Empowering the World War II Native American Veteran: Postwar Civil Rights

Abstract

during and after World War II, the franchise assumed great significance for Native Americans, a significance which stemmed from two historical precedents. First, as sovereign nations, Native Americans possessed a rich democratic heritage. Prior to and during white contact, the majority of tribes conducted operations by consensus rather than coercion, and most Native American groups obtained this consensus through the medium of general councils. Afterwards the group would then initiate appropriate action. The Iroquois furnish a prime example of government by consensus through the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations, in colonial America. At the height of its power, the Iroquois forced European to deal with their Confederacy on terms which more closely resembled equity than subordination. Both in the period of Dutch rule at New Amsterdam and at Albany following the colony's conquest by the Duke of York in 1664 the Iroquois Confederacy possessed the requisite power and political organization to command respect from all interested European governments, wrote historian Wilcomb Washburn.1 As the military power of Indian tribes waned and their status within the newly-formed United States became more questionable, the Cherokee transformed consensus based on military power into a consensus based on a legal power which their white neighbors had long utilized and respected. On July 26, 1827, the Cherokee adopted a written constitution and declared itself to be a sovereign, independent nation. This constitution marked the first effort by Indians in North America to establish a complete, political structure providing for the self-government of their people under written laws enacted entirely by democratic processes, asserted historian Ronald Satz.2 In the 1830s Chief Justice John Marshall's dual pronouncements in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia served to reinforce these tribal conceptions of their independent status although this status had somewhat degenerated. Marshall's decision that tribes were domestic, nations and that only the federal government could make treaties with tribes clearly vindicated their sovereign identity and ensured a continuation of the internal democratic processes. Tribes seized upon the term nation to uphold tribal sovereignty while recognizing that the term dependent implied a loss of power.3 Just how seriously that bargaining power had disintegrated became pivotal when the government abandoned the treaty method in the late nineteenth century for a policy of unilateral decision-making as enunciated in the Executive Order of 1872. The second historical precedent, relating to Native American franchise, stemmed from the aegis of citizenship which operated in this realm of unilateral decision-making. While citizenship was promised in the Dawes Act of 1887, the act postponed the actual bestowing of citizenship for twenty-five years on the assumption that by the next generation most Indians would be assimilated, independent farmers.4 Forty years later, it became clear that the goal of assimilation was far from being achieved, and Congress passed the Snyder Act of 1924 granting citizenship to all Native Americans. In analyzing the passage of the 1924 Snyder Act, historian Gary Stein rejects the argument of Vine Deloria, Jr., argument revived recently by Alison Bernstein, that Congress passed this legislation as a reward for Native American military participation in World War I. Furthermore, he contests the assertion that the act was passed for political reasons, despite the fact that six states possessed a sufficient Indian population to determine the consequences of the election in 1924 once they received the franchise. Pointing to the fact that this legislation was not an act to