Progressive-Era Bureaucrats and the Unity of Twentieth-Century Indian Policy

Abstract

THE HISTORY of American Indian policy has been described as a series of policy reversals driven by a dialectic of separation and assimilation.' The attention given to John Collier, credited with the renunciation of assimilation in the 1930s,2 strengthens the image of an heroic, Manichean struggle. A strong case can be made that Indian policy has been marked by a diversity of forms, but a continuity of effect, at least as far as land and resources are concerned.3 Continuity is inconsistent with heroes and struggles. It points to the steady, guiding hand of bureaucracy. Progressive-era bureaucrats viewed the subdivision of Indian lands, establishment of tribal governments and corporations, and transfer of federal responsibilities to the states as successive stages of a single policy of gradual integration and assimilation of Indians. In 1912 New York civic activist Arthur C. Ludington, a former colleague of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University, was employed to prepare a re-assessment of Indian policy. Ludington's long-term plan, while never formally endorsed by the Indian Office,4 accurately anticipated events of the next fifty years. This suggests that Ludington crystallized the thinking of the generation of bureaucrats who were still in control when John Collier purportedly reversed direction in 1934.