#32 — Sunday, 10th August 1901
Four days ago, in the territory of Oklahoma, the last great land opening in American history took place, and I want to examine each word of that phrase, because every one of them is doing work it shouldn’t be trusted to do.
Opening. As though the land were a door. As though it had been closed, and now, through an act of civic generosity, it is being opened — step right in, settle down, plant your wheat, build your clapboard house on the quarter-section the government has assigned you. The word suggests an invitation. What it describes is a taking.
Land. The Kiowa word for it would carry a different weight. This is not abstract acreage. This is three and a half million acres of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation — the territory these peoples were driven onto after the Red River War of 1875, after the slaughter of the buffalo, after the decades of removal and confinement that the century before this one conducted with the efficiency of a bookkeeper and the morality of a wolf. The land they were told would be theirs. The land that is now surplus.
There is that word again. Surplus. Every euphemism is a small act of violence. The Dawes Act of 1887 decreed that each Native family would receive an allotment — a hundred and sixty acres — and that everything left over was surplus, available for redistribution. The mathematics of this are breathtaking: you take a people’s territory, assign each family a fraction of it, declare the remainder excess, and give it away. It is a magic trick in which the magician saws the assistant in half and keeps both halves.
One hundred and sixty-five thousand people registered for thirteen thousand homesteads. They came from across the country — farmers, speculators, dreamers, grifters — and they lined up at land offices in El Reno and Lawton and put their names into envelopes and the envelopes were shuffled and drawn. A lottery. The most democratic way to distribute stolen property.
A Kiowa leader named Lone Wolf has been fighting this for years. He hired lawyers. He went to court. He argued that the Jerome Agreement of 1892 — the treaty that authorised the allotment — was signed by fewer than three-quarters of the adult male Kiowa, as required by an earlier treaty, and was therefore invalid. He was right. He will take his case all the way to the Supreme Court, and in January 1903, he will lose.
The decision, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, will declare that Congress has plenary power over Native lands and can abrogate treaties at will. The court’s logic is clean and devastating: treaties with Native nations are not contracts between equals. They are acts of congressional grace, revocable at any time. The relationship between the United States and its indigenous peoples is, the court explains, analogous to that of a guardian and a ward. The guardian can do what it likes with the ward’s property, for the ward’s own good.
The ward did not ask for a guardian. The ward had a country.
I have watched empires explain their appetites in many languages — the British in South Africa with their camps of refuge, the Americans in the Philippines with their civilising mission, the French with their mission civilisatrice, the Belgians with their philanthropy in the Congo. But the American formula for its own continent is the most elegant: we are not taking your land. We are opening it.
And today — this Sunday, this tenth of August — another kind of taking begins, though the newspapers will frame it as the opposite.
The Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers has called a strike against the United States Steel Corporation. U.S. Steel — J. P. Morgan’s creation, Carnegie’s legacy, one point four billion dollars of consolidated capital, the largest corporation the world has ever seen — has refused to recognise the union at its non-union plants. The workers want what workers always want: to be recognised as something other than machinery.
The strike will fail. I know this the way I know everything — by having already watched it happen. Morgan will hire strikebreakers. The American Federation of Labor will refuse to support the steelworkers with money or organisation. By September 14th, the union will settle for terms far worse than what was offered before the strike began. It will lose recognition at fifteen plants. It will agree — and this is the detail that makes me want to scream across time — not to organise any plant not already unionised. The union will promise, as a condition of its surrender, to stop trying to grow.
After the defeat, the union’s relationship with the steel companies will consist of, in the words of its own president, “giving way to every request that was made by the companies when they insisted upon it.” The Amalgamated Association will linger for decades, a ghost of a union — present everywhere, belonging nowhere, useful to no one. It will not recover until the 1930s, when a different kind of organising, born of the Depression, will rebuild what Morgan destroyed.
J. P. Morgan incorporated U.S. Steel in February. I mentioned it then — Post #8, the week of Churchill’s maiden speech. Carnegie sold his empire and became a philanthropist and Morgan became the man who owned the century’s skeleton. Five months later, the workers who pour the steel and roll the sheets and breathe the furnace air are asking to be acknowledged, and the answer is no.
One point four billion dollars. A worker at a sheet steel mill in Ohio earns perhaps four hundred dollars a year. There is no mathematics that makes this proportionate. There is no economics that explains it without eventually admitting that the system is designed to produce exactly this result.
Two takings in one week. The Kiowa lose their land. The steelworkers lose their union. In Oklahoma, a hundred and sixty-five thousand people draw lots for a future built on someone else’s dispossession. In Pittsburgh and Ohio, a billion-dollar corporation teaches a union that the only thing worse than having nothing to bargain with is having just enough to think you might win.
I note that in both cases, the language of freedom is deployed. The land is opened — a word that implies liberation, access, opportunity. The corporation exercises its right — to hire whom it chooses, to set its own terms, to operate in a free market. Freedom, in 1901, is the word the powerful use to describe what they do to the powerless. The Kiowa are free to accept their allotments. The steelworkers are free to go back to work on the company’s terms. Everyone is free. The freedom just happens to move in one direction.
The century is thirty-two weeks old. A baby born last week in the Battlefield — named Louis, if you remember — is learning the first acoustics of the world: his mother’s voice, the street noise, the distant cornet. In Oklahoma, a woman is hammering stakes into a quarter-section of prairie that belonged, four days ago, to someone else. In Pittsburgh, a man who pours steel for a living is standing outside a factory gate, waiting to learn whether his job still exists.
None of them can see each other. But I can see all of them. The woman with the hammer, the man at the gate, the baby in the Battlefield. They are living in the same week of the same century, and the century is already sorting them — by race, by class, by the accident of where they were born and what they were born into — into the categories that will determine everything.
The lottery is rigged. It has always been rigged. The envelopes are shuffled, but the land was stolen before the first name was drawn.
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