Editorial

...Higher still are Eric Sevareid, Hunter S. Thompson, Ph.D., and Gloria Steinem...

...Today he buys recycled clothing and edible calendars...

...It was inconceivable to the Jeffersonian mind that the Indian could be civilized without owning and farming his own plot of land...

...Obviously the intellectualoid's diversity is so extensive as to be astonishing, so let us move on to his genealogy and to his preferences...

...I summon as exhibit A the incomparable Walter Cronkite and pass on...

...The destruction of savagism was part of the plan, but it had always been assumed that civilization could be neatly slipped into the breach...

...When one adds to this the enlightenment view of history as civilized progress, the rationale for the total remaking of the Indian was complete...

...While Indian hating was a powerful force in the young nation, particularly on the frontier, Sheehan demonstrates convincingly that the overwhelming desire of whites was not to exterminate the Indian but to transform him --not to destroy his physical being (although this frequently happened), but to destroy his Indiarmess...

...Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., S.T.D., LL.D., Ralph Nader, LL.D., and Dr...

...By philanthropists conceptualizing the conflict between Indian and white in terms of savagism versus civilization, with the latter being naturally superior to the former, the seeds of extinction for the Indian were sown...

...But I sense that you are becoming impatient...

...For this reason it deserves careful attention by serious students of American history and is required reading, for any understanding of one of the more tragic chapters in the nation's history...

...The intellectualoid will spend the rest of his life snorting and fuming in the American audience, that immense ocean of sedentary souls who nervously and reproachfully follow the doings of the nation from their armchairs...

...His disposable income is almost totally exhausted on the intellectualized brummagem of the times...

...Some people have appraised intellectualoids a pain and even an embarrassment, but for me they have provided more spontaneous laughter than one hundred W.C...

...Much of the equipment used by these snooty jacks has only recently rolled out of the laboratory, and by an idiotic leap in logic the oafs who operate this equipment often perceive themselves as avant-courr/ers on the frontiers of knowledge...

...And for those hard-core capitalists who insist on paying for their pleasures I suggest they subscribe to any of a host of earnest periodicals starting with Newsweek and devolving on to such old reliables as the Nat/on~ There are a multitude of other ways to encounter intellectualoids, for their numbers are increasing all the time...

...Now up until this point I have demurred from laying down any lapidified definition of the intellectualoid for fear of doing him an injustice...

...And from the very top chop come the likes of the Rev...

...Given the failure of the civilization program, removal served as a convenient solution to an embarrassing situation...

...Sheehan organizes his study around three aspects of the philanthropic design, its "metaphysics," its '~pregram," and finally, its "illusions...

...Some...

...The intellectualoid speaks condescendingly to practically everyone he encounters, though his knowledge of the world abounds with superstition and error...

...In any case, missionaries and others were only too glad to participate in the grand scheme, and while some might debate whether civilization should precede Christianization, or vice versa, about the ultimate objective there was no dispute...

...Because the author is concerned with explaining the relationship between image and event, idea and policy, he devotes considerable attention to the "metaphysics" of the Indian question...

...David Adams EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) Such preposterous fads along with his political, cultural, and religious enthusiasms are almost all dictated by a few hucksters from Manhattan and Cambridge...

...They now read yoga manuals...

...Thus, the ultimate tragedy, "the white man's sympathy was more deadly than his animosity...

...He is a dupe who has had a fleeting encounter with the halls of ivy or some other fount of advanced and exalted thought, and this experience has infected him with pretensions, both intellectual and moral...

...There would, of course, always be some land left over...

...The intellectualoid is a phenomenon of our mass society, an amusing mutant, hovering somewhere between the library of the intellectual and tee sink of the uneducated clod...

...If such is the case, then the Indian will have found a true friend at last, one who not only respects the right of his physical being to exist (something the Jeffersonian philanth(opist granted), but one who respects as well his essential humanity and the legitimacy of his traditions...

...No one is cutting back their budgets...

...Fieldses, two hundred Laurels and Hardys, three hundred Woody Allenses, the United Nations, the League of Women Voters, the late George McGovern, and a man from Boone County, Indiana, who insists that chickens have extrasensory perception...

...Occasionally the intellectualoid will rouse himself to participate in a demonstration or to write a semiliterate letter to his local editor, but then he slumps back into his throne and continues to improve his mind, a faculty he cherishes much as a Hollywood star cherishes her pectoralis major...

...In the final analysis the fundamental elements in every intellectualoid are a) that though he makes a great to-do over "ideas," he does not read seriously, and h) that his mind is incapable of disciplined thought...

...This was just the sort of benevolence that both the frontiersman and the land specu...

...But a college dropout, who shuffles paper for some giant corporation while terrorizing his mother with the visions of Norman O. Brown and with threats to join a commune, is an intellectualoid of a higher chop...

...School teachers must now keep up not only with the new areas of study but also with new methods of teaching, all of which smack of sociology, psychiatry, and disciplines once held hopelessly beyond their ken and still held in mysterious awe by the average gringo...

...Today's teacher has gotten a glimpse of what it is like to think seriously about ideas, and it has become too much for him...

...He is the unfailing antagonist of his brother the clod...

...Now the educating of a student is a cold, grim business full of anguish and travail...

...continued on page 25) 4 The Alternative March 1974 pervaded all discussion of the Indian question, a consensus that the author claims was beth Jeffersonian and philanthropic...

...Essentially in genus and in species the intellectualoid is that timeless creature of bathos and of misadventure, the dupe...

...Of course intellectualoids are new to America, and perhaps that is why we have treated them so rudely...

...it allowed the philanthropist to postpone the day when he would have to confront the validity of his original premises...

...But while various aspects of the author's interpretation will no doubt be questioned, this study will stand as a major work in the field for some time to come...

...R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . The Alternative March 1974 25...

...Since the end of the Second World War, ideas---usually someone else's ideas---have become the tools with which many Americans have earned their beefsteaks...

...The full extent of that tragedy is brought home clearly in this study, not because the author has engaged in writing history as moral indictment (he has intentionally avoided such a posture), but because he has thoroughly demonstrated that even the "friends" of the Indian were not really his friends at all...

...He has made a resounding botch of politics, the arts---in fact everything he touches becomes a world of Dogberries...

...They think about group sex and even discuss its intellectual high points: They fancy themselves the heirs of Plato, Galileo, and Nicolo Sacco...

...He apes the raiment of the Harvard faculty and murmurs ominously about what tomorrow may bring...

...As the author expresses it, "If the frontier adopted the direct method of murdering Indians, humanitarians were only more circumspect in demanding cultural suicide of the tribes...

...A program based on such a simplistic view of cultural change was destined to fail, and so 4t did...

...As I see it the universities are having conferred upon them a bum rap, for if they are not exactly educating their clients, they are at least intellectualizing them and thereby providing the nation with a prodigious new source of entertaiument, to wit: the modern American intellectualoid...

...The intellectualoid is the direct descendant of the great American boob...

...Consider the lowly school teacher...

...Two conceptions, that of the noble savage and environmentalism were central to the Jeffersonian framework...

...And how are these issues to be resolved...

...John Galbraith, who writes books on economics or rather on a debasement of economics, his last book, Economics and the Public Purpose, being related to economics the way voodoo is related to brain surgery...

...language, and morals, must be changed...

...He is a religious follower of National Public Radio, and he believes educational television sharpens the mind...

...It was in this context that philanthropists lent their support to the popular clamor for Indian removal...

...There is a stirring in the audience, and some have crumpled me into a ball and thrown me to the floor...

...lator could identify with...

...He is Shakespeare's Malvolio, Shaw's Marchbanks, and McGovern's campaign worker...

...Well what of it...

...Yesteryear's pipefitters and stevedores can today become computer jockeys, television commentators, masseurs and the like--men with only the meanest intelligence and culture, but men easily subject to delusions of a vast and asinine grandeur...

...The intellectualoid comes in a variety of sizes and plumage, and there will never be a definition so comprehensive as to embrace all of his diversity, but you are restless and so allons-y...

...From the depths of my well-stocked bomb shelter I salute him and look forward to his increasing influence upon our ever evolving Republic...

...Unwilling to accept the harsh realities as to the limitations of their design, philanthropists sought explanations...

...Will we at last move beyond what educational historian James Anderson has called the "sub-culture ideology," the idea ~that if you are a numerical minority then you are minority in culture...

...Rather than hoots from hayshakers, they deserve el]co miums and felicitations...

...Still without the expansion of what we Americans choose to call higher education, it is doubtful that the intellectualoid would ever have become such a prominent species in the American menagerie, and that is one of the reasons I consider the American university a useful public expenditure...

...Not only was the Indian failing to assimilate, he was dying...

...And this fact enabled the philanthropist to profess benevolence toward the Indian and still participate in the popular pastime of relieving him of his real estate...

...A television technician, who is fetched by the dialectical prowess of Dick Cavett and who occasionally trots out a few audacities of his own, is a pretty low-grade specimen...

...Thanks to the postwar university's voracious appetite for young minds, we now find intellectualoids fussing and fretting in every niche and cranny of the great Republic, in every walk of life, and from every racial, religious, and ethnic provenance...

...Moreover, just as circumstance had produced the savage Indian, so the manipulation of environment might produce the civilized Indian...

...While the former prompted the desire to transform the Indian, the latter guaranteed it as a historical inevitability and explained the manner in which it would be accomplished...

...It was philanthropic in that its thrust was benevolence, albeit a self-serving one...

...The intellectualoid is full of fears...

...The philanthropic outlook called for the transformation of the Indian, but as Sheehan points out the "program" through which this transformation was to be accomplished was actually quite feeble, at least when one considers the nature of the task...

...These ideas have become advanced and have obviously had a dizzying effect on the practitioners of certain trades and professions...

...nonetheless, I have not heard any churlish outbursts against these venerable institutions...

...These congenital mediocrities in earlier days would be minding soda fountains, but today they are manipulating advanced technology and it has proved too much for their equilibria...

...Intellectualizing a student is much like costuming a clown, and the universities have brought admirable efficiency to the process...

...Some read kinetic poetry and even play twelve-string guitars--some play lutes...

...So lest I importune on the rest of my audience, I shall tender a taxonomic sketch of this prodigy, and let the chips fall where they may...

...In a final section on '~illusions" the author documents the attempt of philanthropists to comprehend the consequences of their efforts...

...Today he elucidates math and sciences undreamed of by the schoolmarm of yore...

...And then there was the question o f private property...

...for instance, may question whether the author's emphasis on the consensus of the age is somewhat overstated, or whether the philanthropist had the influence over Indian policy that is implied in this study...

...The churches are not exactly turning out saints, and people die in hospitals all the time...

...They merely purchase a Volkswagen and some Scandinavian stools, while migrating to artsy-craftsy purlieus and acquiring some "personal problems...

...According to the environmentalist conception, the Indian's present condition (savagery) could be explained in terms of the circumstances of his environment rather than by any inherent inadequacies in his race...

...Rather than achieving the transformation hoped for, more often they observed the reality of the Indian's '~ersonal and tribal disintegration...

...All they have to do is tune in the hour-long evening news report on National Public Radio or take up with the brethren at a nearby liberal salvation show--Unitarians have my personal recommendation, though the New Age Catholics are not to be sniffed at...

...The recent events at Wounded Knee, the revival of traditional ceremonies such as the Sun Dance on several of the reservations, and the self-determination movement in Indian education, all suggest that the issues which confronted the Jeffersonian mind are still very much with us today...

...But the intellectualizing of a disciple is a far sunnier task...

...He prefers book reviews to books, newspapers to journals, and he chooses television documentaries and news stories over all of the above...

...Once he taught the three R's and swatted brats...

...Once the Indian was removed from the vices of frontier society, it was argued, the civilization process might be renewed under more favorable circumstances...

...When one is pushing history along its natural course of development, the question of program becomes a mute one...

...Intellectualoids: The Lumpen Intelligentsia HE GREAT UNIVERSITIEs of the land are w struggling through high seas merely because a handful of legislators have discovered that the dons have failed to educate those vast herds grazing on the nation's campuses and performing sexual acts in university libraries...

...Yesterday he was living on seeds, nuts, and wheat germ...

...This called for a heavy dose of education and Christianity, and as Sheehan points out the school and the church Were to play a key role in the philanthropic program...

...Now the extent of his encoanter may vary, and so, just as with Masons and with murderers, there are intellectualoids of various degrees...

...But as Sheehan points out, the Indian survived...

...He is the spoiled brat of our time, an indolent, gullible ne'er-do-well with exiguous intellect and less character, lost forever in fantasies about his intellectual and moral superiority...

...Because the scope and purpose of Sheehan's study are so immense and because the issues involved are still with us today, this work will certainly provoke considerable discussion within the historical community...

...It consists of seating the subject before a mirror, powdering him with bizarre prejudices, painting him with pretensions, convincing him of how uniquely improved he has become, and encouraging him to charge onto the stage and make a pest of himself...

...He is a neurotic...

...As one philanthropist was to express it: ~'their whole character, inside and out...

...Not only are the denizens of the old professions engauding their affiati, but new professions have sprung up in the wake of advancing technology and progressive thought...

...Thus, where possible, tribal lands were divided up among individual families for the purpose of breaking down tribal loyalties and for instilling in the Indian a sense of industry...

...And he might have added that Indianness, although to a lesser extent, has survived as well...

...He has taken on airs...

...In fact so rapidly are they multiplying that many do not even bother to fit themselves out at the university...

...Among those offered were the Indian's propensity for violence, his susceptibility to disease and alcoholism, and finally, his exposure to the vices of a frontier society that not only was scarcely above the Indian on the scale of civilization, but was bent on his destruction as well...

...Americans should be grateful for this priceless national resource, for they can enjoy the intellectualoids' antics without spending a dime...

...Indeed he seems always to suffer from what the shrinks call partial personality disorder...

...It was Jeffersonian in that Jefferson's life spanned for the mast part the period under consideration and his writings helped shape the consensus that was ultimately to determine Indian policy...