WEBVTT NOTE Red Atlantis: John Collier's Politico-Economic Utopia and Indian New Deal 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.040 Well, you just heard the story about proponents of liberty. 2 00:00:05.040 --> 00:00:06.640 My story will be opposite. 3 00:00:06.640 --> 00:00:13.520 It's a story about a man who was anti-liberty, John Collier. 4 00:00:13.520 --> 00:00:19.520 Let me start by posing a rhetorical question. 5 00:00:19.520 --> 00:00:22.920 Imagine a country that has a corrupt authoritarian 6 00:00:22.920 --> 00:00:24.040 government. 7 00:00:24.040 --> 00:00:27.920 In that country, nobody knows about checks and balances, 8 00:00:27.920 --> 00:00:31.720 and nobody is familiar with an independent court system. 9 00:00:31.720 --> 00:00:34.920 Private property is not recognized in this country. 10 00:00:34.920 --> 00:00:38.160 Neither can one buy and sell land. 11 00:00:38.160 --> 00:00:41.800 All businesses are reluctant to invest into this country 12 00:00:41.800 --> 00:00:44.560 because the property is not protected. 13 00:00:44.560 --> 00:00:47.880 Those people who have jobs, they work for a public sector. 14 00:00:47.880 --> 00:00:50.200 Those who don't have jobs, they exist 15 00:00:50.200 --> 00:00:54.360 on meager entitlements that provide the basic foods 16 00:00:54.360 --> 00:00:56.120 and clothing. 17 00:00:56.120 --> 00:01:09.120 At the same time, this country supports free healthcare, free education, and can you guess 18 00:01:09.120 --> 00:01:11.400 what country is it? 19 00:01:11.400 --> 00:01:18.700 It could be, yeah, it could be Soviet Russia, it could be Cuba, right? 20 00:01:18.700 --> 00:01:19.700 What else? 21 00:01:19.700 --> 00:01:20.700 Venezuela. 22 00:01:20.700 --> 00:01:32.700 It could be a third world country, although even Zimbabwe today has at least formula right, checks and balances and private properties at least formula is protected. 23 00:01:32.700 --> 00:01:42.700 Well, the answer to this rhetorical question is that this country exists here in the United States and the name of this country is Indian country, Native America. 24 00:01:42.700 --> 00:01:48.460 America. Indian country, it's a metaphor used by writers and scholars to 25 00:01:48.460 --> 00:01:58.100 describe the archipelago of 310 Indian reservations you can see here on the map. 26 00:01:58.100 --> 00:02:03.540 These lands are held in trust by the federal government, which means legally 27 00:02:03.540 --> 00:02:09.380 this is federal property, which means you cannot sell and buy land, which means you 28 00:02:09.380 --> 00:02:12.180 You cannot get mortgage. 29 00:02:12.180 --> 00:02:16.040 That is why when you cross the borders of reservation you see a bunch of trailers. 30 00:02:16.040 --> 00:02:21.020 People don't live there in the houses, practically nobody lives in the houses. 31 00:02:21.020 --> 00:02:29.820 The main purpose of this trust status is to shield the Indian tribes from financial failures. 32 00:02:29.820 --> 00:02:37.100 Federal government naively believed that Indian tribes should be protected from the outside 33 00:02:37.100 --> 00:02:38.260 society. 34 00:02:38.260 --> 00:02:43.740 Federal government does not allow the Indian tribes to fail financially. 35 00:02:43.740 --> 00:02:51.700 So of course this peculiar status scares away businesses and creates what Robert Higgs famously 36 00:02:51.700 --> 00:02:54.260 described as a regime of uncertainty. 37 00:02:54.260 --> 00:03:00.660 In fact, here on reservations, regime uncertainty exists in its extreme form. 38 00:03:00.660 --> 00:03:03.000 It borders on socialism. 39 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:10.440 So that is why in 1983 a former Secretary of Interior in the first Reagan administration 40 00:03:10.440 --> 00:03:16.000 named James Watt, he actually said, and dearly paid for this statement because he offended 41 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:21.560 the whole group of people, that's how it was viewed at that time, I quote, if you want 42 00:03:21.560 --> 00:03:27.880 to have an example of the failure of socialism, don't go to Russia, come to America and go 43 00:03:27.880 --> 00:03:31.480 to Indian reservations, unquote. 44 00:03:31.480 --> 00:03:37.040 In the 1990s I had the chance, I did the research on another topic and I had the chance to go 45 00:03:37.040 --> 00:03:48.580 through several Indian reservations and what struck me, it was like coming back home because 46 00:03:48.580 --> 00:03:56.360 Indian countryside resemble Russian countryside and you could see the same checks, worn out 47 00:03:56.360 --> 00:03:57.360 checks. 48 00:03:57.360 --> 00:04:06.000 Fences, rotting fences, car carcasses, and frequently, I have to say, a bunch of intoxicated 49 00:04:06.000 --> 00:04:09.960 individuals hanging around. 50 00:04:09.960 --> 00:04:17.880 So I guess my talk will be a biased view of a former Soviet citizen who feels that he 51 00:04:17.880 --> 00:04:23.120 enters his past when he crosses the borders of an Indian reservation. 52 00:04:23.120 --> 00:04:34.120 Well, to be serious, I want to give you a mini-excursion in the intellectual origin, so who set this system, how this system was set, why does it exist. 53 00:04:34.120 --> 00:04:49.120 And I think we need to do it because since 1960s the topic of Native America was hijacked by Marxist scholarship and by so-called identity studies. 54 00:04:49.120 --> 00:04:57.080 So, I'm going to apply sort of methodological individualism to this topic. 55 00:04:57.080 --> 00:05:02.640 In my view, the enduring poverty on Indian reservations is not a result of, as Marx's 56 00:05:02.640 --> 00:05:11.480 scholarship says, evil capitalism, but the result of collectivism and statism. 57 00:05:11.480 --> 00:05:17.320 Endorsed in the 1930s, that's when the system was set up, collectivism and statism were 58 00:05:17.320 --> 00:05:23.280 were internalized by federal bureaucracy and by Native American leaders themselves and 59 00:05:23.280 --> 00:05:28.800 now it became part of the culture, institutional culture and so-called traditional culture. 60 00:05:28.800 --> 00:05:34.760 In fact, the despise of individual enterprise and private property on reservations is currently 61 00:05:34.760 --> 00:05:41.520 advertised as a part of this ancient legacy, traditional lifestyle and so forth. 62 00:05:41.520 --> 00:05:43.520 I don't think I need to give you statistics. 63 00:05:43.520 --> 00:05:46.480 I don't want to waste too much time. 64 00:05:46.480 --> 00:05:49.040 If you're interested, you can Google it. 65 00:05:49.040 --> 00:05:51.600 So Indians, Native Americans are poorest group 66 00:05:52.880 --> 00:05:55.560 among the other ethnic groups in the United States. 67 00:05:57.920 --> 00:06:00.160 These are rotten policies which resulted 68 00:06:00.160 --> 00:06:01.160 in what we have today. 69 00:06:01.160 --> 00:06:05.520 38% Indians live below poverty level. 70 00:06:05.520 --> 00:06:08.240 The rotten policies which resulted in this situation 71 00:06:08.240 --> 00:06:10.960 was set up during the New Deal in 1930s. 72 00:06:10.960 --> 00:06:11.800 By whom? 73 00:06:11.800 --> 00:06:20.800 and Collier, a Columbia-educated social reformer, community organizer, and on top of this, a utopian dreamer. 74 00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:25.800 So he believed he would create certain red Atlantis. 75 00:06:25.800 --> 00:06:38.800 It was a metaphor for him to describe this collective commonwealth, organic commonwealth that would show the American, the world, this ideal lifestyle. 76 00:06:38.800 --> 00:06:45.760 The gist of his system was a creation of so-called the tribal corporations, public corporations, 77 00:06:45.760 --> 00:06:51.560 another fancy word that came from Italy, public corporations. 78 00:06:51.560 --> 00:07:00.560 It's interesting that in the rest of America you don't have local governments that own 79 00:07:00.560 --> 00:07:06.960 casinos, restaurants, motels, hotels, but on Indian reservations you have local governments, 80 00:07:06.960 --> 00:07:11.960 and these private corporations who own these things, okay? 81 00:07:11.960 --> 00:07:16.960 And if they fail these ventures, the federal government steps in and subsidizes them. 82 00:07:16.960 --> 00:07:27.960 So we have stories about numerous Native American enterprises that had been subsidized by the government for 20, 25 years, 30 years. 83 00:07:27.960 --> 00:07:33.960 My major argument is that Collier Utopian Project, it's a utopia, 84 00:07:33.960 --> 00:07:38.960 Restoration of tribal collectivism through setting up these public corporations 85 00:07:38.960 --> 00:07:43.960 Was not some out of touch with reality stuff 86 00:07:43.960 --> 00:07:47.960 It was part of New Deal mindset 87 00:07:47.960 --> 00:07:54.960 And even more I tried to argue that it was a manifestation of a standard policy solutions 88 00:07:54.960 --> 00:07:57.960 Which were shared by many other countries at that time 89 00:07:57.960 --> 00:08:02.960 National Socialism in Germany, Mussolini in Italy 90 00:08:02.960 --> 00:08:13.240 FDR, there are other projects which resemble New Deal and even Soviet Communism understand. 91 00:08:13.240 --> 00:08:20.400 I'm arguing that in addition to this gigantic modernization pursued by this government, 92 00:08:20.400 --> 00:08:25.680 these governments, Italy, National Socialism in Germany, FDR and even Soviet Russia, if 93 00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:32.360 you need examples I can give you, they also to ease this pace of modernization, they resorted 94 00:08:32.360 --> 00:08:43.080 Back to Land philosophy, they started to glorify folk cultures, folklore, history, legacy of 95 00:08:43.080 --> 00:08:48.200 the past or we can say the blood and soil philosophy. 96 00:08:48.200 --> 00:08:52.600 So basically what I'm trying to tell you that blood and soil stuff, it wasn't only what 97 00:08:52.600 --> 00:09:02.160 we could see in Nazi Germany, it was to some extent shared by all these regimes and again 98 00:09:02.160 --> 00:09:06.560 Even in the United States we can find examples like for instance Arthur Dale project in West 99 00:09:06.560 --> 00:09:14.200 Virginia scheme to place unemployed workers on land to turn them into organic farmers. 100 00:09:14.200 --> 00:09:17.360 They would be the model American citizens. 101 00:09:17.360 --> 00:09:22.680 And now the common feature shared by social engineers from California to Errol Mountains 102 00:09:22.680 --> 00:09:25.980 was this blind belief in science. 103 00:09:25.980 --> 00:09:27.780 We can call it science worship. 104 00:09:27.780 --> 00:09:33.420 Hayek, F. H. Hayek and his famous work, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 1955, he was 105 00:09:33.420 --> 00:09:38.300 the first to draw our attention to this particular part of modernity. 106 00:09:38.300 --> 00:09:45.060 Carl Yer, a middle-level New Deal bureaucrat, was a perfect manifestation of this mentality, 107 00:09:45.060 --> 00:09:46.060 mindset. 108 00:09:46.060 --> 00:09:49.720 Okay, that's Carl Yer. 109 00:09:49.720 --> 00:09:50.720 This is mindset. 110 00:09:50.720 --> 00:09:52.720 That's the most important. 111 00:09:52.720 --> 00:09:56.180 So Carl Yer was a perfect manifestation of this mindset. 112 00:09:56.180 --> 00:10:02.660 On the one hand, he glorified Indian tribalism as organic lifestyle, which could be used 113 00:10:02.660 --> 00:10:05.100 to anchor Americans in their soil. 114 00:10:05.100 --> 00:10:10.340 On the other hand, he said science should be used to revitalize communities. 115 00:10:10.340 --> 00:10:18.260 And if you go through his articles and essays, you will see this obsession with science. 116 00:10:18.260 --> 00:10:25.140 He demanded actually that the Indian reservations to be used as laboratories for sociological 117 00:10:25.140 --> 00:10:32.020 Experimentation. In one of his speeches, which was titled United States Administration as 118 00:10:32.020 --> 00:10:39.020 a Laboratory of Ethnic Relationships, he actually issued himself a political license to do things. 119 00:10:39.700 --> 00:10:44.940 He said that if government imposes something on an ethnic group, it's bad. But if government 120 00:10:44.940 --> 00:10:51.940 interferes, imposes something backed by science, that's good. So everything should be backed 121 00:10:51.940 --> 00:11:02.820 To make a long story short, federal government, prompted by Collier, imposed the system of 122 00:11:02.820 --> 00:11:08.140 New Deal, these public corporations, on Indians. Indians were lured by a promise to receive 123 00:11:08.140 --> 00:11:16.560 a generous credit. So 70% of Indians endorsed this, but 30% were against this. And I'm going 124 00:11:16.560 --> 00:11:20.560 I'm going to talk briefly about these 30%. 125 00:11:20.560 --> 00:11:25.560 These Indians revolted essentially against tribalism. 126 00:11:25.560 --> 00:11:30.560 Kalier believed that an Indian should be a die-hard collectivist. 127 00:11:30.560 --> 00:11:36.560 But these Indians, 30%, they said, wait a second, we'll have private property, we have farms, 128 00:11:36.560 --> 00:11:42.560 we don't want to be collectivized, it's not like the Soviet Union. 129 00:11:42.560 --> 00:11:45.560 Of course he was angry. It was a bizarre situation. 130 00:11:45.560 --> 00:11:51.240 He labeled these Indians who loved the private farms, wanted to work on the land, be private owners. 131 00:11:51.240 --> 00:11:55.840 He labeled them as fake Indians. You're fake, so you're not real. A real Indian is a die-hard 132 00:11:55.840 --> 00:12:02.600 collectivist. He wants to be a part of a tribe. In fact, he went nasty. He did nasty tricks. 133 00:12:02.600 --> 00:12:10.120 He not only denounced them, he actually recruited FBI to harass some of the leaders of these 134 00:12:10.120 --> 00:12:18.120 What are the future prospects of this system set up by coloring which exists to the present day? 135 00:12:18.120 --> 00:12:23.120 As I mentioned, this socialist archipelago is relatively modest in its size. 136 00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:30.120 It's only 2% of US soil. It shelters only 20% of Native Americans. 137 00:12:30.120 --> 00:12:37.120 So, unlike bailing out such bankrupt states as California, Illinois, New York, 138 00:12:37.120 --> 00:12:46.120 It's not a big deal for a huge American budget, of course, as long as American taxpayers are ready to put up with this. 139 00:12:46.120 --> 00:12:52.120 And unless American welfare capitalism goes down under the burden of numerous entitlements. 140 00:12:52.120 --> 00:13:03.120 So far, protected by the shield of trust status and guaranteed financial injections, Indian content is in a pretty good shape, in quotation marks. 141 00:13:03.120 --> 00:13:11.680 All in all, like Social Security Scheme, Farmer's Subsidies and many other wonderful products 142 00:13:11.680 --> 00:13:18.240 of the New Deal Alchemical Lab, Red Atlantis is still with us, alive and well.