[PEN-L:357] Herman Melville on the American Indian

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This is from the final chapter of "Savagism and Civilization" by Roy
Harvey Pearce)

In the 1840's, Americans discovered that the West, to which they had
consigned the Indian, itself needed the creative hand of civilization. The
notion of Removal, of pushing the Indian to the Great Plains, somewhere
west of the Mississippi, no longer seemed practicable; for then he would
stand between Americans and Santa Fe, Oregon, and California. He had to be
dealt with; his newly acquired lands had to be taken over; and still he had
to be brought to civilization, or die. What eventually resulted was the
Reservation system, whereby Indians were segregated and gathered together
on specific pieces of land assigned to specific tribes. These were to be
savage islands in the midst of civilized seas. The good hope was that once
they were on their islands, Indians would be at long last liable to proper
civilizing.

But this hope failed too, as it had always failed. Such a failure could
seem nothing less than a divine success to a booming westerner like Senator
Thomas Hart Benton, whose eye was always on the bigger and better and
richer life that was to rise when the West was civilized. In 1846, speaking
to his colleagues on the Oregon question, he judged that Indians (red men)
were inferior to Orientals (yellow men), and proclaimed that the red had
been destroyed so that Americans (white men) could get to the yellow--once
great, now "torpid and stationary "--by commerce, conquest, and
intermarriage, and so bring them to full life and high civilization. "It
would seem," he said, "that the white race alone received the divine
command, to subdue and replenish the earth!" And then:

"For my part, I cannot murmur at what seems to be the effect of divine law.
I cannot repine that this Capitol has replaced the wigwam--this Christian
people, replaced the savages--white matrons, the red squaws--that that such
men as Washington, Franklin and Jefferson, have taken the place of
Powhattan, Opechonecanough, and other red men, howsoever respectable they
may have been as savages. Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of
all people who have found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites,
and civilization, always the preference of the Whites, has been pressed as
an object, while extinction has followed as a consequence of resistance.
The Black and the Red Races have often felt their ameliorating influence."

Benton's expansionist "civilization or extinctions" echoes Sullivan's
officers' revolutionary "Civilization or death." The speech must have
sounded even nobler than the toast; for it put the burden of destruction on
a civilized God, not on civilized men.

The history of the Indian problem in the 1850's and after is not our
concern here, except as it was the result of the victory of civilization
over savagism. We must note, then, that beginning in 1851, the American
government began once more to acquire western Indian lands. The aim was to
protect travellers west, to assure safe settlement of needed lands, and to
clear the way for roads and railroads and the civilization which they would
bring. There was no longer a question of a permanent Indian danger to
civilization; there was only a question of managing to civilize as
peacefully as possible. On the side of the civilizers there was little but
dishonor; on the side of those to be civilized there was little but
desperation; on both sides there was little but violence. The Department of
the Interior sent out its agents to care for the Indians; as often as not
they cared only for themselves. The War Department sent out soldiers to
keep Indians pinned down to lands newly assigned to them and to protect
Americans in the West; Indians would not be pinned down, attacked Americans
encroaching on what they took to be their lands, and were punished for
violating sacred agreements. In the 1860's, the 1870's, and the 1890's, the
Sioux tried violently to assert their independence; in the 1860's the
Cheyennes and the Arapahoes tried to assert theirs; in the 1870's the
Modocs tried to assert theirs and the Nez Perces theirs. These were the
most celebrated campaigns, but there were others like them. Civilized
Americans still cried out in pity and censure. The end was always the same:
defeat and death or confinement.

The American conscience which was hurt by these events could only be a
philanthropic, humanitarian conscience; for American censure in the past
century had reduced the Indian to a state so pitiful as to be comprehended
only by philanthropy and humanitarianism. Henry Schoolcraft was one among
many to set the theme early in the 1850's:

"Whatever defects may, in the eyes of the most ardent philanthropist, have
at any time marked our system of Indian policy, nothing should, for a
moment, divert the government or people, in their appropriate spheres, from
offering to these wandering and benighted branches of the human race,
however often rejected by them, the gifts of education, agriculture, and
the gospel. There is one boon, beside which their ignorance and
instability, and want of business and legal foresight, requires, in their
present and future state--it is protection."

After the Civil War, in the midst of troubles with the Plains Indians,
protection was loudly called for, particularly by Helen Hunt Jackson, who
in 1881 traced the history of American treatment of the Indians and
denounced it in a name that stuck--A Century of Dishonor. Protection
gradually was being given. In 1871 the government had ended the practice of
making treaties with Indians and had stopped pretending they were anything
but wards of their betters. The Indian Service was cleansed and overhauled,
especially under the administration of Secretary of the Interior Carl
Schurz. Attempts to educate and to civilize were stepped up. In 1887, with
the Dawes Act, tribal lands were distributed among individual Indians,
according to civilized notions of land tenure. Finally, in 1924, Indians
were made American citizens. They had at last paid enough for protection
and had fully earned philanthropy and humanitarianism.

Yet even philanthropy and humanitarianism would not work. He on whom it was
to work was in fact no Indian but an image which the civilized conscience
had created just for the protecting, which the civilized intellect and the
civilized imagination had earlier created just for the destroying.
Civilization had created a savage, so to kill him. Idea had begotten image,
so to kill it. The need was to go beyond image and idea to the man.

Recent attempts of our government have been to go that far-as it were, to
begin over again: to grant the Indian what remains of his cultural heritage
as an Indian and to encourage him to hold on to it and still to become
integrated in the American civilization which has been brought to him and
which can yet raise him. Our enlightened aim now is, in the words of one
who has recently been concerned with the Indian's welfare, to let him learn
all the devices the white man has and still be an Indian.

Thus far our civilization has come, and we can say that it is more
civilized than it was. Yet the idea of savagism has a monument which it
will pay us to examine closely, since it stands where we all must see it.
This is the Rescue Group, by Horatio Greenough, which stands at the East
Portico of our Capitol and at the beginning of this book. Commissioned in
the late 1840's, executed while the sculptor was in Italy trying to bring
forth a major American art, erected in 1853 a year after his death, it
raises the meaning of its subject to generalization and permanence. The
conception is grandiosely heroic, not tied down to the particular facts of
frontier life. The frontiersman and the Indian are in their ways
classicized, simplified, abstracted from their "real" images and made to
bear out as simply and as clearly as possible the largest significance of
their struggle. The Indian's look is one of fierce resignation to his fate;
the frontiersman's, of a defender's stern and sad necessity at being the
administrator of such a doom; the wife's, of gentle, civilized terror in
the presence of the savage. The frontiersman, we see, has no choice. As he
looms over his enemy, he bears that burden of victorious pity and censure
which suffused the American understanding of the Indian and his inevitable
destiny.

The statue was explicitly intended to epitomize the meaning of our progress
westward. It illustrated, in the words of the cataloguer of Greenough's
works in 1853, "a phasis in the progress of American civilization, viz.,
the unavoidable conflict between the Anglo-Saxon and the aboriginal savage
races." Greenough himself is said by a friend to have declared that he
wished to depict "the peril of the American wilderness, the ferocity of our
Indians, the superiority of the white-man, and why and how civilization
crowded the Indian from his soil . . ."' I suggest that looked at through
the eyes of our age, the Rescue Group epitomizes the perils not only of the
American wilderness, but of American civilization.

The suggestion of course comes easily, because it comes so long after the
fact. And it is moreover now an obvious one, widely made, and with the
appropriate sentiments. We would do well, then, to meditate hard upon' it,
so as fully to understand it--not only to know what we feel, but to feel
what we know. One way into such a meditation is to read those sections of
Melville's Confidence-Man (1857) which center on a chapter called "The
Metaphysics of Indian-Hating." Herein Melville, in one of the great
creative outbursts in his fading career, proceeds by parody and satire to
indict the idea of savagism for what it precisely was: hatred justified by
piety, piety rationalized by hatred, civilization cultivating and then
feeding upon its discontents. Melville assumes that his contemporary
readers will be ready for his story. He assumes that they will know as much
as, or more than, we now know, thanks to our historical researches, about
savagism and civilization. He thus is addressing readers as immediately
involved as he in living with a culture's commitment to move west, no
matter what the cost, and with the violent ambiguities in all attempts to
justify and rationalize that movement. The art of The Confidence-Man is
powerful enough virtually to make us Melville's contemporaries, and so to
bring this study to its proper conclusion. But then, he is ever our
contemporary.

The Confidence-Man as a whole is the fantastic story of a
nineteenth-century shape-shifter, who, on a voyage on a riverboat,
ironically called the Fidéle, in various guises plays on the naive,
optimistic trust of a body of representative Americans. The working motto
of the novel is in fact "No Trust" and its end is to project a vision of
ante-bellum American culture lost in its own crazy pursuit of quick and
easy ways to spiritual and material wealth. One way of those ways is that
of "Metaphysics of Indian-Hating"; and it is detailed to us as it centers
on the career of Colonel John Moredock, in a version Melville not only
derives from, but explicitly credits to, James Hall, in his Sketches of
History, Life, and Manners in the West (1834-35). Hall, it will be
recalled, was in fact one of the age's prime authorities on the west and
its indigenous inhabitants. And Melville constructs his version of Hall's
account of Moredock in such a way as to transform Hall into an appallingly
blind apostle of progress. We may well take Melville's Hall as an ideal
type, a possible author of all the writings which have been examined in
this study; and we may likewise take Melville's version of Hall's account
of Moredock as a composite, perfected version of those writings. The effect
of the composition and the perfection is to plunge us directly into the
life of Hall's culture and to make us know, only barely mediated, the
component of death--in the idea of savagism--with which, all unknowing, it
sustained itself. . . .

Thus, following the Hall of the Sketches, Melville's Hall traces Moredock's
career--emphasizing that Indian-hating did not completely destroy his
civilized character, that he was, in spite of everything, a good
family-man, a good storyteller, a good singer of songs. Yet he was also a
good enough Indian-hater to make one think of the ideal, the hater par
excellence. The Hall of the Sketches concludes with the simple statement
that Moredock late in life once refused to be a candidate for the
governorship of Illinois. Melville's Hall explains that Moredock refused
because he realized that it would be improper for a governor, Indian-hater
or not, to steal out now and then "for a few days' shooting at human
beings. . . ." Further: " In short, he was not unaware that to be a
consistent Indian-hater involves the renunciation of ambition, with its
objects--the pomps and glories of the world; and since religion,
pronouncing such things vanities, accounts it a merit to renounce them,
therefore, so far as this goes, Indianhating, whatever may be thought of it
in other respects, may be regarded as not wholly without the efficacy of a
devout sentiment."

The cosmopolitan is at this point most deeply disturbed by the narrative;
for this is the antithesis of his kind of love and confidence. And we are
to be disturbed too--but not into siding with Moredock or, beyond him, with
an Indian-hater par excellence. Hatred is hatred; and Melville will not let
us see it as anything but hatred. To remake the traditional Indian-hating
story in general and Hall's version of it in particular into something that
will justify calling hatred "a devout sentiment"; to let us see Hall, as it
were, forcing himself into celebrating loneliness, isolation, godlessness,
and terror--that is, one of Melville's critics says, to give "a strong
purge"-- for the disease spread by the confidence-man; but not on that
account the right purge. Its artistic function is to be too violent a
purge, a terrible irony. If one takes to the story, as Melville must have
assumed his readers would, a minimal awareness of the tradition, one can
see that Melville has no more praise for Indian-hating than he does for
confidence. Both are false, blind, unreasoning. The frightening thing--in
the total context of The Confidence-Man--is that he who escapes one, seems,
by virtue of his very escape, to be driven to the other.

Whatever the final truth of the propositions Melville discovers and
elucidates in The Confidence-Man, the facts of the case are there, and, in
the power and passion of their presentation, may confirm our sense of them
as they have been developed in this study. For the historical fact surely
is that our civilization, in subduing the Indian, killed its own creature,
the savage. The living fact is that it has not yet been able entirely to
kill the Indian, but having subdued him, no longer needs or cares to.
Still, it might be that there will always be somebody who needs to be
subdued--men to play the part of Indians and so become savages standing in
the way of civilization. (We can see this happening in Benton's speech on
the Oregon question, from which I quoted toward the beginning of these
Afterthoughts.) Civilized men continue to forget--and to explain that the
difficulties of the situation force them to forget--that there is a
difference between raising men and exploiting them and that civilization
should always mean life, not death. It is very easy to come to a hard
conclusion like that of the bluff westerner whom Melville makes retell
Hall's tale of Moredock: "And Indian-hating still exists; and, no doubt,
will continue to exist, so long as Indians do."

Yet, meditating the nineteenth-century victory of our civilization over
savagism, profiting from both victory and meditation, bearing the burden of
the facts, we may hope not and work with the hope. We may say with the
Melville who in 1849 had objected to what he termed Parkman's "almost
natural" but "wholly indefensible" disdain for the Indian: "We are all of
us--Anglo-Saxon, Dyaks, and Indians--sprung from one head, and made in one
image. And if we regret this brotherhood now, we shall be forced to join
hands hereafter. A misfortune is not a fault; and good luck is not
meritorious. The savage is born a savage; and the civilized being but
inherits his civilization, nothing more." And we may even try to remember,
out of Moby-Dick and 1851, Queequeg and what is said to be his savage idea
of civilization:

"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help
these Christians."



Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)