The Olmecs had built cities of several hundred thousand in Mexico. Around
A.D. 800 they were superseded by the less advanced Toltec Empire, and later
by the bloodthirsty cultish Aztecs. When the Spaniards arrived in the
sixteenth century, they were able to use the hatred of surrounding people to
aid in the overthrow of the Aztecs.
The earlier "Mexicans" had helped to build a more civilized society to the
north. The art of maize cultivation spread up the Mississippi River. A
culture based on trade and settled agriculture, with towns of many thousands,
grew in the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf South.
At Poverty Point near Floyd, West Carroll Parish, in northern Louisiana,
there is a cluster of six mounds. The largest of these, after centuries of
flooding and other erosion, is now 70 feet high, flat-topped and T-shaped.
The complex had been built with a set of six concentric octagons. It is
estimated that the original complex, or fortified town, had an outer wall 6
feet high, 80 feet wide at the base and 11.2 miles in circumference, with a
probable cubic content more than 35 times that of the Egyptian pyramid of
Cheops(11). This complex may well have served as a Mississippi trading post
between north and south. Radiocarbon dating techniques suggest that this
community flourished as early as 800 or 600 B. C.
The extent of the trade in the northern cultures may be simply illustrated by
the find in just one burial deposit from the "Turner Group" in Hamilton
County, near Cincinnati, Ohio: 12,000 whole pearls, 35,000 pearl beads,
20,000 shell beads, nuggets of copper and silver, sheets of hammered gold,
and copper and iron beads.
In the American Southwest, what is now known as the Hohokam ("lost people")
culture built extensive canals for irrigation in the area of present-day
Phoenix, Arizona, permitting agriculture which fed about a quarter of a
million area residents.
These city-dwellers had apartment houses and ball courts. A four-story
observation tower is still standing at Casa Grande National Monument south of
Phoenix.
It is known that the southern people had astronomical knowledge and arts
sufficient for calendar systems that charted the movements of heavenly bodies
over millions of years. But the ancient northerners, in what is now Arizona,
Wyoming, and Illinois, have also left evidence of astronomical culture. The
flat-topped pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois, across the Mississippi from St.
Louis, for example, may not be made of stone as are those of Mexico. But it
is 100 feet high, 16 acres in extent (compared to 13 acres for the Great
Pyramid in Egypt), and the top originally held a wooden structure for precise
observation of the equinoxes, presumably for the purpose of regulating the
planting seasons. Perhaps 100,000 people lived in the city and outlying
farming areas for which it served as a capital.
The exact causes of the collapse are unknown to us, but the agricultural
society of the ancient midwest dwindled in the period of around A.D. 1200 to
1300, and there was a climatic shift in the Great Plains area which may have
contributed to, or been an effect of the cultural collapse. Nomadic tribes in
dried-out areas were reduced to the expedient of chasing herds of buffaloes
over cliffs for their food, and there occurred catastrophic wars in the
region.
When Hernando DeSoto travelled through the Mississippi Valley in the 1500s,
he found it still relatively thickly settled. It may well have been the
Spaniards' introduction of disease against which the Indians had no defenses
that finally crushed the remaining centers of the Indians' higher culture in
North America.
The Indian assimilation policy of Franklin and the American System advocates
also met with defeat. The nature of this tragedy is seen in the story of the
Cherokees.
Despite having recently invented and learned a written language for their
spoken one; despite cultivating the arts and sciences and proudly educating
their children; despite, or possibly because of being a culturally advanced
group of people in the state of Georgia in the 1830s and thus a threat to the
ruling clique in South Carolina and Georgia; the Cherokees were torn from
their homes and thrown out to the western territories to live among savages,
by order of President Andrew Jackson. This was the Trail of Tears, with a
tremendous death toll.
The Cherokee Nation printed in their newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, the
following notice on September 11, 1830:
People of America, where shall we look? Republicans, we appeal to you.
Christians, we appeal to you. We need the exertion of your strong arm. We
need the utterance of your commanding voice. We need the aid of your
prevailing prayers. In times past, your compassions yearned over our moral
desolations, and the misery which was spreading amongst us, through the
failure of game, our ancient resource. The cry of our wretchedness reached
your hearts; you supplied us with the implements of husbandry and domestic
industry, which enabled us to provide food and clothing for ourselves. You
sent us instruction in letters and the true religion, which has chased away
much of our mental and moral darkness.
Your wise President Jefferson took much pains to instruct us in the science
of civilized government, and recommended the government of the United States
and of the several states, as models for our imitation. He urged us to
industry and the acquisition of property. His letter was read in our towns;
and we received it as the counsel of a friend. We commenced farming. We
commenced improving our government, and by gradual advances we have achieved
our present station. But our venerable father Jefferson never intimated that,
whenever we should arrive at a certain point in the science of government,
and the knowledge of the civilized arts, then our rights should be forfeited
. . . our protection confiscated to lawless banditti, and our necks placed
under the foot of Georgia."(12)
But there was still hope for a peaceful assimilation policy for the hundreds
of thousands of Indians, given a good government in Washington, and a will
for it in the American people.
The Science of Extermination
The first systematic study of the American Indians from the standpoint of the
old European oligarchy was carried out by one of these oligarchs in
person�Albert Gallatin. An envoy to Revolutionary America in 1780 from a very
powerful Swiss family at war with republican society in general, Gallatin had
fought against the adoption of the new U.S. Constitution; had instigated the
Whiskey Rebellion against the new U.S. government; had led the Congressional
opposition to Hamilton's economic development plans; had selected his cousin
Aaron Burr as Thomas Jefferson's vice-presidential running mate; had
virtually dissolved America's armed forces when he was Treasury Secretary;
had led the Free Trade party which destroyed the Bank of the United States
under Andrew Jackson; and had been the longtime financial manager of slumlord
John Jacob Astor and his family.
Having retired from his public positions in the late 1830s, Gallatin was now
ready to do some real mischief. Accordingly, he devoted more than a decade to
devising a "science" which could portray the American Indian as naturally
savage, despite evidence to the contrary. It would have to be based on some
method of organized lying, and avoid seemingly unavoidable questions of basic
history. This science, as it was organized in America beginning with
Gallatin, came to be known as "anthropology."
Albert Gallatin published, in 1836, A Synopsis of the Indians within the
United States east of the Rocky Mountains and in the British and Russian
Possessions in North America. He continued writing about the Indians,
concentrating especially on compiling Indian languages, until he was 87 years
old in 1848, the year before his death.
In 1842 Gallatin created and became the first president of the American
Ethnological Society, a sister organization to European ethnological
societies. The groups served as an adjunct to the Young Europe, Young
Switzerland, Young Italy, Young Germany, Young England, and Young America
projects of Britain's Lord Palmerston. The movement as a whole might be
described as a strategical study of the "special needs" of various ethnic
groups, insofar as these needs contradict those of other groups.
Prior to the founding, Gallatin had sent his assistant, Indian expert Henry
Rowe Schoolcraft, to Europe for conferences of the international movement,
and to speak before the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Schoolcraft was well-qualified as a stand-in for the elderly Gallatin. First
dealing with the Indians on government treaty-making expeditions in the
1820s, Schoolcraft had moved up in the world by marrying an Ojibway
Indian�who was the daughter of a Scottish nobleman, John Johnstone.(13) This
gentleman, an intimate of the British military commander and governor general
of Canada, Guy Carleton, maintained a British trading outpost at Sault St.
Marie between Lakes Superior and Huron. Johnstone thus dominated the fur
trade and associated intelligence activities over a wide area of the American
upper midwest. During the War of 1812, Johnstone had commanded Indian and
British armed forces in combat against Americans in Michigan(14). The British
assault in that area was greatly aided by the employees of John Jacob Astor's
American Fur Company, who helped plan the attack on their own countrymen at
Detroit. Henry Schoolcraft's aristocrat father-in-law, then, was both a
commercial and espionage teammate of Albert Gallatin, manager of Astor's
affairs, when Schoolcraft joined the family.
For the next several decades, Henry Schoolcraft would spend much of his time
in the forest, swapping myths with Indians, and publishing various myths as
authentic Indian cultural and religious data. His myths would be the basis
for the poem Hiawatha, written by Harvard Professor Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow.
The Big Pow-Wow
In August of 1846 Henry Schoolcraft attended an extraordinary meeting of the
"New Confederacy of the Iroquois" in Rochester, New York. There were no
actual Indians present, only white men in Indian costumes. Besides
Schoolcraft, another prominent guest and speaker was Giles Fonda Yates(15),
Lieutenant Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Northern
Jurisdiction. Yates was an archeologist, a newspaper editor, and the delegate
of the Scottish Rite's Swiss grand master, J.J.J. Gourgas, for dealings with
the secessionist underground in South Carolina.(16)
This strange assembly would launch Gallatin's new science in America. In his
keynote, Henry Schoolcraft called upon the "braves" to study America's "free,
bold, wild, independent, native race." To create a new scientific and
literary tradition, they must create an "intellectual edifice . . . from the
broad and deep quarries of [our] own mountains."
"No people, " Schoolcraft warned, "can bear a true nationality, which does
not exfoliate . . . from its own bosom, something that expresses the
peculiarities of its own soil and climate.''(l7)
Were these odd students of the Indian supposed to inquire into the history of
the native people, to learn of their past accomplishments so that their
future could be assured through V assimilation? No�the Indian was dying,
his-memory was to be preserved by studying his present habits and his cults,
as one: studies the habits of animals who, after all, have no history in the
human sense. In Schoolcraft's words, "America is the tomb of the Red Man."
What was this pretend "Iroquois Confederacy," thus commissioned by Messrs.
Schoolcraft and Yates to start a new f American science? The question is
important because
1) the organizer of the group, Lewis Henry Morgan, went on to fabricate a
theory of the social evolution of humanity, which was adopted by Karl Marx as
the basis of modern Communism's view of world history; and
2) Morgan's method of simultaneously bullying and "advocating the savage's
cause" was to be the treacherous method of the anthropologists, of whose
science Morgan is generally considered the American founder.
Lewis Henry Morgan was born in 1818 in Aurora, New York, the son of a wealthy
farmer, state senator and masonic leader. The western New York region during
that period has been dubbed the "burnt-over district," because cult leaders
swept through the area for many years, whipping the populace into hysteria
for every conceivable sort of utopian, Spartan and mystical scheme.
At about age 15, Lewis Henry Morgan organized his first secret society among
the students of his high school, then went on to Union College in Schenectady
for some intensive training in radical Scottish nominalism. He emerged from
school anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and a partisan of what he called the
"free, sincere" life of pagan antiquity over the "vanity and ostentation" of
Greek civilization.(18)
His graduation in 1837, in the midst of America's worst economic collapse to
date, meant that he could not get a job, but it did present him with a
generation of aimless and embittered young men to work on. Over the next
several years of depression, working sometimes as a lawyer for petty
criminals, Morgan organized over 500 members into what he originally called
the Order of the Gordian Knot. Morgan's initiates, sworn to secrecy, began by
appropriating the building and costumes of Aurora's masonic lodge, which had
been abandoned in the recent anti-masonic fury. From there they fanned out
and built him a little secret empire in a dozen upstate New York towns.(19)
In the summer of 1843, Lewis Henry Morgan changed the name of his group to
the "Grand Order of the Iroquois," the branches in the several towns took the
names of the various tribes of the actual Iroquois confederation, and Morgan
himself became the chief, Skenandoah.
No later than 1844, Lewis Henry Morgan began serving more than petty
criminals when the Ely family hired him as their family attorney. (20) Morgan
dealt with Ely flour mills in Rochester, and became more and more deeply
involved, through the 1850s and 1860s, in the development of the Ely railroad
ventures in New York, Ohio and Michigan. Since the books that Lewis Henry
Morgan was to write never made him any money, but actually cost him over
$20,000 to publish; and since his writings were to have a decisive impact on
the modern world; the question of who financed his work assumes some
historical importance.
Morgan's employers were a strange westward extension of the Massachusetts
faction of British-allied Tory families; their interest in Morgan's literary
ventures, and in what would be his counter-assimilation efforts among the
Indians, continued in new theaters the old warfare of the British military
intelligence establishment (and the earlier Jesuits) against America's
frontier development. Let us briefly digress, to inspect the background of
these pioneer sponsors of Anthropology. Morgan would not have appreciated the
attention to his employers�he deliberately destroyed all detailed records of
his business and law relationships with the Elys.
Justin Ely (1739-1817), was perhaps the richest merchant of his day in
Springfield, Massachusetts, with large landholdings all over New England. He
represented his area in the Massachusetts General Court (state legislature)
on and off between 1777 and 1795, moving in a milieu increasingly dominated
by the Tories of the Essex Junto.
His son Heman Ely (1775-1852), from the description in the Ely family's
official history(21) can have been nothing other than a British military
intelligence officer. Ostensibly, he was "engaged in commerce with European
countries and the East Indies . . . he made several voyages, visiting
England, Holland, France and Spain, mainly in the prosecution of his business
. . . he gained much from close observation of men and manners.
"In France he remained long enough to acquire the language, for that purpose
separating himself from pleasant friends and living wholly in French
families. He was in Paris from July, 1809, till April, 1810. He saw the grand
fete of Napoleon with Josephine . . . he witnessed the formal entrance into
Paris of the Emperor Napoleon with the Empress Maria Louise....
"At that time Europe was all under arms and it was no easy matter to pass
from country to country, but Mr. Ely seems to have been ready for any
emergency or adventure, running the blockade, shot at by privateers or
sailing in tiny fishing boats when all commercial intercourse between the
countries was strictly forbidden. Accompanied by only one friend, Mr. Charles
R. Codman of Boston, he took passage from England to Holland in a Dutch
fishing boat. Gendarmes patrolled the coast of Holland, and fired upon their
little boat as they tried to land; they waited until later in the night, when
they were quietly landed on the shores of an unknown country, neither of the
gentlemen knowing a word of the Dutch language. For eight weary miles they
carried their baggage, avoiding towns and fine mansions, till they found a
peasant willing to give them food and to care for their baggage. They then
walked to Rotterdam and soon found means to send a servant into the country
for their baggage which the peasant had buried in the sand lest his house
should be searched by officers. The travellers were closely questioned at
Antwerp and other places, but finally reached Paris on the 9th day of July,
1809.
"During their stay in Paris they were one morning ordered from their beds to
the police court on suspicion of speaking ill of Napoleon, but after some
delay and annoyances were released. Spies were everywhere and caution and
courage were necessary."
This Ely returned to America in 1810, surveyed the scene of family holdings
in Ohio, travelled to Canada, and finally returned to Massachusetts. The
family history does not say what he did during the War of 1812, but it quotes
the Springfield Republican in what it calls "an impartial tribute to his
memory": "Mr. Ely was a Federalist of the School of George Cabot, Harrison
Gray Otis and Thomas Handyside [sic] Perkins" [emphasis in the original].
In 1817, bringing "a considerable company of skilled workers and laborers,"
he moved to eastern Ohio and founded the town of Elyria, and the county he
called Lorain. He was the actual initiator and prime sponsor there of Oberlin
College, used in the 1830s and later as a recruiting base for the more
violent of the abolitionist and other assorted radical movements.
Meanwhile his nephews Elisha Ely (1784-1854) and Hervey Ely (1791-1862) moved
to Rochester, New York. Hervey Ely set up Rochester's biggest flour mill,
Elisha Ely and his sons established railroads. Hervey Ely hired Lewis Henry
Morgan as the Ely family attorney. One of Elisha Ely's sons, Heman B. Ely
(1815-1856) founded the first leg, from Buffalo, of the Lake Shore and
Michigan Railroad. He also ran the first telegraph line from Buffalo down to
Cleveland, near the family seat of Elyria.
The British-affiliated Elyria founder Heman had a son also named Heman Ely
(1820-1894), who in 1852 built the section of the family's Lake Shore and
Michigan Railroad between Cleveland and Toledo. During the Civil War,
beginning May 22, 1862, this Heman Ely was made a Soverign Grand Inspector
General in the Scottish Rite organization of Ohio-based Killian H. Van
Rensselaer, who had supervised the creation of the treasonous Knights of the
Golden Circle in Cincinnati in 1854. A month after Lincoln's assassination,
Heman Ely joined the Scottish Rite Supreme Council, and from 1867 to 1891 he
was the treasurer for the Scottish Rite, Northern Jurisdiction of the
U.S.A.(22)
Sometime during 1844, Morgan's biographers say, he accidentally made the
acquaintance of a real Indian named Ely Parker(23)-_and the game began.
Ely Parker was the grandson of Old Smoke, who under Tory direction had led
the Indians in a massacre of Americans at Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania,
during the Revolution. His father was called Jo-no-es-do, a Seneca warrior in
the War of 1812 . . . until a certain English traveller somehow joined the
family and the family name became Parker. The "Parkers" had the same
relationship to the British military and intelligence services as did Joseph
Brant, the Iroquois chief whose raiders massacred the residents of Cherry
Valley, New York; Brant was a brother-in-law of British Indian Commissioner
and Masonic Grand Master William Johnson, and of Augustine Prevost, who with
his father had founded the Scottish Rite in the United States.(24)
How Anthropologists Gather Data
Now Lewis Henry Morgan applied the vise on his subjects of study. The Indians
in the vicinity of Buffalo, New York, were at that time under tremendous
pressure from the Holland Land Company, which hoped to acquire their valuable
local landholdings. The Company, managed locally by the old Tory Ogden
family, was nationally supervised by the family of Anthony Cazenove, a Swiss
consul who was Albert Gallatin's business agent, lawyer and financial
counsellor. Gallatin had been an original Company partner.
The Holland Company petitioned Congress to continue the Andrew Jackson Indian
eviction policy by throwing the Senecas off their lands and exiling them to
the west. Lewis Henry Morgan now appeared with his hundreds of secret society
brothers-cum-anthropologists, and spoke up as a "friend" of the Indians in
their time of trouble.
Morgan wrote to a friend at this time, "The Order must make the Indian the
object of its benevolence and protection," and to Parker, "We must aid him to
escape the devices of Satan and all such White folk. " Morgan's group sang a
song whose chorus ran,
"Then raise on high the battle cry,
We scorn the white men's laws,
We form a band,
Called throughout the land,
Grand Order of the Iroquois."(25)
The Buffalo area Tonowanda Chief Jimmy Johnson accepted the aid of Morgan and
his strange pretend-Indians, and Morgan was adopted into the tribe.
Lewis Henry Morgan and Ely Parker went in 1845 to counter petition Congress
on behalf of the tribe. On his way to Washington, Morgan stopped in New York
City, at the request of Henry Schoolcraft. He addressed the New York
Historical Society, sitting under its 84-year-old president Albert Gallatin,
whose firm was seeking the destruction of Morgan's clients. At about this
moment Henry Schoolcraft joined Morgan's secret society as Alhalla, the
Iroquois prophet.
President James Polk, being no friend to what he considered inferior races,
preferred the expulsion policy and hundreds of terrorized Senecas died on the
exile trail westward.
Now Morgan and Parker together began, under the close supervision of Henry
Schoolcraft, interviewing the softened-up tribesmen about their family
customs and their religious beliefs. Morgan was to combine the jargon and
lore learned or concocted in these interviews, with a certain amount of
rewarmed Jesuit and British writing on the Indian subject, when he and Ely
Parker co-authored the pioneering American volume of anthropology, The League
of the Iroquois, in 1851.(26)
We may now return to the extraordinary meeting, in August 1846, where
Schoolcraft and Yates, representing Albert Gallatin and Scottish Rite
masonry, commissioned Lewis Morgan and - his white Indians to start a new
science. Eight days later, Henry Schoolcraft sent to the board of regents of
the newly formed Smithsonian Institution his "Plan for the Investigation of
American Ethnology." Soon the Smithsonian published its first paper, a
lengthy study of the Indians commissioned by Albert Gallatin. The second,
third, seventh and eighth publications of the Institution carried more
Gallatin-commissioned articles. Over the coming decades the Smithsonian would
be the central vehicle for the new science, which would take on an
increasingly open anti-civilization character as the work of Lewis Henry
Morgan became the gospel of ancient social studies.
Erasing History
How could the European oligarchs cover up the fact that the Indians had had a
higher culture in the past, and that they, like all human beings, were
susceptible of rapid cultural advancement?
Several theories were advanced. First, that the mounds, forts, etc. were so
marvelous that these "dirty redskins" could not possibly have built them, so
Vikings or some of the lost tribes of Israel must have come to America, built
the structures, and gone away. The recent variant of that theory has it that
aliens on flying saucers built the cities of the Latin American Indians, and
perhaps even created mankind. Another theory stated that ancient Mexicans
came north, did the construction, then left it to the lowly Indians.
The final, now hegemonic anthropological line was advanced by Albert Gallatin
himself: the structures show nothing "indicative of a much more advanced
state of civilization than that of the present" Indians. The public should
simply pay no attention to the ancient monuments . . . which were, in any
event, fast disappearing in the Midwestern march of settlement.
Lewis Henry Morgan spent great time and effort trying to prove that Indians
were and always had been savages. He popularized the story, now accepted as
"fact," that the Indians wandered over a since-destroyed land bridge from
Asia in pursuit of game some 10,000 years ago. Evidence of older habitation
in the New World, and of ancient cultural contact, by boat travel, between
the Americas and Asia or Europe, was seen as an enemy proposition to be
defeated at all costs.
Morgan, with the encouragement of the Boston racialist Henry Adams, made it
his mission to discredit the accounts of Indians' accomplishments published
by early Spanish explorers. After the Civil War, Morgan was at the center of
the literary-political fight against Mexico's President, Lincoln's ally,
Benito Juarez, the full-blooded Indian who asked Mexicans to renew the
city-building tradition of their Indian ancestors.
Morgan's close friend and longtime anthropological partner, the migrant Swiss
banker Adolphe Bandilear, made his career in Latin America, pioneering that
school of "Indian studies" there in which non-Europeans cannot, by
definition, attain to a high mental culture; he was the great debunker of
Indians' achievements.
Did citybuilding Asians and Americans intervisit and collaborate around 1500
B.C.? Was there extensive contact between meso-America and the Mediterranean
area, until some disaster cut off contact 2,000 years ago? What was the
nature of the cultural advancement or revolution the southern people brought
to the ancient northerners?
These and similar questions of ancient world history as regards America, have
no meaning for the school of anti-history founded by Lewis Henry Morgan and
retailed in universities today as anthropology.
Generalizing from his tainted studies of certain Indian tribes. Morgan
formulated a sequence of stages of culture through which all humanity
supposedly must pass, by "slow accumulations of experimental knowledge." His
scheme covered approximately 500,000 years, broken down roughly as follows:
Lower Savagery�200,000 years.
The club, the horde, animistic worship, fruit and root gathering, sexual
promiscuity;
Middle Savagery�90,000 years.
The spear, fetishism, fishing, cannibalism;
Upper Savagery�70,000 years.
The bow and arrow, the tribe, matriarchy, roving, hunting;
Lower Barbarism�50,000 years.
The stone hatchet, ancestor worship, roots and grains, settlement in adobe;
brick and stone buildings;
Middle Barbarism 10,000 years.
The plow, nature worship, polygamy, private property in herds and flocks,
soil cultivation;
Upper Barbarism 30,000 years.
Smelting iron, private property in land, family/concubines/ prostitution,
domestic worship;
Lower Civilization�20,000 years.
The alphabet, city gods, religion, mysticism, aristocracy, marriage, divorce;
Middle Civilization�the present.
The steam engine, dissolution of the traditional family, emancipation of
women, public education, applied-science;
Higher Civilization�the future.
Socialism.
This mechanical conception of man's fate was most fully developed in Morgan's
book, Ancient Society, first published in; 1877.27 Frederick Engels, in The
Family, Private Property and the State, published in Switzerland in 1884,
extolled Morgan for providing the "key" to primitive society, an
"independent, scientific" foundation for Engels' and Marx's materialist view
of human history.(28)
But we are led much closer to the purpose of Lewis Morgan's work by reading a
letter to Morgan from the post-Civil War literary editor of the Nation
magazine, Wendell P. Garrison, son of the anti-Union abolitionist William
Lloyd Garrison:
The only way to meet [those resisting Darwinism's surival-of-the-fittest
concepts] is to say outright that a theology resting on atonement called for
by a supposed angelic creation of mankind and subsequent fall must take the
consequences of building on the grounds of science.... [Our actual opponents]
are the Paulists for though we should have the myth of Adam and Eve without
Paul, he was responsible for connecting it with the mission and career of
Jesus, and our theology is really not Christian but Pauline. The Jews have
got along very well with the myth without persecuting anybody.
I am glad you are plying your axe at the root of that false growth. It must
be done silently and indirectly for a while but I hope to live to see the
time when the first chapter of Genesis will have no more defenders among
intelligent beings than any of Ovid's Metamorphoses.(29)
If, as Genesis tells us, man is made in God's image and was given, from his
divine creation, the innate creative powers and curiosity which makes
city-building, astronomy and world-culture his natural life, from which those
in a savage state have -fallen, then all peoples are to be included in the
prosperity and the full human rights of advancing civilization.
Contrarily, Morgan provided a two-edged propaganda tool for empire, positing
the "natural" climb through long ages of night, which each branch of the
human family must make. In this view, if the Anglo-Saxons have made their
half million year climb to civilization, while others such as the American
Indians, or the people of Africa or India are reduced to backwardness, this
is only their natural state, not a result of colonial or any other political
factors. An imperialist who has falsified or buried the historical record may
say with impunity, "the people of India will be ready for self-government in
another 40,000 years, after they have gone through the appropriate stages...."
On the other hand, the people of the anthropologists' home culture are
beguiled by the anti-historical study of the noble savages, whose ways are
purer than ours, and perhaps we should learn to do without science, cities
and excessive reason as they do? This became the theme of twentieth-century
anthropology and its child, Environmentalism.
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
