jdmann@cdp.uucp (David Yarrow) (10/11/89)
/* ---------- "Native Roots of Communism" ---------- */
/* Written 11pm 10/9/89 by David Yarrow(jdmann) in gen.nativeam */
NATIVE ROOTS OF COMMUNISM
by Thomas R. Henry
The great Iroquois Confederacy has long been in eclipse, but the
influence of the Iroquois idea has never been lost. By a curious chain of
events the Iroquois social scheme became a foundation of the Russian
Communist state as well as the American Republic. It contained the germs
of both newer systems, but both contain many elements which would have been
repugnant to Peacemaker and Hiawatha.
At the Civil War's end Gen. U.S. Grant's military secretary was Red
Jacket's half-breed grandson, Brig. Gen. Eli S. Parker. Parker's Seneca
name was "Hasanoanda," but sometime after the war he was elevated to the
Iroquois Federal Council by the matrons of his clan and took the name of
the dead sachem whom he succeeded - "Deioninhagawe" (He-who-holds-the-door-
open). He was an old friend of the Union commander. In the white man's
world he was distinguished civil engineer and, after the war, hard-shell
Republican. Throughout his life, however, General Parker remained
essentially an Iroquois in many of his outlooks and sympathies.
At about the same time Lewis H. Morgan, a wealthy corporation lawyer -
economically, as might be expected, quite conservative - developed
sympathetic interest in the folkways of the Seneca. Morgan, who lived in
Rochester, NY, was a man of fine intelligence, keen observer, and fairly
liberal thinker outside of business.
His thinking, however, was likely to be muddled when he got beyond his
depth, and he was a man of many contradictions. He was impressed by ideas
of evolution just promulgated by Darwin, but never quite accepted the
conclusion man descended from some lower animal. He gave all lip service
popular in his day to absolute equality of man, but he hated foreigners.
His greatest hate was for Catholics. "I am an American," he snarled at
the Pope during a Vatican audience when the pontiff extended his ring to be
kissed, "An American does not kiss any man's hand." Whereupon the recently
elevated Leo the 13th confounded the Papist-baiter by giving him a strong
handshake.
Morgan was a "joiner." He loved the folderal of fraternal orders that
broke out in a rash all over the U.S. through mid-century. They were, for
the most part, small, rather unreliable life insurance companies rigged out
in colorful regalia, secret rituals and roughhouse. They doubtless served
the purpose of providing escape from boredom of home and business. Most
have long since disappeared.
Among these associations, confined to western NY, was the Grand Order of
the Iroquois. The Catholic-hating, red-headed corporation lawyer was one
of its founders, and author of its initiation ceremony - which he called
"inindianation" - which represented an extreme of nonsense. The order
started at odds with Masons. The "Iroquois" broke into a Masonic hall and
appropriated regalia of the lodge officers for their first inindianation.
The Grand Order of the Iroquois was short-lived, but was one of the
pebbles upon which history stumbles. Morgan soon became disgusted with the
tawdry nonsense, but he was a loyal lodge brother. He began to visit the
nearby Seneca reservation, where he had clients for whom he'd done favors,
primarily to learn about real Iroquois rituals in order to improve those of
his fraternal order.
There he met General Parker, foremost Iroquois of his generation. They
became close friends and confidants. Morgan became more and more absorbed
in Seneca ways and familiar with the story of its federal republic.
Parker's friendship opened all longhouse doors for him.
As a result of his studies, Morgan published an epoch-making book, *The
League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee*, perhaps the most comprehensive account of
an aboriginal people that had appeared up to that time anywhere. The
publication made Morgan one of the foremost ethnologists of his time, and
still is an authoritative source book. Parker's collaboration, of course,
had contributed enormously to its authenticity.
It might have been better for the world if Morgan had gone no further.
The nature of his mind was such, however, that he could scarcely help
plunging into deep waters of philosophy. Evolution was in the air. This
lawyer, without scientific training, proceeded to apply theory to society
itself. He divided human history, of which he know little, in evoutionary
periods, just as geologists were then dividing the history of the earth.
Morgan assumed human society evolved upward from a primitive, unorganized
horde, not greatly different from a troop of monkeys, to a level
represented by Anglo-Saxons of Rochester with church-going families and
comfortable front porches covered with trumpet vine. There were, he
speculated, three major ethnological strata - savagery, barbarism and
civilization. To each, in turn, he assigned three subdivisions - lower,
middle and upper. He used paleontological nomenclature almost verbatim.
Each evolutionary period, he believed, was represented by the culture of
some extant primitive people.
One such stage was the Iroquois culture. He proceeded to recast much of
his excellent Seneca material into another book, *Ancient Society*, in
which this evolutionary idea was expounded. The book attracted the
attention of Joseph Henry, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who
sponsored the ethnologist. Henry obtained Morgan a government frank by
which he could carry on extensive correspondence with persons all over the
world who were in contact with primitive races.
Major forces in social evolution, Morgan propounded, were the development
of the family and property rights by strong individuals. This thesis
involved him in a difficulty of whose practical implications he probably
had as little idea as had the equally conservative Joseph Henry. Evolution
is a continuing process. Forces which moved it in the past still operate,
and man is subject to the same laws as a trilobite. An honest evolutionist
can hardly maintain the human race represents an absolute end of biological
progression. Nor can one assert Protestant, Republican Rochester bankers
with stock in NY Central necessarily constitute *ne plus ultra* of society.
The difficulty didn't bother Morgan, a philosopher with secure
investments. He had no objections to a golden age, if it were far enough
in the future. For all his prejudices, he was an honest man.
Moreover, the conservative lawyer appears to be at heart a romantic
idealist. He came out of a society, remember, whose youths died by
thousands to end slavery. He heard with uncomfortable misgivings the
crying of children in mill tenements. He could hardly help contrasting the
growing evils of industrial civilization with the Iroquois way of life -
and he wondered what had gone wrong. Morgan's faults were many, but
basically he was good and kindly.
"Since the advent of civilization," he wrote in *Ancient Society*, "the
outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its
uses so expanding, its management so intelligent in the interests of its
owners, that it's become on the part of the people an unmanageable power.
Human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. Time
will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise over property
and define the relations of the state to property it protects as well as to
the obligations and limits of the rights of owners."
"A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress
is to be the law of the future as it has been in the past. Time which has
passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the ages yet to
come. Dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a
career of which property is the aim and end, because such a career contains
elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in
society, equal rights and privileges, and universal education foreshadow
the next higher plane of society to which experience, intellect and
knowledge are steadily tending."
This wasn't extremely advanced. It would have gone for just some Sunday
sermon idealism which evaporates before Monday noon except for Morgan's
great reputation as ethnologist and the mass of scientific and pseudo-
scientific data upon which his conclusions rested.
*Ancient Society* was published in 1871. In London at that time German
exiles Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked in close collaboration. They
believed the economic and social structure of the world was entirely wrong.
They sought to rebuild it nearer to the heart's desire, and closer to human
nature as they pictured human nature. They searched avidly for anything
factual to support their thesis that accumulation of private property was
the source of most of the world's ills.
Morgan's book provided Marx and Engels with that data, and a starting
point for further researches on other primitive people. They accepted
wholeheartedly the hypothesis of social evolution. But, resting their
arguments firmly on Morgan's testimony regarding conditions among the
Iroquois, they maintained progress had been from good to bad, so far as a
majority of mankind were concerned, since the days of semicommunistic,
propertyless matriarchy.
At some time, they held, all present civilized peoples had been in a
similar happy state, but their societies were debauched by the introduction
of private ownership. The time had come, Marx and Engels said, to erase
this mistake and start anew.
Marx already had published *Das Kapital*, the Bible of communism. At the
time of his death he was planning extensive revisions in light of what he'd
learned from *Ancient Society*. Younger Engels took up the unfinished
work, and delved deep into history of Greek, German and other civilizations
for more data to support this thesis. Out of these researches came the
book which, next to *Das Kapital*, is Red Russia's most sacred text:
*Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in Light of the
Researches of Lewis H. Morgan*.
Within a few years after its publication this volume had been translated
into every European language and Chinese. It was easy and interesting to
read, compared with the ponderous tome of Marx. It rivaled the Rubaiyat
through the later years of the century as a quotation source for heretics
and scoffers at convention.
"That is what men and society were," wrote Engels, referring to Morgan's
description of Hiawatha's commonwealth, "before division into classes.
When we compare the position of the Iroquois with the overwhelming majority
of civilized men today, an enormous gulf separates present day proletarian
and small peasant from the free member of old gentile society. The basest
interests - mean greed, brutal appetite, sordid avarice, and selfish
robbery of the commonwealth - mark the new class society. It is by vilest
means - theft, violence, fraud, treason - the old gentile class society is
undermined and overthrown. The new society during all the two-and-a-half
thousand years of its existence has never been anything else but the
development of a small minority at the expense of the great exploited and
oppressed majority."
"It is Lewis H. Morgan's great merit," Engels continued, "that he has
discovered the prehistoric basis of our history."
Then came Lenin. He maintained completely the Morgan-Engels theory of an
ideal primitive society, as exemplified by the Iroquois. He maintained,
moreover, that the distorted flux of social evolution from this state could
be turned back into its proper channels by arbitrary means - that is, by
violent revolution. And we know what he did about it.
Both *Ancient Society* and the work of Engels are now among the most
widely distributed books in the Soviet lands. Thousands of copies were
distributed to soliders for indoctrination during the last war, and the
military virtues of the Iroquois were held up as ideals. The actual
Hiawatha is much better known in Russia than in his native land.
Morgan, of course, is one of the Soviet saints - strange fate for the
Pope-hating, Republican, lodge-joining Rochester corporation lawyer. It is
an irony of history that two such men as Morgan and Parker should have
collaborated to produce what has been called "The Communist Old Testament."
*****
Source: *Wilderness Messiah, The Story of Hiawatha & the Iroquois League*
pp. 237-243, published in 1955, William Sloane Assoc., Inc., NY, NY
by Thomas R. Henry, based on information gathered in the course of
duties as publicity representative of the Smithsonian Institution.
=============================================================
COMMENTARY: The original title of this piece - FROM HIAWATHA TO STALIN
- lividly portrays what has happened. The instructions originally left by
Peacemaker through his spokesman Hiawatha have been "studied" and "written"
to become the basis for Europe's two great societies: American capitalism
and Soviet Communism. The spiritual guidance to assure human dignity and
liberty entrusted to Hiawatha became perverted to ugly Stalinism.
Parker, Morgan, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin name the links in the
chain which led to this corruption.
Nonetheless, this lesson in mutation is valuable, for we can trace the
roots of the vision which inspired each of these men, and its leads us to
the shore of Onondaga Lake in the New World Finger Lakes. There Creator's
Messeger transmitted the Great Law of Peace to found the oldest suriviving
democracy on Earth: Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Confederacy, or Iroquois
League. This is the shining ideal which illuminated European imaginations
of liberty, equality and peace.
So Haudenosaunee are "elder brother" to both American and Soviet
government.
Mr. Henry undermines the social theory of Marx and Engels by slighting
the intellectual qualifications of Morgan. Perhaps this is due, but he
fails to strongly uphold the idealism of each of these men - their common
striving to express the highest and best of human culture and nature.
Haudenosaunee, too, have been imperfect to apply Peacemaker's teachings.
But such human failings do not tarnish the original instructions.
- prepared by David Yarrow, the turtle, for SOLSTICE magazine
***** SOLSTICE: Perspectives on Health and Environment, is published
bimonthly at 201 E. Main St Suite H, Charlottesville, VA 22901 804-979-4427
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