In States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States, Oz Frankel chronicles the growing role of the state “as an energetic gatherer of facts about … social, economic, and other aspects of national affairs” during the century's middle decades.Footnote 1 In the United States, one significant manifestation of this role occurred in the years following the Civil War, a time of unprecedented social, political, and economic transformation, as well as western territorial expansion. This expansion was accompanied by federally sponsored exploration and data gathering across a wide range of scientific fields, including geology, cartography, meteorology, and ethnology, among many others. Such efforts had deep historical roots, dating back most famously to the Lewis and Clark expedition early in the century, but exploration intensified following the war, chiefly as a means to ease the process of settlement and economic development in the West through the publication of accurate maps, statistical reports, and similar documents.
Reflecting what Frankel has termed “print statism,” a process by which governments seek to shape public debate and perception, these documents played an important role in profiling the vast regions of the interior West, particularly in policymaking circles, but after the Civil War the American public increasingly turned to the growing national print media, especially magazines.Footnote 2 Spurred on by innovations in printing, transportation, and communication technologies, as well as growing literacy rates, weekly and monthly magazines surged in popularity during the 1860s and 1870s and began to encroach on the centrality of books in reflecting the character of their times.Footnote 3 Census data and contemporary directories show that the number of American magazines jumped from 700 to 1,200 between 1865 and 1870, then doubled to 2,400 by the end of the decade.Footnote 4 This expanding market certainly played a role in forging a unified sense of national community after the fractures of the Civil War, but, as Christine Bold observes, the proliferation and variety of periodicals in the postwar era also reflected the “the contested values, shifting power dynamics, and socio-upheavals of industrializing America.”Footnote 5
One highly influential entry in this expanding discursive field was The Nation magazine, which, from its founding in 1865, not only provided a forum for the examination and debate of pressing national issues, but also presented itself as an arbiter in the marketplace of ideas, one dedicated to bringing order to social, political, and economic landscapes in flux. For many of its contemporary readers, many of whom represented the country's privileged and powerful classes, The Nation’s viewpoint was seen as vital to debate across a range of national issues. Prominent among those issues in the pages of the weekly magazine, as well as in the burgeoning national press at large, was, of course, western territorial expansion, which in the 1860s and 1870s accelerated and extended beyond the familiar landscapes of the Mid-west into the arid and alien landscapes of the western interior. As the line of settlement moved into this new terrain, traditional images of the West as an agrarian paradise were challenged, and uncertainties regarding the nature of the landscape and the projected course of its development deepened.Footnote 6
These uncertainties were reflected in the pages of The Nation, which devoted considerable attention to western expansion and played an important role in mediating perceptions of the West for its influential eastern readers. In the following analysis of this mediation, I will build upon recent historiographical and theoretical studies of nineteenth-century US print culture, as well as Richard Slotkin's foundational work on the magazine's ideological orientation, to highlight The Nation’s rhetorical framing of anxieties concerning three specific issues central to the political discourse of expansion in the post-Civil War era: inadequate geographic knowledge of the region, transformations in western land development, and corruption and mismanagement in Indian affairs. As represented by The Nation, these problems threatened to undermine the promise of the West, the region that had come to emblematize the American future. In the course of this analysis I will argue that The Nation self-consciously positioned itself as a voice of reason and objectivity – what I later term a “national superego” – amidst chaotic national debates over western policy, but that its rhetoric in response to the aforementioned concerns worked to promote values and priorities in accordance with the class interests of the magazine's readership – interests focussed above all on the needs and priorities of capital.Footnote 7 Viewed in this light, The Nation’s coverage of western expansion reveals the complexities implicit in the very capitalist ideology the magazine espoused, and it presages broader concerns about modes of western exploration and settlement, especially with regard to the social and economic assimilation of racial others.
A NEW JOURNAL FOR NEW TIMES
From its inception in the closing year of the Civil War, The Nation presented itself as an improving force in American life, a beacon of intelligent leadership at a time of national transformation. The magazine was inspired by the reform-minded Frederick Law Olmsted, who envisioned a forum wherein the country's brightest minds might address the important issues of the day. Olmsted went west to oversee a California mining operation before his plan was brought to fruition, but his friend E. L. Godkin moved forward and published the magazine's first issue in July 1865. With the assistance of Charles Eliot Norton, who had recently left the venerable North American Review, Godkin recruited important political and cultural figures such as William and Henry James, James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Adams, Charles Francis Adams, and others to comment on topical issues for a small but highly influential readership, which even by 1876 would reach only about 12,000. By comparison, many rival “quality” magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, as well as Harper's Monthly and Weekly, had circulations topping 100,000 during the 1870s.Footnote 8
The Nation consciously positioned itself as a new journal for new times. For instance, its editor encouraged stylistic consistency, marked by a concision and readability at odds with the lengthy and often ponderous prose that had marked much magazine journalism of the antebellum era and that continued to characterize some of its “highbrow” rivals in the 1860s and 1870s, most notably the North American Review.Footnote 9 Additionally, in an attempt to foster an image of objectivity, the magazine published all of its articles unsigned, even though its contributors included some of America's most eminent figures. While more widely circulated magazines such as Scribner's Monthly touted their lists of well-known contributors, Godkin felt that publishing signed articles was undemocratic. As he explained,
An article of which the author is known is hardly ever judged on its merits. If he is still obscure, most people will not take the trouble to read what he says; if he is famous, they will devour the veriest twaddle that comes from his pen, and insist on new supplies every day.Footnote 10
Many of these unsigned articles were devoted to developments in science, economics, and, to a lesser degree, the arts – all of which received limited attention in the magazine's back pages – but the majority of coverage was devoted to political issues, especially on the domestic front. Frequent subjects for editorial advocacy included civil service reform, anti-tariff policies, restrictions on immigration, and opposition to the African American male franchise, among others.
However, in keeping with its stated doctrines of journalistic impartiality, The Nation attempted to distance itself from overt political affiliations. Declaring itself independent, the journal frequently touted its own high-minded objectivity. As Godkin proclaimed in the magazine's founding prospectus, published shortly before the first issue appeared,
The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.Footnote 11
This bold claim of intellectual clarity and impartiality would lead the patrician Henry Adams to gently mock the “elevated plateau of the New Jerusalem occupied by Godkin and the Nation.”Footnote 12
But despite its claims to political independence and objectivity, the magazine brought a clearly articulated set of values to its presentation of national issues, including western expansion. While The Nation’s correspondents were by no means univocal in their political expression, the magazine's ideological orientation was remarkably consistent during the post-Civil War era, owing in large part to the active role of Godkin himself. He very often wrote the lead political editorials that anchored each issue, and he usually collaborated with his staff on the much shorter – and sometimes sharply worded – editorial observations in an opening section of several pages entitled “The Week.”Footnote 13 As biographer William M. Armstrong notes, Godkin's editorial fire could be
directed … impartially at anyone who violated the “laws of trade” as well as his [Godkin's] elevated notions of culture. He deplored Irish-American politicians, labor reformers, the “western type of man,” evangelical clergymen, the growing “servant problem,” the eight-hour day, the failure of Americans to dress for dinner, “sentiment,” untutored immigrants, universal manhood suffrage, popular journalists, noisy patriots, reactionaries, and reformers of all hue.Footnote 14
The contributors he recruited generally shared his fierce commitment to the principles of free-market capitalism and his hostility toward labor, as well as the suspicion of immigrants and people of color that marked much of the racialist thought of his era, thus further imprinting the magazine with its editor's ideological stamp and tailoring content for its limited circle of readers.
As is the case with most nineteenth-century journals, details about actual readership – as opposed to the audience implied by content and modes of address – are difficult to ascertain, as few subscriptions lists are available and readership by non-subscribers (family and friends of subscribers, library patrons, etc.) is impossible to gauge. However, several indicators point to the journal's circulation among a privileged and influential readership. One such indicator is the cultural standing of many of the aforementioned contributors and the degree to which the magazine's content also appealed directly, but certainly not exclusively, to readers of a similar social caste, with particular attention to domestic political and economic policy. In addition, references to The Nation occur frequently in both the personal correspondence and public statements of leading figures in politics, finance, and academe. In reference to Godkin, for instance, William James declared that “[t]o my generation, his was certainly the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation, for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined the whole current of discussion.”Footnote 15 The Nation’s influence is perhaps most succinctly summed up in the words of journalist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner, who described the magazine's weekly appearance as the “the weekly Day of Judgment.”Footnote 16 Taken together, this evidence lends credence to Godkin's own perception of The Nation’s readership, as recorded in a late 1865 letter to Norton: “The cultivated class we have with us, but the class next below, do not quite know what to make of us, and are suspicious and hostile.”Footnote 17
As the quotation above suggests, Godkin had an acute class consciousness, and he envisioned his magazine as a weapon against the threat of anarchy that he believed characterized the postbellum United States during a time of rapid transition, a threat that could be countered by the influence of the elite and influential readership he courted. In an 1874 editorial, for instance, Godkin voiced his concerns about the country's social, political, and economic transformations to this implied readership, declaring that the democratization of culture under the new industrial order was resulting in “a kind of mental and moral chaos, in which many of the fundamental rules of living, which have been worked out painfully by thousands of years of bitter human experience, seem in imminent risk of disappearing totally.”Footnote 18 Norton would echo Godkin's concerns, and his faith in the magazine's power, writing in 1871 that only “the Nation & Harvard & Yale College” stood as “barriers against the invasion of modern barbarism and vulgarity.”Footnote 19
In responding to these threats of “mental and moral chaos,” The Nation would assume the role of national superego, attempting to bring reason and order to the troubled social field, especially with regard to the West. It would work to establish the terms by which the new lands and peoples of the West would be assimilated by the nation as a whole, and it would play a role in shaping the perceptions and defining the political agenda of its influential readers during a tumultuous period in the history of both the region in particular and the United States as a whole. Yet, as noted above, in the process it would also illuminate the many ideological tensions underpinning the processes of expansion, contributing notes of anxiety to the broader tone of optimism that marked much of the era's discourse concerning the West.Footnote 20
PROMOTING INSTITUTIONAL SCIENCE
One of the items high on this political agenda was the promotion of institutional science, which was perceived as an important tool in managing western expansion. With the establishment of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, the mid-century growth of university science programs, and the formation of increasingly specialized scientific associations, the scientific class of trained experts began to expand. The most important development with regard to scientific study of the West was the proliferation of federally sponsored surveys of the region in the 1870s and the eventual consolidation of those expeditions under the US Geological Survey (USGS) in 1879, the same year the closely aligned Bureau of Ethnology was established. The rise of the scientific class after the war and the concomitant acceleration of western surveys were paralleled by significant expansion of the magazine press, and the proliferation of this medium played a major role in strengthening the public profile of institutional science and moving it into the centers of federal policymaking in the post-Civil War era. Like many other “quality” magazines of the day, The Nation reported on developments in science frequently and favorably, but its coverage of scientific expeditions in the West largely eschewed the sort of romanticized portrayals of individual scientist–explorers that appeared in more popular magazines such as Scribner's, which in 1875 published an adventure-filled series of articles recounting John Wesley Powell's perilous descents of the Colorado river in 1869 and 1872. The Nation, in contrast, portrayed members of the emerging scientific class as kindred spirits in the work of organizing and controlling the forces that threatened to tear at the national fabric, aligning the empirical reports from geographic and geologic surveys with the needs of capital in settling and developing the West.Footnote 21
Support from elite journals such as The Nation was much needed, for American scientific figures in the postwar era lacked the authority and prestige of their European counterparts and were still struggling to gain a firm institutional foothold. The Nation, a reliable advocate for the scientific class, bemoaned the tenuous place of institutional science within American circles of power, as the following commentary in support of federally sponsored western surveys from 1874 suggests:
While it must be conceded that our Government need fear comparison with no other in its outlays on behalf of science, it is equally true, if not equally notorious, that the coveted appropriations for specific work, like the national surveys, are usually obtained by quiet and almost secret legislation; and that science cannot come before Congress as frankly with its petitions as commerce and manufactures do.Footnote 22
The references to “quiet” legislation and secretive lobbying register the growing distrust of “scientific lobbyists” voiced by some prominent western legislators and businessmen, who accused survey leaders of fostering government paternalism that threatened to impose limits on western economic development, as well as discouraging migration by presenting foreboding images of the interior West's terrain and climate to potential settlers from the East. Responding particularly to reports by survey leader John Wesley Powell that much of the interior trans-Mississippi West was arid and unfit for traditional small farms, western boosters attacked the work of the federal surveys in the press and in Congress. Clinging firmly to traditional agrarian modes of development, anxious to boost emigration to their states, and hostile to what they saw as the meddling of eastern elites, western critics of the scientific class levied charges of charlatanism and mocked the credentials and authority of prominent scientific figures both in the press and in the halls of Congress.Footnote 23
In the face of such skepticism, The Nation labored to support the cause of scientific exploration and to tout the corrective influence that such exploration could have on public policy and economic development in the West, thus aligning empirical study of the western landscape with the priorities of capital. The Nation consistently promoted Congressional funding for exploration and mapping, and it frequently provided favorable coverage of the western scientific and cartographic surveys, reserving especially effusive praise for Clarence King, whose Ivy League background, patrician social standing, and ties to the growing western mining industry qualified him as an emblem for both the professional scientific class and the interests of capital that The Nation sought to promote.Footnote 24
The Nation’s commentary on the western surveys was clearly aimed at enhancing the prestige of scientific figures and countering the charges of charlatanism and self-interest leveled against government scientists by western boosters. For instance, an extended 1874 editorial entitled “Who Shall Direct the National Surveys?” argued that Congress should continue to fully support exploration and mapping of the region and ensure that such exploration was carried out by men of established scientific authority. The Nation maintained that as the country's line of settlement pressed further westward into increasingly unfamiliar territory, and as its economy grew more diverse and sophisticated, the need for clearer, richer, and more stable images of the West would grow. This need could only be met by a new class of men who were fitted for the task “by natural gift and particular education – men whose lives are devoted to it, whose reputation depends upon it, and who bring to it a zeal and enthusiasm certainly not inferior to the best which the votaries of any profession display.”Footnote 25 For The Nation, scientist–explorers such as Clarence King, Ferdinand Hayden, and John Wesley Powell, who would come to direct the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology simultaneously, represented the “best scientific skill combined with practical capacity and exceptional courage,” qualities the country would need if it were to shape effective national policy toward the West and demonstrate American scientific enlightenment to the “eyes of the world.”Footnote 26
This perceived need for the corrective influence of scientific figures was especially acute in the West, which The Nation presented as a region subject to both innocent misperception and malign misrepresentation. With regard to the former, The Nation frequently bemoaned the short supply of accurate geographical information about the West, a problem it attributed to an unclear demarcation between untrained amateurs and true scientific experts with proven records of empirical observation. The Nation’s view is exemplified in its harsh 1874 review of a dictionary of topography and climate that purported to give an accurate accounting of the region. The review characterizes the text as wildly inaccurate, with “many points … placed in the wrong State or Territory” and “many names misspelled.”Footnote 27 The dictionary's data are contrasted with those presented by federal explorers Powell and Hayden, whose work is praised for setting new standards of accuracy and authority, and thus opening the region to more effective methods of development.
Throughout the 1870s, The Nation maintained its argument that national understanding of the West and the federal government's approach to western exploration left much to be desired, but it launched its harshest critique in an extended 1879 editorial titled “The Proposed Reform of Our Land and Scientific Surveys.” The reform in question was the National Academy of Science's recommendation that the federal government consolidate its cluttered array of western surveys under a single civilian agency administered by experts of the highest scientific standing, a proposal The Nation wholeheartedly endorsed. By streamlining the organizational structure of the surveys and standardizing methods of data collection, The Nation maintained, Congress could harness the power of science to that of large-scale capital in the cause of western expansion, and thus bring much-needed order and clarity of vision to a poorly understood region that would be vital to the country's future.
In making its case for what would become the US Geological Survey later that year, The Nation derided the existing system of western exploration and mapping, which it characterized as “obviously illogical, unscientific, and clumsy.” Citing outmoded methodologies, conflicting aims, and general inconsistency of both effort and expertise on the part of survey parties in the field, the article provided an extensive catalog of the government's shortcomings. The result was a “disgraceful and senseless confusion” with regard to the true nature of the western terrain and the resources that lay both on and below its surface.Footnote 28 Worse yet, the situation seemed to be deteriorating rather than improving. Until it could be freed from its current web of political intrigue and mismanagement, the government's program of scientific exploration and mapping would fall far short of the country's needs and threaten prospects for successful settlement and development of resources in the West.
This 1879 editorial reflects a growing level of concern and even anxiety about the West being felt in commercial and governmental circles, especially with regard to the federal system of exploration and mapping, which was widely perceived to be in disarray. As a result, the picture of the national landscape was only roughly drawn, marred by gaps, imperfections, and outright errors. In short, text and terrain were out of sync, and the only solution was to implement an institutionally secure, methodologically systematic program of topographical and geological surveying to be directed by authorized members of the scientific class who could operate without fear of political whim. Without these measures, the western landscape would remain subject to myth and misperception, rather than the sort of empirical vision necessary to the successful management of land and other resources that would power economic development.
TRANSFORMING THE AGRARIAN FIELD
The aforementioned sense that the nation's system of scientific exploration was in disarray intensified broader ideological anxieties about the West, especially with regard to land policy and the nature of agrarian expansion, issues deeply rooted in traditional notions of American political identity and social consciousness dating back to Thomas Jefferson and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. The management of lands beyond the Mississippi was a focal point of western coverage in eastern periodicals, including The Nation. The history of land-reform efforts in the West is long and complex, but the central issue for the purposes of this study is the divide between competing visions of the region. Was it an inexhaustible source of natural resources and a field where traditional modes of agriculture and settlement could thrive, as pro-western boosters, politicians, and land speculators argued? Or would physical characteristics radically different than those east of the Mississippi – particularly aridity and limited water supplies – threaten prospects for development in much of the interior West, as suggested by a growing body of scientific reports, including John Wesley Powell's 1878 Report on the Arid Regions of the United States?
Both the economic and ideological stakes of this debate were high, for the systematic, empirical measurement called for by The Nation would reveal clearly the challenges of the arid West, which were often misrepresented or ignored altogether in western promotional literature. These revelations would in turn prompt major revision of the Jeffersonian paradigm of agrarian expansion, with its foundation in the individual freehold as the primary unit of American social, political, and economic life. As the Census of 1870 made clear, the percentage of easterners engaged in agriculture was already beginning to decline in the face of rapid urbanization and industrialization, but challenges to small farming would be even greater in much of the interior West, where climate and topography would make traditional practices unfeasible. Instead, the landscape would need to be opened to large-scale operations such as mining, ranching, and railroading, as well as expensive irrigation projects, which would in turn require enormous infusions of capital and a significant transformation in the way most Americans imagined the West and its possibilities as an agrarian paradise.
However, as The Nation would repeatedly complain, this transformation was slow to develop. In response, the magazine's editorial voice presented itself as a corrective force working upon deeply ingrained but thoroughly misguided popular attitudes and expectations concerning the region, especially those generated by western boosters, countering celebrations of western promise with warnings of western perils, couched in the language of limitation.
As noted above, dismantling the agrarian myth of the West would mean revising long-held assumptions about the nature of expansion and settlement. Chief among these assumptions was the steady progression of a stable social, economic, and political order organized around the symbolically resonant figure of the yeoman farmer. This model of expansion had been in place for much of the nation's history, but the increasingly sharp image of the West produced by scientific exploration was beginning to expose its inadequacies for future development, and, in the process, devalue the small farmer's symbolic standing in the national mythos.Footnote 29 From the perspective of The Nation, this devaluation was attributable to troubling economic developments in the West, especially regarding agriculture. Most notably, large numbers of farmers across the nation had become frustrated by low commodity prices, high shipping rates, and tight credit, and many developed a growing suspicion of corporate leaders after the economic panic of 1873. As a result, they had begun to organize into collective organizations, the most famous being the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry. Founded in 1867, the Granger movement spread swiftly across the West during the 1870s.
Alarmed by these developments, The Nation voiced its concerns in an 1874 article entitled “The Farmer's Future.” While sympathizing with the farmers’ economic plight, The Nation, never a friend of labor, condemned the farmers’ impulse to organize, claiming that its only effects “have been those of confusion and distress in a country which at present peculiarly needs repose and recuperation of its forces.”Footnote 30 This “confusion and distress” emblematized a broader economic and social instability that the magazine attributed to “a countless number of similar unions all over the country, which are gradually dividing from one another, and segregating into separate bounds, the once homogeneous, the lately confused and heterogeneous elements of American society.” The Nation notes that this fracturing into “confused and heterogeneous elements” may be an inevitable part of the country's economic transformation into an industrial state, but, lamentably, it also entails a loss of symbolic standing for the farmer, who vacates his elevated place in the cultural imagination and steps down into the mundane fray of capitalist competition. As the article succinctly states, “it has become clearer and clearer that the business of farming in the West is nothing more nor less than a branch of a speculative trade.” Although the farmers’ financial woes and loss of symbolic standing are regrettable, the farmers have mostly themselves to blame, for they have succumbed to fanciful images of a golden agrarian West and a collectivist mentality at odds with free-market capitalism. As a result, “chaos and distress” were spreading across the fields of the western states.Footnote 31
In its analysis of “The Farmer's Future,” The Nation charts what might be termed the “desacralization” of the Jeffersonian agrarian tradition and casts a characteristically wary eye on the cause of organized labor. However, despite the antilabor tone in its analysis of western economic woes, The Nation also reserves some blame for the secretive and unscrupulous business practices of railroad companies, as well as the vicissitudes of incompetent, and sometimes corrupt, western legislators, who were disrupting the order of the free market themselves. The Nation frequently praised the railroads as agents of civilization and modernization, but, in looking westward, it saw an industry too often willing to subvert principles of fair competition through dishonest accounting methods, deceptive land speculation, and government corruption.
Two dramatic economic developments made these practices difficult for the pro-business Nation to overlook. The first was the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1872–73, in which leaders of the Union Pacific Railroad diverted over $20 million into their own pockets through manipulative financial practices and distributed sizable shares of the company to influential federal officials. Worries over railroad practices were further exacerbated by a second, more consequential, development – the collapse of Jay Cooke and Company, one of the nation's largest banking houses and the primary financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad – which led in turn to the financial Panic of 1873 and the worst depression the country had experienced up to that time.
While The Nation had expressed worries about the power of the railroad industry as early as 1868,Footnote 32 its critiques heightened in the following decade, as it became increasingly wary of railroad business practices and accused the industry of deliberate obfuscation in releasing financial records and statistical data that were “altogether too frequently calculated to confuse rather than to enlighten.” Echoing its calls for a more empirical view of the western landscape, the magazine cited a need for refined statistical tables to make sense of industry figures. In other words, the “undigested mass” of railroad financial data “must be compressed into tables which will render possible an intelligible and comprehensive view of the whole.”Footnote 33 In the same year, the editors bemoaned the “almost total absence” of reliable data regarding western development and railroad expansion. This further fueled rampant speculation in both corporate stocks and western lands, a practice that had become “a sort of mania.”Footnote 34 Surely, money was being made – and would continue to be made – through such speculation, The Nation maintained, but the risks were increasing daily and the “credulous public,” whose annuities were threatened, needed to be apprised of these “stern realities” so they would not simply accept the inflated claims of corporate interests. Noting overly exuberant investment in western land, The Nation warned of “a long period of extreme depression,” which the country did in fact experience following the financial Panic of 1873.Footnote 35
Clearly, the railroad was transforming the West, along with the rest of the country, but in the pages of The Nation the magnitude of the industry's power elicited anxiety as well as optimism. Although the magazine's support for railroad expansion would remain high throughout the 1870s, its accompanying attacks on Byzantine and misleading accounting practices, payoffs to corrupt government officials, and false portrayals of western agricultural bounty would continue to shroud the new era of corporate consolidation in a veil of suspicion and, together with the growth of organized agrarian labor, tarnish dreams of a golden West unfettered by the ills of eastern metropolitan culture.
“THE INDIAN QUESTION”
In chronicling the rise of corporate power, especially as played out in western railroad expansion, The Nation, like much of the elite press, continually emphasized the country's entry into a historical era unlike any it had seen before. A similar narrative emerges in coverage of Indian policy, which underwent major revisions in the decades following the Civil War. These revisions were prompted in large part by eastern philanthropic reformers, such as the Friends of the Indian, whose program of gradual assimilation ran counter to the more forceful program of military control promoted by many western political figures, who called for a much stronger role in Indian affairs for the War Department. The Nation sought a rhetorical high ground from which these differences could be mediated, and it expressed a range of opinions on the so-called “Indian question.” However, in general the magazine's commentary on Indian policy would trace an arc from optimism to anxiety.
Like so many western enterprises after the Civil War, the reconfiguration of Indian policy began on a hopeful note. In 1868, flush with postwar confidence and perhaps swayed by sentimental images of the “dying race,” the Grant administration and federal lawmakers instituted what became known as a Peace Policy toward western tribes. Sometimes known as the Quaker Policy, the plan restricted Indians to reservations, where they would be placed under the tutelage of Christian missionaries and government agents. They would then be instructed in English; provided with annuities in the form of cash, food, clothing, and farming supplies; and inculcated with “American” values. Chief among these values was a regard for private property, long seen as a crucial element in any plan to assimilate native peoples within the dominant Euro-American culture. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson had identified the tribal notion of collective ownership as an impediment to cultural assimilation, which he hoped to achieve through the erosion of traditional lifeways and cultural identifications rather than through violent dispossession.Footnote 36 For Jefferson, this meant transforming the Indians into small farmers, and, despite exterminationist rhetoric from some western newspapers and an emphasis on removal in national policy beginning in the 1820s, this goal remained in place during the late 1860s, when the Peace Policy was instituted.
The Nation supported the Peace Policy's emphasis on agrarianism, individualism, and peaceful assimilation, but by the early 1870s, growing economic distress and reports of government mismanagement and corruption led it to criticize federal Indian programs and look upon the entire western political landscape with an increasingly jaundiced eye. For instance, in a harsh review of the Indian Commissioner's 1873 Annual Report, The Nation criticized the federal Indian Appropriation Act of 1871, which extinguished the status of Indian tribes as sovereign dependent nations and brought an end to their treaty-making powers.Footnote 37 The resulting Indian policy, The Nation claimed, was at best hard to discern and at worst corrupt and counterproductive. More specifically, the policy that had been touted as a “civilizing machine” was in fact quickly driving western tribes into “vagabondage,” a charge that would have resonated with parallel fears about the growing class of urban poor.Footnote 38 Responding to rumors of Native American uprisings, The Nation countered that the Indians “are more sinned against than sinning,” and most likely were provoked to action by a shortsighted and at times nefarious federal bureaucracy. Because of the federal bureaucracy's shortcomings, the Indians “are swindled by the contractors out of their lawful subsidies, and they are roused into quitting their reservations by the fact that they are constantly being shifted from good land to worse, in compliance with the intrigues of knavish land speculators at the Department of the Interior.”Footnote 39
The actions of these “ring knaves,” The Nation continues, have been greeted by “official nonchalance” from Washington, which had failed to monitor or manage the situation effectively. Specifically, the government had failed to enforce restrictions against both Indians and acquisitive settlers; it had also failed to account for tribal differences in allotting subsidies and reservation lands. Moreover, the editorial concludes, this lamentable situation showed no sign of improving soon: “There is, we suppose, little hope that Congress will attempt to deal with the Indian question this winter in an intelligent way, or even that, if it deemed to do so, it would know how.”Footnote 40 Clearly, in the eyes of The Nation, the optimistic hopes for a peaceful Indian transition to agrarian capitalism that marked the early years of the Peace Policy had given way to cynicism, as the ideals of the program were undermined by official mismanagement, indifference, and outright chicanery motivated by desire for Indian lands.
By the following year, 1875, The Nation’s tone toward Indian policy only soured further, as noted in an update on the “foul dealing” that marked Washington's negotiations with a delegation of Lakota leaders, who “on the whole must have been impressed chiefly by the desire of the two great chiefs [Indian Commissioner E. P. Smith and Interior Secretary James Delano] and their Great Father [President Grant] to get hold of their land.”Footnote 41 But despite its criticism of federal Indian policy, The Nation resisted calls for the transfer of Indian affairs back to the War Department, which had been forced to relinquish its control to the Interior Department in 1849. Influential military figures such as Gen. Nelson Miles had written in the rival North American Review that the army could restore order, discipline, and honesty to Indian policy in the West, but in its editorial pages The Nation resisted the transfer. Conceding that the War Department could bring much-needed honesty, oversight, and enforcement to western reservations, The Nation goes on to argue that the transfer would not stop the “pauperizing” of native peoples, for it would not address the central flaw in federal policy.Footnote 42
Specifically, The Nation argued that the federal government was violating the central tenet of capitalism by feeding and clothing the Indians for nothing, thus encouraging sloth and resistance to American ideals of industry, personal responsibility, and self-improvement. “Men are elevated by working for their living,” argued The Nation, but federal policy discouraged such elevation by supplying Indians with means of sustenance without making them earn it.Footnote 43 Moreover, federal policy was doubly flawed, for it provided only meager provisions, a situation that fomented ill feeling toward the government and doomed Indians to lives of torpid poverty. Dislocated from traditional lands and lifeways, but discouraged from fully embracing the capitalist values and ideals that defined American identity, the Indian was banished to a liminal space of semi-barbarism, neither savage nor civilized.
The Nation was highly critical of the way the federal government was managing Indian affairs in the West, but its criticism was aimed at ineffective and sometimes corrupt and unfair practices, not at the fundamental capitalist principles that lay beneath them. The chief weakness in the Grant administration's Indian policy was its “coddling” of reservation populations and its failure to force western tribes into adopting capitalist notions of personal property, monetary exchange, and individualism. The Nation did not oppose the Peace Policy's ultimate goals; instead it opposed what it saw as the government's inefficient, weak-handed, and sometimes corrupt means of achieving them. As Richard Slotkin has observed, The Nation endorsed the view that if the federal government were to achieve its goals of eroding tribal identities and socioeconomic structures, it would need to subject Indians more directly to the “work-or-starve” mentality that characterized the broader economic philosophy of the day and extended from the Indian reservation to the urban immigrant ghetto.Footnote 44
CONCLUSION
As reflected in the pages of The Nation during the post-Civil War era of national expansion, the far West appeared as both a field of opportunity and a source of cultural anxiety, with social and economic ills bred in the metropolitan East threatening to undermine western promise. On one hand, The Nation found cause for hope in the expansion of federally sponsored scientific exploration in the West, a development the magazine's editors deemed crucial for the region's economic development. However, despite some gains, notably the establishment of the US Geological Survey in 1879, The Nation remained greatly concerned about gaps in geographic knowledge of the region, especially the arid interior West, which presented unprecedented challenges to traditional modes of development. The magazine's commentary on the halting and fragmented nature of western exploration throughout most of the postwar era registers fears that the interior West would remain subject to myth and misperception, rather than the sort of empirical vision that would be necessary to its successful assimilation into the nation's economic and social structures.
This undercurrent of anxiety also runs through the magazine's responses to economic developments in the West, particularly with regard to the reconfiguration of agrarian and corporate power. The agrarian social structure of small farms that Jefferson had envisioned spreading across the West was challenged by both the limits of the land and the infection of labor unionism, while the emergent economic structure was tarnished by suspicions of corporate malfeasance. Charges of predatory land speculation and financial obfuscation violated the core of the capitalist ethic that The Nation so heartily endorsed, and they cast long shadows across prospects for western development.
Finally, the concerns noted above were heightened by the administration of Indian affairs, which The Nation scathingly described as a “most gigantic system of wrong, robbery, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty.”Footnote 45 The Indian surely suffered under this system, the magazine acknowledged, but a greater concern was the erosion of market forces by wrongheaded notions of philanthropy, a development that had serious practical and ideological implications. Like the corruption of business ethics and free-market economics that The Nation decried in the railroad industry and the Granger movement, the mismanagement of Indian affairs posed a threat to successful incorporation of western lands, this time by undercutting the foundational notions of private property and market competition upon which The Nation’s laissez-faire capitalist philosophy rested. If allowed to progress unchecked in the West, this abandonment of capitalist principles would lead to the creation of a permanent dependent class of impoverished racial others, an indelible stain upon the nation's social and economic fabric. Of course, The Nation was produced and circulated within a relatively circumscribed social context, but its representations of the West and the terms of its settlement and development nonetheless illuminate growing tensions underlying the course of western expansion in the post-Civil War era. In attempting to reshape the narrative of unbounded promise that marked much expansionist rhetoric of the period, The Nation tinged the discursive landscape of the West with shadows of doubt and presaged the complexities of the region's integration into the nation's political and ideological frameworks that would continue throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.
