White Enough to Be American?: Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation

By Lauren L. Basson

Racial mixture posed a distinct threat to European American perceptions of the nation and state in the late nineteenth century, says Lauren Basson, as it exposed and disrupted the racial categories that organized political and social life in the United States. Offering a provocative conceptual approach to the study of citizenship, nationhood, and race, Basson explores how racial mixture challenged and sometimes changed the boundaries that defined what it meant to be American.

Drawing on government documents, press coverage, and firsthand accounts, Basson presents four fascinating case studies concerning indigenous people of "mixed" descent. She reveals how the ambiguous status of racially mixed people underscored the problematic nature of policies and practices based on clearly defined racial boundaries. Contributing to timely discussions about race, ethnicity, citizenship, and nationhood, Basson demonstrates how the challenges to the American political and legal systems posed by racial mixture helped lead to a new definition of what it meant to be American--one that relied on institutions of private property and white supremacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469606439

Lauren L. Basson

Lauren L. Basson is assistant professor of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

Book preview

White Enough to Be American?

White Enough to Be American?

Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation

Lauren L. Basson

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2008 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Basson, Lauren L.

White enough to be American? : race mixing, indigenous people, and the boundaries of state and nation / by Lauren L. Basson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3143-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-5837-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Indians of North America—Mixed descent—Legal status, laws, etc.—History. 2. Racially mixed people—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States—History. 3. Racially mixed people—Legal status, laws, etc.—Hawaii—History. 4. Indigenous peoples— United States—Government relations—History. 5. Indigenous peoples—Land tenure— United States—History. 6. Miscegenation—Political aspects—United States—History. 7. United States—Race relations—Political aspects—History. 8. European Americans— Attitudes—History. 9. Citizenship—United States—History. 10. Nationalism—United States—History. I. Title.

E99.M693B37 2008

323.1197–dc22 2007027979

Portions of this book were previously published in a different form: Fit for Annexation but Unfit to Vote? Debating Hawaiian Suffrage Qualifications at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Social Science History 29, no. 4 (2005): 575–95; used by permission. Savage Half-Breed, French Canadian or White US Citizen? Louis Riel and US Perceptions of Nation and Civilisation, National Identities 7 (2005): 369– 88; the journal's website is <http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals>; used by permission of Taylor & Francis (UK) Journals. Foreign Bodies, Alternative Politics and the Boundaries of Americanism, Hagar 6, no. 2 (2006): 21–33; used by permission. Challenging Boundaries and Belongings: ‘Mixed Blood’ Allotment Disputes at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, in Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices, ed. Joel Migdal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 151–76.

12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

To

JOEL S. MIGDAL

A true mentor and a real mensch

Contents

Note on Terminology

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Mixed Blood Americans:

The Jane Waldron and Barney Traversee Allotment Disputes

2 Métis Americans:

Louis Riel and the Northwest Territories

3 Annexed Americans:

Robert Wilcox, Home Rule, and Self-Government for Hawaii

4 Anarchist Americans:

Lucy Parsons, Foreign Bodies, and American Soil

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Jane Waldron 30

Eudora Traversee 50

Louis Riel 58

Louis Riel addressing the jury during his trial for treason 67

Robert Wilcox in Italian uniform 96

Robert Wilcox as delegate to Congress 120

Lucy Parsons 142

Note on Terminology

Many of the words and phrases that I use in this book are terms that come directly from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cases that I examine. These include phrases such as racially mixed, political competence, fitness for self-government, and a host of others. I also use many contemporary terms, including America and American, whose conventional usage I do not necessarily endorse. My purpose in introducing these terms in this book is to provide a critical assessment of their contested meanings and of their contributions to definitions of the U.S. nation and state. In an attempt to indicate that my intention was to interrogate rather than to adopt this terminology uncritically, I initially placed many of these terms in quotation marks throughout the text. Out of concern that the overuse of quotation marks might be distracting to the reader, however, I left some terms unmarked, although my stance toward these terms was still a critical one.

As I reviewed the text, I felt concerned that my choice of which terms to place in quotation marks and which to leave unmarked seemed haphazard. Matthew Frye Jacobson has commented on the unexamined racial certainty that such selective practices denote and has observed, A principled consistency on this score is rendered very difficult by the culture within which we operate (Jacobson 1998, Note on Usage). Following Jacobson's precedent in part, I ultimately decided to leave most terms, including archaic phrases, unmarked unless they have explicitly derogatory connotations in historical or contemporary contexts (e.g., mixed blood and half breed), or represent direct quotations. My dilemmas about the use of terminology are, in large part, a reflection of the limits of our current sociopolitical vocabulary and the challenges involved in attempting to provide a critical assessment of dominant conceptual frameworks in language that will be readily understood but not uncritically employed.

Acknowledgments

Where do I begin? I am tremendously grateful to all of the people and institutions whose support has contributed to the writing and publication of this book, a process that has taken more than a decade to complete. Naming a few of my supporters will inevitably mean leaving others unnamed. My gratitude extends to all.

First and foremost, I thank Joel S. Migdal, my trustworthy and inspirational mentor. Joel's confidence in me and my ideas, and his steady support and guidance throughout the long years I spent working on this project have been the key to my ability to see it through from start to finish. My profound gratitude extends beyond words. I wish that every young academic could be as blessed as I have been to have a mentor like Joel.

There are numerous other scholars who have assisted with this project in all sorts of ways, from teaching me important courses to engaging me in thought-provoking conversations, to reading and commenting on drafts of different portions of this manuscript. I would especially like to thank Christine Di Stefano and Michael McCann, who provided invaluable advice on former incarnations of this project. I would also like to thank the many faculty members from the Jackson School of International Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington who contributed both informally and formally to the development of the ideas I present in this book.

I am also profoundly grateful to my Israeli colleagues who have provided me with the supportive environment that has enabled me to complete this book over the past few years. In particular, I wish to thank Aref Abu-Rabia whose confidence in my ideas and strong support allowed me to launch my academic career in Israel. Aref's support was instrumental in allowing me to obtain both doctoral and postdoctoral grants at key junctions that helped keep this project alive. I would also like to thank all of my wonderful colleagues in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University. They provide a stimulating and nurturing academic environment that allows interdisciplinary scholars like me to thrive. I have had the good fortune to meet and exchange ideas with numerous other scholars throughout Israel over the past six years. I am grateful to them all.

A number of foundations and institutions have provided vital support to this project. Over the past several years, I have been the grateful recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, a Lady Davis fellowship at Hebrew University, a Kreitman postdoctoral fellowship at Ben-Gurion University, and a Golda Meir postdoctoral fellowship at Hebrew University.

I am extremely grateful to the librarians and staff members who have assisted me with my research for this book. In particular, I would like to thank Glenda Pearson, head of Microform and Newspaper Collections at the University of Washington Libraries and all of the other staff members whom I encountered there. I am also grateful to staff members at the Ben-Gurion University library. Many thanks to the staff members at the South Dakota Historical Society, Timberlake Area Historical Society and Museum, Hawaii State Archives, Chicago Historical Society, and Library and Archives Canada who helped me procure photographs for this book.

It has been a pleasure to work with Chuck Grench, Paul Betz, and the other editorial staff members at the University of North Carolina Press who have made my first book-publishing experience a very positive one. Thank you to Renee Romano and Patricia Grimshaw for outstanding comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. Your critiques have led to a much improved book. Of course, I take full responsibility for any errors in fact or judgment that might remain.

Last but never least, I wish to thank all of my family and friends who have tolerated, encouraged, and inspired me over the long years it has taken to complete this book. A very special thank you to my parents, Norman and Gayle Breslow, who instilled in me the love of learning, writing, and questioning. A big hug to my sister, Sara, soul mate and fellow traveler through the trenches of academia and other avenues of life. I want to express my honest appreciaton to Ezra, who sincerely tried to offer his support and understanding over many years. I know it wasn't easy. A giant embrace to my children, Benjamin and Ayelet Basson, who have taught me all about patience, forgiveness, and what is really important in life.

Writing a book is always a challenge. This one was no exception. I seem to have a special talent for choosing unusual paths through life and stubbornly pursuing them. As a result, I wrote this book while living in Israel during the second intifada and the years that immediately followed it. My experiences of these post-9/11 years from a Middle East vantage point undoubtedly influenced my interpretations of historical connections between race and citizenship in the United States in ways of which I am not even aware. What did enter my awareness, however, was the significant social and intellectual isolation I experienced while writing this book. I am proud and pleased that I was able to see this project through to completion under such unusual circumstances and am all the more grateful for the support I received from people both near and far.

White Enough to Be American?

Introduction

At the turn of the twentieth century, many European Americans perceived a distinct threat to their nation and state. Fears of racial mixture preoccupied policymakers, scholars, lawyers, scientists, and journalists. People proposed new policies, published articles, created laws, and conducted experiments with the aim of protecting their visions of a racially pure nation and state by preventing racial mixture. But their efforts were largely unsuccessful. People and territories perceived as racially mixed continued to challenge the standard, monoracial categories that organized much of U.S. political and social life.

When Barney Traversee came to his local land registrar to settle a disputed land claim in 1892, U.S. officials had some tough questions for him.¹ Was Traversee an Indian or was he white? Was he a U.S. citizen or a member of a foreign tribal nation? These issues did not seem to hold particular significance for Traversee himself, but they were obviously important to the government officials who questioned him. There were no unequivocal answers to these questions. Barney Traversee did not fit into the racial and national categories used to define eligibility for property ownership and other rights associated with U.S. citizenship. As a result, he challenged official policies and conventional ideas about what it meant to belong to the U.S. nation and state.

Traversee's ancestors on his father's side were French. His mother's ancestors included American Indians. Traversee was enrolled in an Indian tribe, but he lived most of his life in a white farming community. He had voted in local U.S. elections, but did that make him an American citizen? Did it make him white?

Contradictory responses to Traversee's difficulties in describing who he was revealed a disjunction between the conventional racial categories that guided official policies and the more complex range of racial and national affiliations experienced by those to whom they were applied. Traversee's dilemma and the uncertain status of thousands of other indigenous people of mixed descent exposed a morass of confusing interpretations among U.S. officials and other members of mainstream society about what it meant to be white, what it meant to be Indian, and what it meant to be American at the turn of the twentieth century.

Policymakers and other officials became so concerned about how to categorize and control racially mixed individuals and territories that they debated these matters, including the Traversee case, at the highest levels of government. Racial mixture seemed to threaten the very boundaries that defined U.S. citizenship, national membership, and statehood.

Why did the idea of racial mixture pose such a threat to conventional understandings of the nation and state? How did racially mixed people and territories challenge and sometimes change the sociopolitical and territorial boundaries that defined what it meant to be American and to live in the United States of America?

This book offers two answers. First, through their defiance of laws and policies based on monoracial categories, racially mixed people demonstrated that constructed racial categories played a central role in defining the territorial boundaries of the state and the sociopolitical boundaries of the nation. They destabilized these boundaries by exposing the inconsistencies that characterized definitions of standard racial categories. These challenges prompted state authorities to respond in part by using political, legal, and scientific means to strengthen existing racial categories and increase their visibility.

Second, challenges posed by racially mixed people and territories exposed the coexistence of universalistic principles that promised equality to all U.S. citizens, and particularistic, racist principles that explicitly restricted full national membership to whites. These contestations suggested that instead of representing the development of a democratic form of government in which all citizens enjoyed equal opportunities for full political participation, the combination of universalistic and ascriptive principles in U.S. political discourse functioned to sustain European American dominance—that is, white supremacy. Universalistic principles refer to inclusive ideas and norms that apply equally to all members of a given group. Ascriptive (or particularistic) principles distinguish among members of a group and allocate rights, resources, and responsibilities on the basis of ascribed characteristics such as race, gender, religion, and national origin. In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, race was arguably the dominant ascriptive criterion employed in distinguishing those eligible for full national membership from those excluded from this status. In arenas that ranged from the U.S. Congress to the national press and local courts, debates about specific cases involving racial mixture revealed and reproduced complex, racialized logics that determined which human bodies were fit for full inclusion in the nation and which bodies of land were fit for full inclusion in the state.

This book examines four diverse case studies concerning specific indigenous people of mixed descent and controversies surrounding their racial and national status. Chapter 1 focuses on a pair of legal disputes involving Jane Waldron and Barney Traversee, mixed blood Indians who filed claims for individual allotments in the wake of the dissolution of the Great Sioux Reservation in 1889. The disputes led to a national debate about whether the original claimants were Indians or whites, and about the relationships among racial status, property ownership, and citizenship.

Chapter 2 concerns Louis Riel, leader of the Métis, an indigenous people of French and American Indian descent whose historic homeland was divided by the U.S.-Canadian border. It discusses how U.S. policymakers and journalists treated Riel as a friendly foreigner as long as he resided on the Canadian side of the border but excluded him from full membership in the U.S. nation on the basis of his racial status, despite the fact that he was a naturalized U.S. citizen. Riel's binational status also raised questions concerning territorial annexation, a subject examined in a different context in the next case study concerning Hawaii.

Chapter 3 investigates the controversial political career of Robert Wilcox, a man of indigenous Hawaiian and European American descent, who became the first representative to Congress from the newly annexed Hawaii. This case study also focuses on congressional debates about whether Hawaii was fit for the same form of self-government granted to other, continental U.S. territories or whether its mixed population required a more limited form of self-government. The chapter demonstrates how a more abstract definition of what it meant to be American, focused on adherence to the principles of private property and white supremacy, developed in the context of territorial expansion and annexation.

Chapter 4, the final case study, argues that to understand emerging definitions of Americanism, it is important to take into consideration how policymakers and the press defined what it meant to be un-American. The chapter focuses on Lucy Parsons, a leading spokeswoman for the anarchist movement in the late nineteenth century who described herself as an indigenous woman of Mexican and Indian origin, although most contemporary observers contended she was of at least partial African descent. It discusses how Parsons invoked her indigenous status to challenge mainstream, European American attempts to define socialists and anarchists as foreign, and thus to define the nation and state in exclusively capitalist terms. This analysis offers an alternative perspective on the intersections among ideas about race, private property, mixture, and Americanism.

From 1885 to 1905, the time period during which all of these case studies occurred, important transformations were taking place in what it meant to be American and to live in America. In the aftermath of slavery and the Reconstruction era, many European American lawmakers, politicians, and scientists launched new efforts to construct and justify limitations on the citizenship rights of African Americans in response to growing anxieties among whites about the dissolution of racial boundaries. For example, white fears of racial mixture across the black-white color line in American cities increased as African Americans began to migrate north. These fears often precipitated severe political and legal responses, including the passage of antimiscegenation laws and incarceration of black men involved in relationships with white women (Mumford 1997, 4–18).

Meanwhile, thousands of new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe arrived to fill labor needs in the rapidly industrializing U.S. economy. Other racially defined groups, such as Chinese, faced exclusion from both the labor market and the state. The enormous influx of European immigrants in the context of the changing economy complicated existing ethnic and racial categories and contributed to the rise of new political movements such as socialism and anarchism.

The end of the frontier era in the continental United States set the stage for imperialistic expansion overseas. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, the United States took control of numerous island territories, most of which it treated as colonial possessions. During this period, the United States also annexed the territory of Hawaii. Indigenous Americans on the North American continent confronted further confiscation of their historical land base and legislation designed to compel them to adopt a European American way of life. The boundaries of the U.S. nation and state, and the people and places included within them, were indeed changing in significant ways.

These shifting boundaries confirmed and strengthened the importance of ascribed characteristics such as race in defining what it meant to be American. By focusing on debates concerning the racial and national status of indigenous people of mixed descent, this book investigates how constructed racial categories contributed to defining eligibility for membership in the nation and state. These debates intersected in important ways with controversies about land use and allocation, and territorial expansion. Concentrating on cases involving indigenous people of mixed descent permits investigation of how controversies concerning racial mixture influenced the definitions of both the nation and the state. One of the aims of this project is to challenge methodological nationalism by focusing on both territorial and sociopolitical border zones as intersections where crucial processes in the defining of nations and states occur (Wimmer and Schiller 2003).

Government officials often depicted the nation and state as natural, eternal entities that embodied the democratic concepts espoused by the country's founders. Despite this image of permanence in space and time, officials simultaneously engaged in efforts to shore up and sometimes revise the boundaries that constituted the nation and state. Why was there such a discrepancy among official proclamations, policies, and practices? Why did the boundaries of the nation and state continue to appear fuzzy and fluctuating despite repeated efforts by powerful groups to portray them as sharp and stable?

One reason for the discrepancy is that there were always people and places in the United States that did not conform to the basic categories on which those boundaries were premised. The official image of the nation and state offered visions of a territory occupied exclusively by a homogeneous, racially pure, white citizenry. The presence of nonwhite and racially mixed people and places in the United States disrupted this image. Racial mixture challenged prevailing assumptions about the existence of naturally separate races and exposed the heterogeneous character of the country.

In different historical and regional contexts, mixture has been defined according to a variety of criteria, including class, religion, language, and nationality. In the United States, mixture refers almost exclusively to race. Throughout U.S. history, race has been the main sociopolitical category dividing the country's residents (see, e.g., Smedley 1993, 20). The ideological salience of race, legitimated by science, reached its greatest intensity during the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The power held by the ideology of race was so great that empirical contradictions that might have served to unsettle or displace a less dominant ideological framework did not significantly lessen its influence, although they sometimes prompted new definitions of racial categories (ibid.).

The rigidity of the boundaries that defined separate racial categories played as important an ideological role as the categorical scheme itself. Mixture posed a particular threat to definitions of the U.S. nation and state not only because it threatened the dominant notion of separate races but also because it undermined the concept of strict, natural boundaries that kept those races distinct and pure.

The Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 provides one well-known illustration of the challenges posed by racial mixture. On the basis of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, Homer Plessy challenged a Louisiana law requiring equal but separate accommodations on railroads. Plessy was of predominantly European ancestry and looked white. The fact that he had one great-grandparent of African descent, however, prompted authorities to classify him as black and declare him ineligible to sit in passenger cars reserved for whites. In his decision about the case, Justice Henry Billings Brown upheld the Louisiana law on the basis that natural racial instincts might lead to hostilities without legislated separation (R. Smith 1997, 378; see also Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 1896). On the other hand, Brown failed to provide any definition of the allegedly natural boundaries between races, instead leaving the crucial definitions of whiteness and nonwhiteness to be determined under the laws of each state (quoted in R. Smith 1997, 379; see also Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 1896). Brown's decision suggests some of the difficulties that cases of racial mixture posed to laws and policies based on monoracial categories. It also demonstrates how responses to these difficulties often involved efforts to justify and strengthen racial divisions rather than to question and dismantle them.

With regard to the territorial dimensions of racial mixture, many scholars have documented that racist and imperialist tendencies represented a consistent pattern in U.S. history.² U.S. engagement in overseas imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century did not constitute a new phenomenon but rather a continuation of colonial policies and practices the U.S. government had been pursuing toward indigenous peoples on the North American continent for more than a century.

This reinterpretation of the era of U.S. overseas expansion has been accompanied by new interpretations of the meaning and functions of territorial boundaries and frontiers. Challenging the conventional frontier thesis, some scholars have conceptualized territorial boundary areas as fluid borderlands in which diverse populations meet and interact.³ What these interpretations tend to overlook are the divisive and exclusive functions of state-imposed territorial boundaries. These boundaries define the nation and state not only in terms of the populations and territories they include but also in terms of those they deliberately exclude. The purpose of territorial boundaries is often to create new states and nations by dividing and thus destroying the existing homelands of indigenous peoples.

In the United States, this process of division was accompanied by efforts to ensure the racial homogeneity of territories incorporated into the Union. Policymakers were reluctant to annex territories they viewed as racially mixed, that is, territories that included substantial nonwhite populations. They created a minimal threshold of whiteness that continental territories had to obtain before they became eligible for statehood. Debates about the political fitness of new territorial possessions intensified as imperialism led to the conquest of additional territories beyond the North American continent.

From 1885 to 1905, individuals of mixed descent and mixed populations in newly conquered U.S. territories and industrial American cities challenged the boundaries designed to define and protect a pure, homogeneous nation and state on at least three levels. On one level, people of mixed descent defied standard monoracial categories through their physical presence. Their mixed bodies belied the notion of naturally separate races. They offered physical evidence of the unnatural and unscientific character of racial logics that sought to ignore or exclude them in the name of natural law and science. The presence of mixed bodies prompted many European Americans to rethink the monoracial categories that structured U.S. political and social life, leading to frequent efforts to strengthen racial boundaries in science, law, and politics and divert attention from their empirical ambiguity.⁴ As at least one scholar noted, the less boundaries correspond to underlying ways of life, the more tightly they need to be enforced and the more firmly people need to be educated and persuaded to cooperate in their maintenance (Todorov 1993).

On a second level, people of mixed descent contested the dominant definitions of nation and state through their actions, some of which were more overtly political than others. As a result of being conceptualized as physically, genealogically, and, often, socially mixed, they negotiated a precarious path through life in a sociopolitical context in which they occupied a profoundly ambiguous and uncertain status. Their responses to the ambiguous status imposed upon them varied tremendously. Many people of mixed descent sought to hide or downplay their mixed status by identifying with one of the standard monoracial categories, often internalizing the racism that marred their lives.⁵ A few publicly asserted their mixed heritage and made it the focal point of political resistance. Others pursued political paths that did not directly address their mixed racial status but that demonstrated an experiential awareness of the racialized divisions that barred many U.S. citizens from full political participation and often prevented the articulation of alternatives to dominant sociopolitical institutions and practices. In other words, the ambiguous structural position of people of mixed descent in U.S. society contributed to their pursuit of a wide variety of political actions that challenged conventional understandings of the state and nation from the margins. The challenges posed by people of mixed descent included aspects that were both material and discursive, as well as structural and individually initiated.

On a third level, racial mixture challenged prevailing definitions of the nation and state through its implication of multiplicity. As the case studies examined in this book reveal, the dominant conceptions of the U.S. nation and state depended on a privileged singularity. In the minds of many political officials and observers, multiplicity in any form constituted a threat to the nation and state.⁶ This perceived threat stemmed from strict opposition to the idea that one might possess multiple rather than exclusive loyalties or affiliations. Multiplicity represented a moral as well as political and legal danger. Political officials and observers defined the United States in terms of monotheism, monogamous marriage, monolingualism, and monoracialism. Quite often in the cases I consider, the threats posed by racial mixture were associated with threats of other forms of multiplicity, including paganism and heathenism, plural marriage and bigamy, multilingualism, and binationalism. In this sense, the threat of racial mixture functioned as part of a larger and more amorphous threat of multiplicity that many European Americans regarded as a danger to their nation and state.

During earlier periods in U.S. history, authorities relied heavily on the visibility of racial, territorial, and institutional boundaries to distinguish citizens from noncitizens, and Americans from non-Americans. The visibility of race was associated with both physical features such as skin color and adherence to contested but widely recognized codes of conduct presumed