19th century Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner deplored the treatment of the Indians. After describing a particularly horrendous usury trap which peasants got forced into, Matto de Turner, despairingly cries out:
Would that God, in the exercise of His goodness, might one day ordain the extinction of the native race, which, resplendent once in imperial greatness, now drinks the fetid cup of degradation! God grant it extinction, since it can never recover its dignity or exercise its rights!
This language sounded familiar to me. L. Frank Baum, a decade before he wrote The Wizard of Oz, published a weekly newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Upon the death of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, Baum wrote an 1890 editorial in which he speaks admiringly of Sitting Bull, and angrily of “his conquerors [who] were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery.” Yet Baum also writes contemptuously of the Sioux still alive:
With [Sitting Bull’s] fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. … Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.
Like Matto de Turner, Baum contrasted Indian days of glory with their present degraded state, and thought that the degraded remnant would best be put out of their misery. The writings are virtually simultaneous. Matto de Turner’s novel, Torn from the Nest, was published in 1889, Baum’s editorial just one year later. The writers were talking about Indians on different continents, but they were observing a similar fate.
Baum’s call for the extinction of the Sioux went a step further than Matto de Turner, unfortunately. Matto de Turner left extinction to God. Baum invited the U.S. military to do the job. In an editorial of 1891 Baum says:
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
Presumably, Baum felt personally threatened by the living Indians in a way Matto de Turner did not. His is a mixed message, it’s clear to say. Baum decries the injustices visited upon the Indians, yet calls for more “wrong” to be done. Rather than seek humane solutions to an intractable problem, Baum invokes Final-Solution-like rhetoric.
I’ve never read anything about Frank Baum personally visiting violence upon anybody, or offering any kind of material support to killing. His children’s fantasies are notable for their tolerance and acceptance of the “queer” and the disenfranchised. I am saddened he so compromised his compassion and sense of justice in these editorials. He knew better.
sources:
Torn from the Nest
by Clorinda Matto de Turner
translated from the Spanish by John H. R. Polt
edited by Antonio Cornejo Polar
1998. Oxford University Press, New York
The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer editorials by L. Frank Baum are reproduced by the University of Warwick, Coventry UK here:
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