The Last Great Indian War Would Be Waged Against Children

On November 1, 1879 Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania. In the ramshackle remains of a disused Army barracks Richard Henry Pratt, a United States calvary officer turned school superintendent, began what would, in time, become a school, a social experiment, and a vehicle for the last great assault against indigenous Americans. Based on Pratt’s model, Carlisle became the flagship institution in a nation-wide system of off-reservation boarding schools. For most Americans unfamiliar with this period of U.S. history, the idea of a government-sponsored education system for Native Americans appears at worst benign, and at best a beneficial way to access education, that mythologized great enabler of upward social mobility.

The intent behind these schools, however, was anything but benign.

By the late 1800s the United States, eager to end it’s century-long wars of conquest against indigenous nations, adopted a new method of undermining Native American resistance. By targeting children the United States could ensure their parent’s compliance with demands to settle on reservations, adopt civilized practices like farming, and break the transmission of savage cultural knowledge, skills, and language to a new generation. With their children hostage to an expansive, land-hungry empire the remaining dregs of resistance would decrease, and the children, baptized and washed clean in the sea of white culture, could go forth into the nation stripped of the shackles of indigeneity and now worthy of citizenship.

For Pratt, and other early proponents of the boarding school system, the schools provided a more humanitarian, and conveniently cost-effective, method of ending the endless Indian wars without further bloodshed. To their progressive white boosters boarding schools were very much perceived as warfare by other means.

Is not here an opening for Christian enterprise? We have tried fighting and killing the Indians, and gained little by it. We have tried feeding them as paupers in their savage state, and the result has been dishonest contractors, and invitation and provocation to war. Suppose we try education?... Might not the money now constantly spent on armies, forts, and frontiers be better invested in educating young men who shall return and teach their people to live like civilized beings? (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1878)

Pratt himself expressed a similar perspective in a fit of frustration. Writing to President Hayes after being denied a promotion he stated…

I am at this time, ‘fighting’ a greater number of ‘the enemies of civilization,’ than the whole of my regiment put together, and I know further that I am fighting them with a thousand times more hopes of success… Here a Lieutenant struggles to evolve order out of the chaos of fourteen different Indian languages! Civilization out of savagery! Industry and thrift out of laziness! Education out of ignorance! Cleanliness out of filth! And is forced to educate the courage of his own instructors to the work, and see that all the interests of his Govt. and the Indian as well as properly protected and served. (Pratt, 1890)

Prior to the growth of scientific racism in the early 1900s proponents of the boarding school system believed a change of surroundings, and immersion in white culture for a generation, would be sufficient to pull the Native American race up from the throws of barbarism.

It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. (Richard Henry Pratt)

Unlike their Indian parents, thought to be irredeemably corrupted, children were pliable and the perfect recipients for the redeeming knowledge of civilization.

It is food for thought to note the number of handsome, bright-eyed children here, typical little savages, arrayed in blankets, leggings, and gee-strings, their faces hideously painted, growing up in all the barbarism of their parents. A few years more, and they will be men and women, perhaps beyond redemption, for, under the most favorable circumstances, but little can be hoped from them after growth and matured, wedded and steeped in the vices of their fathers. It is rather the little children that must be taken in hand and cared for and nurtured, for from them must be realized the dream, if ever realized, of the philanthropist and of all good people, of the day to come when the Indian, a refined, cultured, educated being will assume the title of an American citizen, with all the rights, privileges, and aspirations of that favored individual. (Agent to the Utes, 1886)

It was not enough to simply educate the youngsters, but by transformation of their minds the school system would forever alter their perception of an indigenous way of life. There could be no return, no regression, no backward slide against the tide of civilization. Assimilation was the only way forward in Progressive America, and into that dream of citizenship.

The kind of education they are in need of is one that will habituate them to the customs and advantages of a civilized life… and at the same time cause them to look with feelings of repugnance on their native state. (George Wilson, 1882)

America was unable to imagine another way forward for indigenous inhabitants of this land. The demands of civilization, the disgust of savagery, and the failure to consider a pluralistic interpretation of citizenship made conflict inevitable. To emerge victorious in the last great Indian war something must die. White progressives found cultural erasure, the death of indigenous language and transmission of cultural knowledge, preferable to yet more murdered Indians. As William Jones, Commissioner of Indian Affairs stated in 1903, “To educate the Indian in the ways of civilized life,… is to preserve him from extinction, not as an Indian, but as a human being.”

We hear the same sentiment from Pratt himself

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Carlisle, and the other boarding schools scattered throughout the nation, were machines of war meant to redeem savages and make them useful citizens for a modernizing nation. Decades before the United Nation convention on genocide official United States Indian policy through the boarding school system showed “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such” by the forcible transfer of children from one group to another. The loss of language, knowledge, skills, and identity still resonates in indigenous communities today, and together we must determine how to reconcile with our violent history.

For further reading…

Adams Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928

Fear-Segal White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation

Trafzer, Keller and Sisquoc, eds. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences

Podcast Episode #57:"Intentionalism and Functionalism in the Holocaust" (originally released 4 March 2016)

Host: /u/400-Rabbits, hereafter 400R

Guest: Joe, aka /u/CommieSpaceInvader, hereafter CSI

(edited) TRANSCRIPT:

400R: Hell-o everyone and welcome to Episode 57 of the AskHistorians podcast, a listener-supported podcast. Today's topic is the Holocaust and more specifically we're going to be talking about an academic debate over the causes and the reasons and the rationale and the development of the Holocaust. More on that in just a second, but I want to go ahead and give a big thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon and let you know what we are going to be doing with the excess money that's coming in right now. Right now we have a small bonus above our basic operating costs and keeping our libsyn and our SoundCloud account up -- I've almost got up all the backups on SoundCloud, I promise I'll have those up soon. But we have a small surplus above that and the plan now is to take that and put it aside until we have enough to at one point buy a academic history text, probably on the cheap, probably get something lightly used, and raffle that off to our contributing members. So, if you are a contributor to the AskHistorians Patreon, you can foresee, at the rate we are right now, in a few months, you will perhaps be the recipient of a free academic textbook. We'll probably give you a couple choices of what you can get there. So we're gonna try to do that, kind of get it in on the cheap, see what we can find, see our choices there, but that's the plan now, and as we build more subscribers and have more people support the podcast, we would get that out more and more frequently until we get to a point where we're doing about one a month, at which point we'll have to start thinking of more impressive things to do with our money, perhaps contributing it towards a fund to getting people to the AHAs [American History Association conference]. Anyway, for right now, I just want to say thank you to everyone who supports us on the Patreon, which is of course patreon.com/askhistorians, yeah, go there now. I'll wait. Or you can just hit pause and come back, I'm not actually going to wait.Moving on back to our topic at hand, which is slightly less lighthearted, the Holocaust, and specifically, again, there's this academic debate of intentionalism versus functionalism, which our guest will explain much, much more in depth as we get on. But I want you to approach it and thinking about it as this debate between people in Germany, after the end of World War II. People who lived through it, or people whose parents lived through it. People who were still very much grappling with it as an immediate idea trying to come to the idea, trying to come to grips with, “Why did this happen?” and, more importantly, who is responsible, and who is culpable, you know, what is the limits of human agency? I want you to approach this episode through that lens of kind of imagining yourself in that situation, of someone in 1960s, 1970s, even 1980s Germany, or just generally in the historical profession, looking at the Holocaust and saying “Why did this happen?”, “Is this something that was intrinsic to people?”, or “Is this unavoidable?”, which is of course a question, very often a fundamental question, of dealing with anything when doing any sort of Holocaust studies. But I think focusing on this particular aspect of the debate helps open it up. Along the way we of course talk about a lot of aspects of the development of the Holocaust, like some of the earlier plans, like Aktion T4, some of the later things like Operation Reinhard, but also some of the ad hoc measures, the ghettoisation of the Jews, forced deportations, some of the laws that made it untenable for Jews to live in Germany, even crazy crazy ideas like building a giant reservation for Jews in southern Poland, or shipping all of the Jews in Europe to Madagascar, because sure, why not? That'll work. We'll talk about all those things in this episode of the podcast, and we have a terrific guest today, an absolute wonderful speaker. Also, I've done a little bit something different with the audio, so hopefully it should be one of the clearest, sharpest, most aurally pleasing of the podcasts you've heard so far. Hope you enjoy!

[ podcast theme music ]

Narrator: Welcome to the AskHistorians Podcast!

400R: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the AskHistorians Podcast. Today I am here with Joe, although he goes by the slightly more whimsical name of commiespaceinvader on the AskHistorians subreddit. We are actually discussing a slightly less whimsical topic today and that will be Holocaust, and really kind of looking at some of the academic historical debate around it and some of the rationale that led to it. But before we got started, why don't you go ahead and let us know what got you in particular interested in this topic.

CSI: Uh, first of all, Hi everyone. As far as my relation to the topic, parts of my family were persecuted by the Nazis for political reasons, and during my youth I spent a lot of time in these Austrian left-wing youth groups like the Antifa & similar stuff, and that's really what got me interested in the topic. And I finally decided to go into it academically when, instead of my mandatory military service, I did a year abroad in a major institution related to the Holocaust. I worked there for a year, and that's what really got me into the topic, and kinda sealed the deal for me to go academically into history & into Nazi history.

400R: Yeah, and I guess we should mention that you yourself are Austrian, correct..?

CSI: Exactly

400R: ...So it's somewhat all around you, I guess you should say.

CSI: [chuckles] yeah, yeah, that is quite the correct assessment.

400R: So one of the ways we're going to be looking at this topic and talking about it is through this kind of academic theoretical framework of this debate that went on about functionalism versus intentionalism in the Holocaust. Could you give us, the listeners, and those of us who are not familiar with this topic a rundown about what is this debate?

CSI: This debate is one of the central debates of the last 30 years in Holocaust studies. It is not really, like today, you wouldn't divide so much anymore as you did back in the day, but the basic question it revolves around is: “Why did the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust, and how did the Nazi regime function as a regime?” You have on the one side the intentionalists, that explain the Holocaust and the course of Nazi Germany in terms of Hitler's personal intentions, which are derived from a coherent and consistent ideology and implemented through a totalitarian dictatorship. On the other side you have the functionalists, who emphasise the anarchical nature of the Nazi state, and the chaotic decision-making process surrounding that is sprinkled with constant improvisation and as a very important buzzword there, their theory of “cumulative radicalisation”: building on top of each previous anti-Jewish policy, the Nazis at some point, through initiatives from the periphery, arrive at murder.

400R: So, to kind of put this into the most simplistic terms we could, it's a debate over whether the Holocaust was something Hitler had planned from the very beginning and it was carried out because Hitler wanted it to happen from the very beginning, versus it was something that more kind of grew organically from, as you said, the collective radicalisation of the Nazi state.

CSI: Exactly. If you take, for example, one of the most extreme positions in these debates, you have on the one hand people like Lucy Dawidowicz, who in her book writes that Hitler had the idea to kill all the Jews of Europe in 1922 and from there on he pursued a straight road in terms of his politics towards that aim, and never deviated from it and if he deviated from it for a short time only did so because of strategic considerations. And on the other hand you have people like Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, who say that Hitler didn't even decide that the Holocaust was going to happen, it just happened.