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

Introduction

3 Introduction A T-shirt sold on Indian reservations is emblazoned “Battling Terrorism Since 1492.” It could as well be sold in synagogues: Columbus sailed out of Palos harbor in the wake of the last of the ships transporting Spain’s Jews into exile, and their confiscated wealth financed his voyage (Roth [1932] 1966:271–72; Uchmany 2001:187). Jews and American Indians share a history of persecution from Christian nations. That, and the Jewish mitzvah—obligation—to help the less fortunate led several American Jews to work toward, and then within, the Indian New Deal. Their role has not been emphasized in histories of this major shift in US Indian policy. It is the argument of this book that the blatant anti-Semitism of the 1930s downplayed the critical contributions of these men and one woman. Focusing on Felix Cohen, a brilliant legal scholar who wrote the legislation of the Indian New Deal, and his anthropologist wife, Lucy Kramer, this book brings forward their involvement and contextualizes it. Although America in the 1930s accepted open discrimination against Jews, Franklin Roosevelt insisted on recruiting the best men, and even women, to his New Deal. The story of the Indian New Deal reflects revolutions not only in the status of American Indians but also of American Jews. Beyond the Indian New Deal, Cohen’s construction of the concept of inherent sovereignty for America’s “domestic dependent nations” became part of the foundation of the international movement for indigenous rights, culminating in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (Wiessner 2008:1145, n. 26). 4 • Introduction Because I am an anthropologist, I see actors in history constrained or empowered by the cultures in which they live. My experience as an Ashkenazi Jewish American whose parents were contemporaries of the Cohens —my father a lawyer employed in the New Deal (National Labor Relations Board), and my ethnographic fieldwork with American First Nations including the Montana Blackfeet for whom Cohen had been legal counsel—informs my reading of historical documents. Looking at the formal public presentation of the Indian New Deal in 1934, I see that what was meant to be a startling reversal of federal Indian policy reflected a decade of change set in motion after World War I. International yearning for a peaceful and just world was epitomized by Woodrow Wilson’s call for a “general association of nations . . . formed on the basis of covenants designed to create mutual guarantees of the political independence and territorial integrity of States, large and small equally” (Wilson 1918). Three constituencies in the United States overlapped around 1930: the hegemonic Protestant Christians, Ashkenazi immigrants’ children rapidly rising into middle-class acceptability, and American First Nations regaining population after their late nineteenth-century nadir. All three were buffeted by the Great Depression economic breakdown. The Indian New Deal is more than a narrative of crusading John Collier persuading Congress to pass his bill endorsed by Senator Burton Wheeler and Representative Edgar Howard. It is part of American cultural history. Its three protagonists are Collier, from Southern and Puritan aristocracies; Felix Cohen and his wife Lucy, New York–born children of Social Democrat Jews from eastern Europe; and Harold Ickes, astute Chicago politician working for Midwest Progressive principles at the top of Roosevelt’s administration . The three men formed a troika, each critical to the success of the Indian New Deal. Chapter 1 introduces the background to the 1934 Indian New Deal. Its predecessors ranged from Thomas Jefferson, who as president worked up a plan to dispossess Indians by luring them into debt and taking land as payment , through President, formerly General, Grant’s “Peace Policy” of final military conquests, to the turn-of-the-century Dawes Act which divided reservations up into small farms and sold off “surplus” land. After that nadir of contempt for Indians, a rebound of Indian population in the twentieth century, coupled with Indians’ admirable service in World War I, brought US citizenship to American-born Indians and growing realization that Christianizing-and-civilizing policies had been harsh failures. President Hoover’s acceptance of the Meriam Report in 1928 was the beginning of the shift carried through in the Roosevelt administration. Already Introduction • 5 in 1923, the socially well-connected John Collier had organized the American Indian Defense Association to mobilize liberal Americans to free Indians from stringent federal control. A decade later, Collier became Commissioner of...