BY GEORGE NOVACK  
The capitalist rulers of the United States rose to power through a series of violent struggles against precapitalist social forces. The first of these upheavals took place at the dawn of modern American history with the invasion of the Western Hemisphere by the nations of Western Europe and the conquest of the aboriginal inhabitants. The uprooting of the Indians played a significant part in clearing the way for bourgeois supremacy on this continent.

However, the pages of the most learned historians contain little recognition and less understanding of this connection between the overthrow of Indian tribalism and the development of bourgeois society in America. As a rule, they regard the ousting and obliteration of the natives simply as an incident in the spread of the white settlers over the continent. They may condemn the treatment of the Indians as a lamentable blot on the historical record, but they do not see that it has any important bearing upon the formation of the United States.

This conventional view of Indian-white relations is shared by conservative and liberal writers alike. In their classic liberal interpretation of The Rise of American Civilization, Charles and Mary Beard, for example, utterly fail to grasp the social significance of the wars against the Indians, making only scanty, disconnected references to them.

President Conant of Harvard supplied an instructive illustration of how far the Indian conquest has faded from the consciousness of bourgeois thinkers during a speech at the New York Herald Tribune Forum in October 1948: “In the first place, this nation, unlike most others, has not evolved from a state founded on a military conquest. As a consequence we have nowhere in our tradition the idea of an aristocracy descended from the conquerors and entitled to rule by right of birth. On the contrary, we have developed our greatness in a period in which a fluid society overran a rich and empty continent….” Conant’s speech summoned American educators to demonstrate in theoretical questions what American capitalism must prove in practice—the superiority of bourgeois ideas and methods over the “alien importations” of the “philosophy based on the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.” The Harvard president insisted that “not words, but facts” must be the weapons to convince the youth and defeat Marxism. The passage we have cited will hardly promote that purpose, for it contains two serious misstatements of fact about early American history.

In the first place, contrary to Conant’s assertion, the bourgeois structure of this nation did “evolve from a state founded on a military conquest.” It was the conquest of the Indian tribes, not to speak of wars against the Spanish, Dutch, and French, that gave England and her colonists mastery of North America.

Secondly, although North America in colonial times was far more thinly populated than Europe or Asia, it was scarcely “empty” of inhabitants. In order to occupy and overrun the continent, the pioneers first had to “empty” the land of its original possessors. The founders of Harvard could tell its president many tales of the difficulties involved in this task.

What are the reasons for this extraordinary blind spot in bourgeois historians and those who, like Conant, push to the extreme their preconceptions of our national origins?

There is, first of all, the weight of tradition. Historians continue to treat the Indians with the same disdain and lack of comprehension that their forefathers manifested in practice. The pioneers looked upon the Indians as little more than obnoxious obstacles in the path of their advancement who had to be cleared away by any means and at all costs. The English colonists rid their settlements of Indians as ruthlessly as they cleared the lands of trees and wild animals. In fact, they placed the Indian “varmints” and “serpents” on the same level as wild beasts. In early New England bounties were paid for Indian scalps as today they are awarded for the tails of predatory animals.

The contemporary professors do not know how to fit the Indians, and the facts of their dispossession and disappearance, into their schemes of interpretation any more than the pioneers were able to absorb them into bourgeois society. The government’s final solution of the Indian problem has been to segregate the survivors in reservations, an American equivalent of the European concentration camps and the African compounds. The historians dispose of the Indians by also setting them off to one side, in a special category completely detached from the main course of American historical development.

Indeed, because of their unconscious and narrow class outlook, the bourgeois historians, on the whole, are hardly aware that the fate of the Indians presents any problem. They assume that private property must be the normal foundation of any “good” society. And so the annihilation of Indian collectivism by the white conquerors for the sake of private property seems so much in the nature of things as to require no explanation.

But there is more involved than inertia or indifference. Freud has explained individual lapses of memory by an unconscious wish to hide from whatever is shameful, fearful, socially unacceptable. Where a social lapse of memory occurs, a similar mechanism and similar motives for suppression are often at work, especially where representatives of ruling classes engage in systematic forgetfulness. That is the case here. The abominable treatment of the Indians is extremely unpleasant to contemplate, and equally unpleasant to explain.

At the bottom of their censorship lies the bourgeois attitude toward the communal character of Indian life. The bourgeois mind finds communism in any form so contrary to its values, so abhorrent and abnormal, that it recoils from its manifestations and instinctively strives to bury recollections of their existence. In any event, the run-of-the-mill historian feels little impulse to examine and explain primitive communism, although it was the cradle of humanity and, in particular, formed a starting point of modern American history.

Even contemporary writers sympathetic to the Indians, such as Oliver LaFarge, go out of their way to deny that the basic institutions of the Indians can be termed “communistic” even while offering evidence to the contrary. “The source of life, the land and its products, they [the Indians] owned in common,” writes LaFarge in As Long as the Grass Shall Grow. (p. 25.) “Loose talkers have called this Communism. It is not.” Here is a striking example of how deep anticommunist prejudice runs.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home