Dingy Storyteller

Monday, May. 24, 1943
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This neglect, with its harmful effects upon both American character and prestige, is the theme of Brothers Under the Skin. Author Carey McWilliams is a former California Commissioner of Immigration & Housing. His description of the U.S. treatment of minorities is blunt; so are his suggested solutions. His ideas stem from years of preoccupation with the history of minority peoples, professional familiarity with Negro homes and segregated quarters, and a long career of opposition to those who see colored poverty and degradation as inevitable. McWilliams' earlier books on labor and agriculture (Ill Fares the Land, Factories in the Field) brought a small storm down on their author's head; Brothers is likely to whistle up another.

McWilliams supplies old and new information in his survey of U.S. treatment of some 17,000,000 minority peoples:

The Indian, he says, far from becoming extinct, is "our most rapidly growing minority." Indians in the U.S. and Alaska number 394,280, are increasing at the rate of "1% a year compared with 0.7% for the whole population." "It was with the Indian that our patterns of 'color reaction' and 'color behavior' were first conditioned" and became so set that Americans rarely consider that "a large part of [our] race psychology" derives from their ancestors' experiences with Indians on the ever-shifting frontier.

"Fear and anxiety," says McWilliams, led even the most religious Puritans to "feel no compunction when they saw Indian women being clubbed to death and Indian babies being dashed against trees." This anxious attitude changed to indifference after the Indians were conquered; by 1880 most of them had been relegated to reservations, in the belief that "it was cheaper 'to feed than to fight them.' " Under the Dawes Act (1887) arrangements were made for every Indian to obtain eventually a piece of reservation land.

The result, says McWilliams, was tragic. The Indians were used to tribal ownership; once their holdings became individual they fell prey to swindlers and land-grabbers; their cultural and social solidarity fell apart. (This, McWilliams believes, was the intention of the Dawes Act.) Their language was suppressed in schools ("truly nightmarish institutions"), their religious ceremonies discouraged, their arts and crafts allowed to fade away. By 1923 they had declined in numbers "from the pre-Columbian estimate of 850,000 to around 220,000."

In 1924, Indians were at last accepted as "citizens." In the last decade serious efforts have been made to restore their heritage by adding to, and protecting, their holdings, supplying them with capital, fostering their arts and crafts, etc. By restoring their racial dignity as a group, believes McWilliams, the U.S. has helped them to become more a part of the nation as a whole. They require special treatment, since they compose "300 different . . . tribes speaking 250 different dialects." But, at bottom, their problem is that of all colored minorities.