William McKinley was the 25th president of the USA - from 1897-1901. While before becoming president his political career was focused on Ohio, there was a status of McKinley in Arcata, California until it was toppled in February 2019. Here, Victor Gamma returns and looks at the case for and against the removal of the statue. In part 2, we look in depth at McKinley’s relationship with Native Americans and the accusations made against McKinley by the statue topplers.
If you missed it, in part 1 here Victor provides the background to the statue removal and starts to look at how McKinley treated Native Americans.
President William McKinley.
Arcata Council Member Susan Ornelas said: “It’s not just a lost thought. McKinley didn’t back Native Americans at all. He backed the Curtis Act, which took away Native rights on a lot of land.” As we have seen, to say McKinley “didn’t back Native Americans at all” is completely false. He firmly backed the Navajo against the attempted depredations of whites. The Curtis Act was an amendment to the Dawes Act of 1887. After the Civil War U.S. policy towards Native Americans changed to assimilation. Laws such as the Dawes Act basically sought to turn Native Americans away from their traditional tribal lifestyle and assimilate into the larger culture of modern America. Although settler greed certainly explains part of it, the Dawes Act and other measures reflected the prevailing view that the nomadic or tribal ways of the native peoples must inevitably give way to the sedentary, agricultural, and now industrializing, majority culture. It was thought that if Native Americans owned their own land and were responsible for it, dressed like white people and started living like them, they would cease being “Indian,” melt into the larger population, and the government would be free of having to oversee them. As such it abolished tribal government and gave individual Native Americans their own plots of land. The measure was also partly the result of building public pressure to treat the Native Americans with greater fairness.
Assimilation
Whether one agrees or disagrees, the fact was that the European pattern of civilization was simply overtaking tribal or nomadic cultures, which were seen as no longer feasible in the modern age. The then current philosophy was assimilation. Today this is unpopular, but then it was believed that the indigenous people needed to be helped in making the transition from the nomadic to the agricultural ways of the majority culture. The idea was to stop dealing with the Native Americans as a tribe, but instead as individuals, like non-indigenous people. As is often the case, intentions don’t always match reality and lofty motives were mixed with some selfish intent. In the wake of the Act, Native Americans lost an enormous amount of land. Additionally it also helped destroy the communal basis of indigenous culture. Ultimately the Act was recognized to be a failure, but at the time it was believed to be a needed reform.
William McKinley became president after the point at which this had all been accomplished and was charged with administering policy within a framework that he did not create. To blame him for any negative effects of the Curtis Act is thus unfair. As we have seen, McKinley had a strong sense of justice and was determined to treat the Native Americans fairly. The Curtis Act was titled “An Act for the protection of the people of the Indian Territory.” With a title like that it is not surprising that McKinley believed it would do just what the title claimed. Moreover, the bill was not sponsored by unfeeling whites, but by Charles Curtis, a mixed-blood Kansas Native American and senator from Kansas. Curtis held the conviction that his people needed to embrace change if they were to move forward. He was an especially fervent believer in education. This conviction flowed out of his own experience. Born on a reservation in poor circumstances, he rose through hard work to eventually become majority leader in the Senate. Education played an important part in the process. With encouragement from both grandparents, he graduated from High School and then went on to study law. Because of his own success, he firmly believed that education and assimilation was the best way for his fellow Native Americans to prosper. The Dawes and Curtis Acts were partly designed to help indigenous people earn a living while making the transition by giving them land. Therefore we can see that the future negative effects of the Curtis Act were not widely foreseen at the time. The Act was well meaning and McKinley’s motives in backing it were out of a desire to help the tribes.
Support for the Curtis Act
In his first annual message to Congress on December 6, 1897, the president explained his reasons for supporting the Curtis Act. He remarked that conditions in the Indian Territory had drastically changed over the previous 30 years and that the old treaties were no longer functioning. He pointed out that the white population greatly exceeded that of the Native Americansand that the whites were deprived of certain privileges. He asserted that the whites had settled with the permission of the Native Americans. The worst one can say about McKinley’s message is that he was incorrect that all white settlement was by permission of the Native Americans. The truth is that many whites settled in Indian Territory without permission. Since the president was not known for fabrication, it is most likely that he was unaware of this. The Dawes Commission made the following recommendation to the president: “Individual ownership is, in their (the Commission’s) opinion, absolutely essential to any permanent improvement in present conditions, and the lack of it is the root of nearly all the evils which so grievously afflict these people.” According to the information McKinley was given, the Curtis act was “having a salutary effect upon the nations composing the five tribes” and that the Dawes Commission reported “the most gratifying results.” The president was acting on the recommendations of experts, so what else was he supposed to do?
As a part of assisting the tribes, McKinley was diligent in fulfilling the “The Historical Trust Relationship'' between the U.S. government and Native Americans. One of the key elements in fulfilling the government’s part of the relationship was to provide educational opportunities. In this capacity McKinley signed no less than four executive orders providing land for Native American schools.
Judging McKinley
To meet the standards set by the protestors, McKinley would have had to: A) Repudiate over 30 years of government and territorial policy which by then involved hundreds of thousands of people, B) Publicly reject the findings and recommendations of an expert commission sent to make judgments based on personal investigation - and on what basis would he have been able to do so?, and C) Somehow have the vision to understand what no one else seemed to regarding the future damage to tribal culture that would result. Additionally, the protestors do not seem to understand the nature of American government. McKinley was not a dictator who could simply order something to happen. He had to work within the democratic system and was beholden to Congress and the people who voted for him. Not only was their strong support in Congress and what would become Oklahoma for the measure, some tribes agreed to it as well.
In an effort to have the facts on their side, pro-statue-removal Arcata city interns Paul Hilton and Steven Munoz were tasked with gathering information on McKinley and his statue. They charged that he was complicit in the so-called “California Genocide.” Hilton stated: “He turned a blind eye when California paid off militia who killed and massacred natives,” adding, “Looking away is being complicit.” Mr. Hilton and his co-intern assembled a three-part report on the 25th president and his statue. A related accusation was, “Why do we have this man standing in this square where they used to sell our children?” The protest was referring to mistreatment of California Native Americans, which allegedly included the sale of Native American children as slaves.
Putting the claims to the test
Let’s test this accusation. It is, in a word, so impossible as to approach the bizarre. Simply look at the chronology. Historians consider the genocide to have taken place from 1848 to roughly the 1870s. As stated above, McKinley was a boy and young man who had not even held political office yet during the California Genocide. The Arcata accusation might make some sense if he were a resident of California, but he was a resident of Ohio, in which case he cannot be expected to even be aware of the genocide, let alone speak out against it. Blaming him for the California Genocide is like blaming the young Abraham Lincoln for slavery.
But let’s allow Native Americans to speak for themselves. After expiring on September 14, 1901 from the gunshot wounds he received at the hands of his assassin, McKinley’s body lay in state at Buffalo, New York for two days. A Congress of Native Americans of the Pan-American Indian Congress had been a part of the great exposition in Buffalo. Led by several chiefs, including Geronimo, a procession of Native Americans, each holding a white carnation, paid their respects at the casket of the fallen chief executive. The chiefs composed a memorial card which read:
“The farewell of Chief Geronimo, Blue Horse, Flat Iron and Red Shirt and the 700 braves of the Indian congress. Like Lincoln and Garfield, President McKinley never abused authority except on the side of mercy. The martyred Great White Chief will stand in memory next to the Savior of mankind. We loved him living, we love him still.”
Geronimo’s eulogy continued the tribute:
“The rainbow of hope is out of the sky. Heavy clouds hang about us. Tears wet the ground of the tepees. The chief of the nation is dead. Farewell.”
The reference to mercy may be to McKinley’s action after the Battle of Sugar Point. After that conflict, McKinley pardoned all Native Americans involved.
Now, in part 3 here you can read about McKinley’s relationship with African Americans.
