< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Fourth Annual Convention, Adam's Mark Hotel, Denver, Colo.
During the presidential campaign last year -- you
remember, the one that threatened to stretch into this year
-- both major-party candidates promoted faith-based
initiatives.
Although the specifics varied, the basic
concept was the same no matter whether it came from Al Gore
or George Bush.
The premise was that existing social welfare programs don't always function well, especially when the goal is to make people into citizens who can live without governmental assistance.
From there, the theory is that these programs might function better if they were administered by religious groups, who could add a dimension -- the dimension of personal and cultural transformation -- that a neutral civil government cannot provide.
Thus, the faith-based initiatives.
The Bush
platform offered several specifics, among them Lift
federal regulations that hamper faith-based initiatives
from involvement in the delivery of services to the
needy,
and Open certain federal after-school
programs to faith-based and community groups.
It will probably come as no surprise that something like this has been tried before -- having religious groups administer certain federally funded social welfare programs.
It happened more than a century ago, in the 1870s. The
social welfare programs were on Indian reservations, and it
is called the Grant Administration Peace Policy
by
many historians.
Let me make it clear that I am not a historian. I'm a
history buff. That means my knowledge is rather
superficial. I'm also a newspaper columnist, which means
that superficial
might as well be my middle name.
As one of my editors, Bob Ewegen at the Denver Post, often
points out, journalism is the art of relentless
over-simplification.
So, if you'll keep those caveats in mind, I'll start with a brief look at the relationship between the United States and various Native American tribes in the 19th century.
American policy toward the Indians has always been in a state of flux, swinging between preservation and assimilation, and it was no different right after the Civil War, when victorious General Ulysses S. Grant was taking office as president.
Preservation was the prevailing policy under the Lincoln and Johnson Administrations -- insomuch as they had an Indian policy, preoccupied as they were with Civil War and Reconstruction. The federal government made treaties with tribes that were in the way of Manifest Destiny.
These treaties generally set aside land for the tribes
-- it was reserved
from homesteading or mining
claims, and thus the term reservation.
And with more and more settlers heading west, there was always pressure on the federal government to open more and more land to settlement. And so the federal government applied pressure to the Indians to reduce the size of their reservations, so that more land could be opened to settlement.
But if the reservations shrank, what were the Indians to do for a livelihood? There wasn't enough game for them to follow their traditional way of hunting, and Congress wasn't eager to appropriate money to feed them interminably.
So preservation on a reservation
was losing
ground by 1870, and the assimilation
theory began to
prevail in Washington. If the Indians could be taught
the arts of Christian civilization
-- that is, if
they could learn to get their livelihoods from 160-acre
farms, rather than from vast expanses of prairie where the
buffalo roamed -- then they'd be just like the white folks,
part of the community, rather than isolated on
reservations.
And if they were farmers, rather than hunters, they wouldn't need nearly as much land, which means substantial portions of their reservations could be opened to settlement.
But who would conduct this education on the reservations?
In 1870, various Christian denominations -- primarily the Roman Catholics and the Quakers -- were already operating mission schools on reservations, and had been running them for several decades.
There were also some political considerations. The federal agents assigned to reservations were notoriously corrupt.
President Grant was a military man who believed that Army officers, with their oaths and codes of conduct, were more trustworthy than civilians. Besides that, as the Army shrank after the Civil War, there were scores of officers who had no commands.
Grant began appointing Army officers as Indian agents. But this removed a source of patronage, which upset Congressmen who were no longer able to get appointments for their contributors. In 1870 Congress passed a law which forbade military officers from holding civil appointments, and so Grant had to look elsewhere for Indian agents.
All these factors combined to create the Faith Based
Initiative
of 1870. Men of goodwill in Washington
sincerely believed that assimilation was the best course
for the Indians. More normal men in Washington -- that is,
men of greed -- believed that the Indians were using up too
much land that could be turned to more profitable purposes.
Teaching the Indians to operate individual farms would
further both goals.
Church mission schools were already in operation, and more denominations might be induced to support Indian schools, especially if the reservation agent was a member of that denomination. And appointing good churchmen as Indian agents would be a good start on reducing or even eliminating corruption in that quarter.
And so began this Faith-Based Initiative in 1870. Insofar as possible, the denominations that had missions on given reservations were assigned to those reservations, with one major exception: the Mormons, who had run an extensive mission network among the Utes, were totally excluded. The denominations would select the agents for their reservations.
Most denominations participated: Hicksite and Orthodox Friends, Baptist, Presbyterian, Campbellites, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Reformed Dutch, Congregational, Episcopalean, Lutheran, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, even the Unitarians. Altogether, they ran 73 agencies that served 238,899 Indians, ranging from the Sac and Fox in Iowa to the Quinalt in Washington Territory, from the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico to the Flatheads of Montana Territory.
Let us ignore, for the moment, whether the goal of assimilation was a worthy goal, and instead ask whether the Peace Policy moved toward that goal, and if not, why?
Obviously, very little assimilation ever occurred. So
something went awry with this Faith Based
Initiative.
One major problem was bickering among the denominations. The Catholics got only seven reservations, although they had supported missions on 19 reservations. The oversight board was dominated by Protestants, and in the view of some Church's officers, the entire Peace Policy was a way to push Catholics aside so that Protestants could proselytize and spread dangerous doctrines.
There was some truth to these charges, in that Protestant agents began closing the Catholic churches that had been operating on reservations.
The Protestants also argued among themselves -- even the Quakers were fighting, with both the Orthodox and the Hicksites demanding the same reservations.
About all the Protestants could agree on was that they opposed Catholic schools. And Protestants and Catholics agreed that Unitarians weren't really Christians, and shouldn't be part of this endeavor.
Congress naturally heard of these conflicts. The Peace Policy was also unpopular out here in the West, where it was seen as an effort by bleeding-hearts who didn't understand the warlike and violent nature of many Native Americans. And the Army wasn't fond of it, either -- the Army wanted Indian matters returned to the War Department, rather than retained in the Interior Department.
So there were external and internal political conflicts, and there were occasions when the church-designated Indian agent was no improvement on the corrupt political hacks.
To be fair, most of the Peace Policy agents were honest, something that could not be said of Indian agents at any other time in the 19th century. The commission of churchmen in Washington who oversaw the program
But they faced the same problems as the corrupt agents -- low pay and isolation -- and if they didn't get additional support from their churches, they had the same need for money, a need that could be satisfied by accepting kickbacks from suppliers who delivered weevil-infested flour and moldy bacon while charging for first-rate goods.
This indicates that there were structural problems in the entire system of reservations and agents; problems that couldn't be fixed just by putting good people in bad positions.
The main problem was the lack of resources. The Grant
Peace Policy
essentially told the Indians that they
had to go to the reservations, because if they were off the
reservation, they would be considered hostile, and the
Army, under the command of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
(War is Hell
) and Gen. Phillip Sheridan (The only
good Indian is a dead Indian
) would deal with them.
And if they stayed on the reservation, they were supposed to receive rations like flour and beef. They were supposed to receive seedgrains and breeding stock, along with machinery and instruction, so they could take up agriculture. Their children were supposed to be educated.
But even though there were formal treaties, Congress refused to appropriate enough money. The Indians who stayed on the reservations seldom got their rations -- they starved.
So, the Plains Indians faced this choice:
1) Trust the government, stay on the reservation, and starve.
2) Trust their own skills, leave the reservation to hunt and raid, and avoid starvation while preserving their dignity.
It's not hard to understand why so many Indians took the
second option, and that meant there was precious little
peace
under the Peace Policy. Indeed, the war on
the plains reached a peak then; it was on June 26, 1876,
that George Armstrong Custer's command encountered 5,000
Lakota, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne who weren't on the
reservation.
This Plains war led Congress to cut appropriations even further, and the Peace Policy began to lose its political support. By 1880, it was pretty well abolished, in favor of reforming the civil service, in the hope of getting qualified and honest Indian agents.
Historian Richard P. Metcalf, after examining the Peace
Policy, concluded that during the eight years this
religious peace policy was in effect, more lives were
lost to Indian depredations, more money was spent on Indian
campaigns, and soldiers fought more engagements against
Indians than in any comparable period in American
history.
Metcalf also observed that Congress refused to
appropriate sufficient funds for the reservations, and so
the agents were unable to keep the few Indians they had
from starvation, much less make the reservation an
attractive alternative to the nomadic life. The meager
funds that were granted were largely soaked up by
continuingly venal traders and contractors. More than a few
church-nominated agents, forced to live on an annual salary
of only $1,500, became corrupt.... Several reservations
were torn by interchurch quarrels over the right of
different denominations to establish missions.
Another historian, Henry E. Fritz [The Movement for
Indian Assimilation, 1860-1890, p157], generally agreed
with Metcalf, but pointed out that the general qualities of
Indian agents improved under the Peace Policy. There
was not perfection, but there was improvement because
agents sent out by the churches were committed to the
Indians' welfare. Such personnel were a minority before the
Peace Policy began.
Fritz also points out that a great deal of fraud was eliminated by an inspection system initiated by the Board of Indian Commissioners -- the churchmen in Washington who oversaw the program.
So, it wasn't a total failure, even if it was a long way from being a success. Can it teach us anything today, as the federal government again attempts to work with religious groups to address problems like illiteracy and joblessness?
It should. One lesson is that denominational disputes don't help. Another is that audits and accounting remain vital.
But the main lesson of the Peace Policy is that good intentions are no substitute for adequate resources. Had Congress appropriated the money that it promised, the Peace Policy might have produced something like peace, because Indians might have stayed on the reservation, since they would have received the food, tools, and instruction that they had been promised.
But Congress stinted on the resources, and private
charity was unable to meet the demands of the program.
Faith is a wonderful thing, but as the Apostle Paul wrote,
faith without works is dead,
and society must
provide the resources for the works
if the
faith
is to help society achieve its goals.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >