A Passion for the True and Just: Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen and the Indian New Deal

1. The Indian New Deal

9 chapter one The Indian New Deal The Indian New Deal in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was an extraordinary about-face in US policy, a radical acknowledgment of injustice and historical untruths. Credit for this critical shift is conventionally given to Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian Affairs, the crusading John Collier. Collier spoke passionately about Indians’ rights to preserve their cultures and practice their religions. As commissioner, he implemented moves to shift Indian children from English-language boarding schools into local day schools with indigenous-language primers, to create elected tribal business councils for managing reservation economies, and to restore Indian land to the tribes. John Collier was the effective spokesman for the Indian New Deal and the administrator for its policies. He was not the power behind the Indian New Deal, nor its architect: Harold Ickes was the former, and Felix Cohen was the latter. Collier the Crusader fits a conventional scenario, one man’s courageous fight against entrenched oppression. In the 1930s America wasn’t ready to see a Jewish man in a crusader’s cape. Time magazine ran an article in May 1934 detailing how few Jews served in Roosevelt’s administration , mostly as “bright young legalites to do spade work for the Brain Trust” (“National Affairs” 1934). Harold Ickes hired them, going so far as to name one, Nathan Margold, Solicitor for the Department of the Interior, and Margold hired another, Felix Cohen, as an assistant solicitor in Interior. Ickes was too astute a politician to appear in a crusader’s cape. He termed himself a “curmudgeon,” deflecting attention away from his deep commitment to Progressive principles. Felix Cohen and his anthropologist wife Figure 1.1. Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes handing the first constitution issued under the Indian Reorganization Act to delegates of the Confederated Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation (Montana). Photo from Library of Congress. Figure 1.2. Nathan Margold. Image provided by Worth Mentioning Public Relations (William Margold). Figure 1.3. Felix Cohen. Photo courtesy of the Felix S. and Lucy Kramer Cohen Photograph Collection. 12 • Chapter One and collaborator, Lucy Kramer, were further to the left: they were cardcarrying members of the Socialist Party of the USA.1 Critics of the Indian New Deal charged that it was trying to “make Reds of the red men.” There was substance to the charge. Behind the Cohens’ allegiance to socialism lies the European Social Democrat movement, popular among Ashkenazi Jews. The movement was socialist, not Bolshevik, fitting well into Talmudic principles attributed to the great sage Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” and, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah.”2 These profound injunctions can be considered a mitzvah, that is, a commandment, to work for social justice. It is in this sense that Felix Cohen’s work on the Indian New Deal may be seen as a mitzvah. Harold Ickes, descended from Protestant American families that settled in western Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, came to a similar moral imperative from Presbyterian strictures heightened by childhood poverty and his struggle for a college education at the University of Chicago. Cohen described Ickes as he observed him “during the past 10 years of rough and tumble political work under a boss [Ickes] who has never allowed the slightest glimmer of high idealism to appear in any speech and who has, nevertheless, done more good things than any less curmudgeonly member of the President’s Cabinet.”3 These two men of such different backgrounds and lives, one a tall athletic intellectual from immigrant Jewish parents settled in New York City, the other a short Chicago politician embroiled in a tumultuous marriage to an heiress, shared a drive to emancipate America’s “domestic dependent nations” from its harsh yoke.4 Neither man, in contrast to Collier, entertained a romantic notion of Indians as nature’s pure primitives. It was a crying need for justice that sustained them, justice that their legal skills could bring within reach. In this book, I describe each member of Interior’s triumvirate, Ickes, Collier, and Felix Cohen, the history of federal Indian policy and of the First Nations governed by it, and the Indian New Deal. I pay attention to the indirect influence of...