Red Atlantis: John Collier's Politico-Economic Utopia and Indian New Deal

0:00Well, you just heard the story about proponents of liberty. My story will be opposite. It's a story about a man who was anti-liberty, John Collier. Let me start by posing a rhetorical question. Imagine a country that has a corrupt authoritarian government. In that country, nobody knows about checks and balances, and nobody is familiar with an independent court system. Private property is not recognized in this country. Neither can one buy and sell land. All businesses are reluctant to invest into this country because the property is not protected. Those people who have jobs, they work for a public sector.

0:47Those who don't have jobs, they exist on meager entitlements that provide the basic foods and clothing. At the same time, this country supports free healthcare, free education, and can you guess what country is it? It could be, yeah, it could be Soviet Russia, it could be Cuba, right? What else? Venezuela. It could be a third world country, although even Zimbabwe today has at least formula right, checks and balances and private properties at least formula is protected. Well, the answer to this rhetorical question is that this country exists here in the United States and the name of this country is Indian country, Native America.

1:42America. Indian country, it's a metaphor used by writers and scholars to describe the archipelago of 310 Indian reservations you can see here on the map. These lands are held in trust by the federal government, which means legally this is federal property, which means you cannot sell and buy land, which means you You cannot get mortgage. That is why when you cross the borders of reservation you see a bunch of trailers. People don't live there in the houses, practically nobody lives in the houses. The main purpose of this trust status is to shield the Indian tribes from financial failures.

2:29Federal government naively believed that Indian tribes should be protected from the outside society. Federal government does not allow the Indian tribes to fail financially. So of course this peculiar status scares away businesses and creates what Robert Higgs famously described as a regime of uncertainty. In fact, here on reservations, regime uncertainty exists in its extreme form. It borders on socialism. So that is why in 1983 a former Secretary of Interior in the first Reagan administration named James Watt, he actually said, and dearly paid for this statement because he offended the whole group of people, that's how it was viewed at that time, I quote, if you want to have an example of the failure of socialism, don't go to Russia, come to America and go to Indian reservations, unquote.

3:31In the 1990s I had the chance, I did the research on another topic and I had the chance to go through several Indian reservations and what struck me, it was like coming back home because Indian countryside resemble Russian countryside and you could see the same checks, worn out checks. Fences, rotting fences, car carcasses, and frequently, I have to say, a bunch of intoxicated individuals hanging around. So I guess my talk will be a biased view of a former Soviet citizen who feels that he enters his past when he crosses the borders of an Indian reservation.

4:23Well, to be serious, I want to give you a mini-excursion in the intellectual origin, so who set this system, how this system was set, why does it exist. And I think we need to do it because since 1960s the topic of Native America was hijacked by Marxist scholarship and by so-called identity studies. So, I'm going to apply sort of methodological individualism to this topic. In my view, the enduring poverty on Indian reservations is not a result of, as Marx's scholarship says, evil capitalism, but the result of collectivism and statism.

5:11Endorsed in the 1930s, that's when the system was set up, collectivism and statism were were internalized by federal bureaucracy and by Native American leaders themselves and now it became part of the culture, institutional culture and so-called traditional culture. In fact, the despise of individual enterprise and private property on reservations is currently advertised as a part of this ancient legacy, traditional lifestyle and so forth. I don't think I need to give you statistics. I don't want to waste too much time. If you're interested, you can Google it. So Indians, Native Americans are poorest group among the other ethnic groups in the United States. These are rotten policies which resulted in what we have today.

6:0138% Indians live below poverty level. The rotten policies which resulted in this situation was set up during the New Deal in 1930s. By whom? and Collier, a Columbia-educated social reformer, community organizer, and on top of this, a utopian dreamer. So he believed he would create certain red Atlantis. It was a metaphor for him to describe this collective commonwealth, organic commonwealth that would show the American, the world, this ideal lifestyle. The gist of his system was a creation of so-called the tribal corporations, public corporations, another fancy word that came from Italy, public corporations.

6:51It's interesting that in the rest of America you don't have local governments that own casinos, restaurants, motels, hotels, but on Indian reservations you have local governments, and these private corporations who own these things, okay? And if they fail these ventures, the federal government steps in and subsidizes them. So we have stories about numerous Native American enterprises that had been subsidized by the government for 20, 25 years, 30 years. My major argument is that Collier Utopian Project, it's a utopia, Restoration of tribal collectivism through setting up these public corporations Was not some out of touch with reality stuff It was part of New Deal mindset And even more I tried to argue that it was a manifestation of a standard policy solutions Which were shared by many other countries at that time National Socialism in Germany, Mussolini in Italy FDR, there are other projects which resemble New Deal and even Soviet Communism understand.

8:13I'm arguing that in addition to this gigantic modernization pursued by this government, these governments, Italy, National Socialism in Germany, FDR and even Soviet Russia, if you need examples I can give you, they also to ease this pace of modernization, they resorted Back to Land philosophy, they started to glorify folk cultures, folklore, history, legacy of the past or we can say the blood and soil philosophy. So basically what I'm trying to tell you that blood and soil stuff, it wasn't only what we could see in Nazi Germany, it was to some extent shared by all these regimes and again Even in the United States we can find examples like for instance Arthur Dale project in West Virginia scheme to place unemployed workers on land to turn them into organic farmers.

9:14They would be the model American citizens. And now the common feature shared by social engineers from California to Errol Mountains was this blind belief in science. We can call it science worship. Hayek, F. H. Hayek and his famous work, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 1955, he was the first to draw our attention to this particular part of modernity. Carl Yer, a middle-level New Deal bureaucrat, was a perfect manifestation of this mentality, mindset. Okay, that's Carl Yer. This is mindset. That's the most important. So Carl Yer was a perfect manifestation of this mindset. On the one hand, he glorified Indian tribalism as organic lifestyle, which could be used to anchor Americans in their soil.

10:05On the other hand, he said science should be used to revitalize communities. And if you go through his articles and essays, you will see this obsession with science. He demanded actually that the Indian reservations to be used as laboratories for sociological Experimentation. In one of his speeches, which was titled United States Administration as a Laboratory of Ethnic Relationships, he actually issued himself a political license to do things. He said that if government imposes something on an ethnic group, it's bad. But if government interferes, imposes something backed by science, that's good. So everything should be backed To make a long story short, federal government, prompted by Collier, imposed the system of New Deal, these public corporations, on Indians. Indians were lured by a promise to receive a generous credit. So 70% of Indians endorsed this, but 30% were against this. And I'm going I'm going to talk briefly about these 30%.

11:20These Indians revolted essentially against tribalism. Kalier believed that an Indian should be a die-hard collectivist. But these Indians, 30%, they said, wait a second, we'll have private property, we have farms, we don't want to be collectivized, it's not like the Soviet Union. Of course he was angry. It was a bizarre situation. He labeled these Indians who loved the private farms, wanted to work on the land, be private owners. He labeled them as fake Indians. You're fake, so you're not real. A real Indian is a die-hard collectivist. He wants to be a part of a tribe. In fact, he went nasty. He did nasty tricks. He not only denounced them, he actually recruited FBI to harass some of the leaders of these What are the future prospects of this system set up by coloring which exists to the present day?

12:18As I mentioned, this socialist archipelago is relatively modest in its size. It's only 2% of US soil. It shelters only 20% of Native Americans. So, unlike bailing out such bankrupt states as California, Illinois, New York, It's not a big deal for a huge American budget, of course, as long as American taxpayers are ready to put up with this. And unless American welfare capitalism goes down under the burden of numerous entitlements. So far, protected by the shield of trust status and guaranteed financial injections, Indian content is in a pretty good shape, in quotation marks.

13:03All in all, like Social Security Scheme, Farmer's Subsidies and many other wonderful products of the New Deal Alchemical Lab, Red Atlantis is still with us, alive and well.