José Angel Hernández

HIST: 6393; "Empire, War and Revolution"

January 18, 2000

Richard Drinnon. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), Pp. 552 + Bibliography & Index.

In Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building, the author narrates the various germs of Puritan racism and attempts to trace the origins of Indian-hating to the events that unfolded during the Spanish-American War (1898) and US involvement in Vietnam. More importantly, though, Drinnon's underlying thesis focuses on European perceptions of Native American society and how those observations facilitated an aggressive westward expansion that continued beyond the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) and into Indochina. The strategy of the book, according to Drinnon, is "embarrassingly simple-minded": to tag along, document, and analyze what early European immigrants said as they pushed their way across the American continent. Not surprisingly, those early Puritan attitudes toward Native Americans reveal what today would be termed as racism, prejudice, and bigotry. Of course, at the time and in the absence of anthropological terminology, the only true identifier of such attitudes was the term Indian-hating, which is self-explanatory.

Divided into five parts, the first half of Drinnon's monograph focuses on racism and Native Americans. The early Puritans and the Pequot War are discussed at length including the authors own interpretation and analysis of the events taking place, particularly the religious and sexual behavior of the Puritans towards the Indians. Throughout the book, Drinnon also includes various chapters covering divers instances of Indian-hating by some of North Americas most prominent figures. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Timothy Dwight, John Hay, Henry Adams, John Fiske, and others are included in the authors narrative. Here, the focus of the author concentrates on the contradictory nature of public and private attitudes toward Native Americans. The last half of his study is dedicated to Anglo attitudes toward the Filipino in the Spanish American War, the Vietnamese (southern and communist alike) during the US occupation in that country, and how those early perceptions of Indian-hating were transformed and adopted to southeast Asia. Thus, the Filipinos and Vietnamese became North America's new "savages."

The problem with Drinnon's study, if I may call it a problem, has to do with his lack of connection and his narrow focus on racial attitudes toward people of color. This is not to say that race and racism are narrow, but more importantly, I feel that political, technological, and economic tensions presented additional obstacles during the three periods: the Pequot War, the Spanish American War, and the war in Vietnam. Phrased another way, political, technological, and economic context are necessary in order to provide the reader with a more thorough historical interpretation of these events. Combined with William Appleman William's monograph on US diplomacy, though, Drinnon's study on Indian-hating and empire building is complemented with a diplomatic understanding of US attitudes toward empire building. In this regard, the reader is better able to understand some of the underlying prejudices that accommodated US expansion overseas via the Open Door Policy, the Monroe Doctrine, and even the Good Neighbor Policy.

Drinnon's contribution or importance, however, should be examined in the context of both the historiography of the period and the focus of his topic. Aside from tackling a large project, including both time and content, Drinnon in my estimation, makes early attempts at postcolonial and postmodern analysis: reading backwards or against the grain, to use Ranajit Guha's definition. This is to say that the author employs literary methods well before his time and well beyond the call of historiographical duty. What the author manages to successfully relate, then, is his facility with literary theory, including his own application of Freud and Williams.

However, much like the current criticism being lashed out at postcolonial theory, Drinnon's concentration on "the oppressed or dissenting" negates location and institutions thus blurring the picture of Puritan-Native American relations. As a result, and like I mentioned earlier, Drinnon's dependence on "literary analysis" gives the reader, at best, a checkered interpretation of Puritan-Native American relations and how that contact and conflict facilitated North America's westward expansion and beyond. Also, how did Puritan/Anglo relations with Native Americans differ from, say, Spanish and French attitudes? Additionally and, unfortunately, I fail to understand the role of Native Americans...their agency. What is their role (¿Que fue su papel?) and are they merely innocent bystanders victimized by the wicked White Puritans? Is there not a reciprocal exchange of terror between Puritan and Native American alike? What is lacking from the narrative, unfortunately, are theoretical tools that can connect the narrative to the author's initial intention that might assist in keeping the reader focused.

Throughout the first half of the narrative Drinnon occasionally evokes Thomas Morton's New English Canaan or New Canaan, particularly John Adams' interest in this early "classic." Written in 1637, the paternalistic and drunken Morton recounts the abundance of game and vegetation that the "New World" yields. More importantly, though, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams relates that although he sees Morton as a drunken enthusiast and racial miscenigator, he nonetheless finds New Canaan "infinitely more entertaining and instructive...than ...Condorcets (New Heaven)... or...Swedenborg (New Jerusalem)." For me, however, this one example (and there are many) illustrates how the literary endeavors of one individual (fiction) become transformed into an interpretation, a tool if you will, of history, i.e. fact. It is no surprise that early Puritans and pioneers alike related their experiences in the "New World" through travelers logs and various private histories. "Just as fairy tales functions as a mythology," states Leticia Magda Garza-Falcón, narrations by Morton or Mather become part of the American belief system...of the national psyche...to build that city upon a hill. These North American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy" and the myths that they engender are, in my opinion, the most difficult task for the historian to overcome. Richard Drinnon's monograph is a significant step in challenging the national mythology so pervasive in todays political and "social" rhetoric.