At Book Club the other night we discussed a disturbing, true story from the 1920’s about the only partly resolved multiple murders of Osage Indians and the origins of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.(1) Following the final forced relocation of the Osage to what looked like useless land in northeast Oklahoma. Beneath that land, it was soon learned, lay a gigantic pool of oil and the Osage owned all rights to it.
Subsequently whites were declared to be “Guardians” of Osage “rich redmen” ostensibly assuring that they handled the contracts and ownership of their great wealth properly. Instead, most took financial advantage and many, probably dozens, took part in both slow and quick murders of Osage families such that control of the oil and the leases would wind up in white hands. The FBI finally got to investigate a handful of the murders and to convict a couple of conspirators and murderers, whereupon victory was declared. In fact murders had occurred prior to those the FBI investigated, and continued past that time. Sordid, and disturbing; dozens of Osage Indians were murdered but, in the views even of lawmen of the time, “they were only Indians.”
Prudence has always required that Nazi Germany be soundly condemned for treating a class of citizens and neighbors as something less than human and needful of extermination. One wonders how so many Germans could have followed Hitler, accepted the “Final Solution” or actively ignored it, even as trainloads of Jews passed by and as gas-chambers and ovens processed them nearby. Lo and behold, hundreds of Americans coexisted with, if not participated in, systematic murder of the Osage, even whole families, for no more than financial gain. The membrane between Judeo-Christian ethics and societal murder schemes, is very thin.
So, the whole chapter might be buried in our national memories as something that we have moved beyond and would never, in our enlightened state, today, be repeated. A bit more reflection is in order.
Following King Phillip’s War, or the French and Indian War, American colonists clarified their perception of the new continent as theirs for the taking, lacking only a few courageous men and women to push the frontier further and further and a little further. The sometimes peaceful “Indians” who already lived on it were deemed uncivilized or even savage, and therefore lesser beings, a perception proven over and over as “Indian” land, waters and hunting grounds were “settled” by colonists, French, Spanish and English (as well as Germans and others), and the occupants lashed out in the only ways they knew, killing and brutalizing many “whites”. It became easy to kill those indigenous “savages” since they were lesser and God clearly had provided “America” for the colonists.
Natives couldn’t seem to handle their liquor, either. Frontiersmen quickly learned that “Indians” could be weakened and controlled with alcohol. The fact that “firewater” was a problem for Indians was reinforcement for the idea that they were lesser humans and their problems were due to their own flaws – get rid of them. Some Osage had those weaknesses, at least some did, and despite their remarkable assimilation, were perceived as not quite worth a white person and flawed, as shown by their ignorance of white people’s connivance and thievery. Thank God we have moved beyond such arrogance and prejudice. Not.
One need look only at the last 55 years(!) of federalized welfare policy and effect to see that the “Osage” of that period are simply mainly inner-city blacks, today, but also Hispanics. Their flaws, in our liberal sympathies, are evidenced by poverty and worthy of welfare programs too numerous to count. Instead of stealing their oil we steal their opportunities by trapping them in failed ghettos and failed schools, failed health-care and failed economics, partly because of political advantage, but partly, Prudence dictates, because of a never-admitted belief that the inner-city demographic is not as capable of success as “normal” people. This attitude is “proven” by the statistics of gang warfare and high murder rates.
Now professional sympathizers and the employees of the welfare industry will scream that I am racist because I think that poor “folks” are guilty of being poor when it is really my racist attitude that keeps them stuck in welfare. The opposite is true. There is a large bloc of people who earn elections and financial power off the backs of welfare recipients… but it isn’t comprised of conservatives. Prudence suggests that a clear-minded examination of the last 55 years of inner-city problems and failures reveals that those awful conditions could never be sustained, maintained and profited from unless it fulfilled some over-arching purpose. And, if not an articulated purpose, at the very least, an over-arching belief!
Fifty-five years is a long time, even for an all-intrusive government with unrestricted debt-creation power, to accidentally allow millions of its citizens to live in failed circumstances while trillions of dollars in entitlements are sent to them or spent on them.
While “Indians” have a flawed relationship with alcohol, for inner-city populations it is drugs. Fortunately, in someone’s decades-old view, drugs also provide a source of income for blacks and Hispanics and they do, after all, mostly kill one-another, gang members, somewhat bad neighbors. Just make ‘em vote correctly and leave the suburbs alone and, in fact, the rest of us can leave them to their miserable daily existences. It’s a de-facto policy that has worked for over 50 years! Who’s the cynic… or the racist?
Unionized social work and current public policies are certainly not the solution. Dominant philosophy holds that these people are unable to break out of poverty because “government” – right-wingers, primarily, won’t provide “the resources” to make it happen. Failing schools, by the way, also unionized public services, use the same logic. Rapid growth in expenditure-per-pupil have failed to reverse declines in educational achievement; more “resources” will fix the problem. Worse, now that pharmaceutical companies and sales companies have expanded addiction into the suburbs, the dependable drug trade that has kept blacks and others from being too restive in the inner cities is causing wider concern about drugs and the whole corrupting profit-structure may collapse leaving ghetto-dwellers in a tough spot. Only a racist would want that to happen.
President Trump has begun a decades-overdue process of review and undoing of welfare programs that have failed continuously. What will make that actually “stick,” if any of it may be accomplished against the welfare bureaucracy and politics, is a change in philosophy, attitudes and beliefs, starting with belief in black abilities as equal to those of any whites. Maybe this is the last generation that treats inner-city residents like children or, worse, like “Indians.”
(1) “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”
by David Grann