The Dilemma of Progress
It was an unusually warm day in the nation’s capital when on Thursday, December 13, 1923, Calvin Coolidge’s White House welcomed the Committee of One Hundred, a group of activists, scholars, and experts whose job it was to advise the administration on indigenous policy.
During the visit, the twenty-six-year-old Ruth Muskrat, born into the Delaware Nation and a junior at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, made a brief but powerful impression on the president—and the nation.
Donning Native American attire, Muskrat handed Coolidge a copy of Gustavus Elmer Emanuel Lindquist’s landmark study, The Red Man in the United States, adorned with a beaded cover handcrafted by Cheyenne tribeswomen.
Addressing the “Great White Father,” Muskrat said, “It is a book which bears the best we have to offer—the story of our struggles and our tragedies, of our victories and our developments.” The cover, she explained, was a “symbolic story of our race—the story of the old type of Indian, greeting with the hand of friendship the founders of this great nation.”
But, even as with the white man’s America of old, the Native American’s land of hope was quickly vanishing, if it had not already. What had been was no more, and what was to be was both a future of opportunity and dread, much akin to the post-abolition lives of freed slaves after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
There was, as all knew, “an Indian problem.” It was, at its core, no different than “the slave problem”: how to move beyond the past and make of America a place for new beginnings for all and not just some. As ever, there was in America at this moment in time a dilemma of progress.
But Muskrat knew, too, that this problem had become too much a white man’s self-assumed burden. Addressing Coolidge directly, the young Native woman said, “May not we, who are Indian students of this generation, who must face the burdens of that problem, say what it means to us?
“Our old life is gone,” she said. “A new trail must be found… Ours must be the problem of leading this vigorous and by no means dying race of people back to their rightful heritage of nobility and greatness.
“We want to understand and to accept the civilization of the white man; we want to become citizens of the United States and to share in the building of this great nation that we love,” she said. “But we want also to preserve the best that is in our own civilization. We want to make our own unique contribution to the civilizations of the world-to bring our own gifts to the altar of that great spiritual and artistic unity which such a nation as America must have.”
The problem was not an easy one to solve. As Lindquist had written, “the idea of occupation by conquest and by extermination gave way to that of segregation.” Much akin to the segregation of Black Americans, “the solution of the problem arising between the white and the red races,” it was believed, “lay in keeping them as far apart as possible.”
Just as Black Americans faced segregation and then assimilation, Native Americans endured the same irony: being accepted and “Americanized” meant having their humanity and worth somewhat affirmed but their fundamental rights still denied—even though they were already Americans.
The best way to solve the problem, as Muskrat saw it, was through education—through the ideal that all should have a chance to pursue their full measure of life, liberty, and happiness in the land of hope.
“We must have schools,” she said. “We must have encouragement and help from our White Brothers.” Help they needed; in the 1900 census, some 44 percent of Native Americans were considered literate, compared to 94 percent of whites.
The challenge, as during Reconstruction, was to close this vital gap, which meant first acknowledging that America’s was a dream and promise meant for all and not just some, that the cultivation of the mind—the cultivation of the future—was not an exclusive but an inclusive American (and human) endeavor.
“For reasons today, as never before, the trail ahead for the Indian looks clear and bright with promise,” Muskrat admitted in closing. “But it is yet many long, weary miles until the end.”
The irony and dilemma of American progress remained a central fact of American life in the early (and middle and late) twentieth century. “Our democracy is but a name,” Helen Keller wrote in 1911, highlighting the glaring imbalance of the American promise.
Even after the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Muskrat could write in 1944 that Native Americans “were not then and are not now accorded the full privileges of democracy.”
Poetically, that same year, Otelia Cromwell spoke for another historically repressed group of Americans when she rebuked the “glaring inconsistency between American theory and practice” which radiated from the contrasting promise of the Allied fight for freedom and democracy abroad in the Second World War with the realities of oppressive and often violent segregation confronting Black America at home.
As ever, there was a sense that America was both a land of hope and a land of oppression, a ray of sunshine for some and a cloud of darkness for others, a place where futures were being made for some and the past still haunting those looking for their chance at a better tomorrow.
It was at once a land of inclusion and exclusion, a beacon of tolerance and intolerance, a place of prosperity and poverty.
Even still, the flame of hope burned bright, whether on the reservation, in the tenements or in the ghettos.
On Wednesday, August 10, 1927, Coolidge spoke at the dedication of Mount Rushmore. Standing on Sioux land confiscated by federal authority, the president said, “The progress of America has been due to the spirit of its people.”
He added, “This memorial will be another national shrine to which future generations will repair to declare their allegiance to independence, to self-government, to freedom and to economic justice.”
Today, countless Americans visit Mount Rushmore, beholding the glory of an America that is far more human than we like to admit. The monument, like the reservations, stands as a dual symbol of an America whose progress has at times left its own people behind.
It stands, too, as an expression of ideals pronounced, defended, and fought for, but ideals yet to be fully and more purely realized.