Response to Barsh (Vol. XV:1, Fall, 1990)

Abstract

Russell Barsh has misunderstood an important part of my critique of his paper. There no intent in my commentary to deny the existence of Barsh's Arthur in the Indian Office in 1912 [Barsh's reply, XV: 1, p. 60 and footnote 5]. I accepted without question his argument that the author of some of the papers in Record Group 75, Special Series A (the Ludington Papers) the same Arthur who promoted electoral reform in New York or eulogized by President Wilson in the New York Times. [Ibid, p. 60] Instead, my point that this same Arthur Ludington, whom Barsh had elevated to that of making seer, at best, only a clerk in the Mails and Files Division of the'Office of Indian Affairs. As such, he in no position to exercise any influence on Indian policy. Whether even the author of the Tentative of Indian Policy, since that document is unsigned, is purely conjectural. Further, the Tentative of Indian Policy, far from being a blueprint for a future federal Indian more likely part of a rebuttal to the letter from the Indian Office's critic, Ernest Thompson Seton. At the risk of being redundant, I believe I must stress again that Barsh's assertion that was to prepare a reassessment of Indian policy [Ibid, p. 1] is simply that: an assertion. The only evidence he cites for this interpretation of Ludington's role is footnote #4 which provides no evidence for the assertion. My own examination of the Ludington Papers also failed to reveal any documentation for this assertion. In short, there is no evidence that Arthur employed to prepare a of Indian policy, whether for Woodrow Wilson or Robert Valentine. Further, if his Tentative Outline had had any impact upon Indian Office there would surely have been some confirmation of that influence in other documents. In the absence of any such confirmation, I concluded that the papers were essentially irrelevant to any serious examination of Indian in the Progressive Era. Your readers will also be puzzled by the statements some of us made about Barsh's similarly unsubstantiated claim that Arthur prepared his re-assessment of Indian policy in 1912 at the request of Woodrow Wilson. That claim a central point of the essay that we received for comment. The deletion of this claim in the final printed version has rendered a substantial portion of our critiques unintelligible to your readers.