|
|
|
|
|
|
|
'Cause only dead white men count:
May 30 2007
"Allegation C" of the report charging Ward Churchill with research misconduct is partly about John Smith's whereabouts in the 1614 to 1618 period. The Wesson et. al. report,(1) Rupert Murdoch's cronies and FBI agents with web pages are saying that John Smith disappeared in 1614 from New England and "never returned."(1) MIM investigated this point and found it factually lacking, a fabrication for a McCarthyite purge. Aside from the fact that John Smith's whereabouts are not known precisely chronologically, smallpox survives three years on clothing, several months in sewage and who knows how long in dead bodies not cremated-- a key point omitted by Wesson et. al.
Although MIM has more First Nations expertise than the Wesson et. al. committee, we would still say we are not experts on John Smith. In contrast, Wesson et. al. tried to argue that it could not have been John Smith behind a smallpox epidemic, because he was already gone for a mere two years after 1614 when the epidemic happened in New England. This is quite a bold assertion for the time period in concern.
As we said before, serious historians do not treat John Smith as if substantial errors of date are never made. In fact, one of the scholars who prepared John Smith's Complete Works acknowledges an historical dispute regarding not just two years, but a whole five year length period of time.
"It is the prerogative of professional critics to find fault. Smith's True Travels has long provided an opportunity for the exercise of that prerogative. While there were fabrications in other works by Smith, they said, the True Travels was pure prevarication. These critics, the editor would pose a number of questions, among them the following:So says Barbour while defending the value of John Smith's documents."If Smith never set foot in eastern Europe, where was he from 1600 to 1605?"(2)
We should be clear that when it comes to defending John Smith's documentation of history, there are only degrees of skepticism, no literalists among real historians. Here is what Barbour says about relevant pages in one John Smith work on New England:
"The best and the most that can be said of chapters 21 through 27 is that they show John Smith's continuing interest in English overseas colonization. In this section, he ventures to give, in turn, such bits of new information as he had about . . . New England in North America."(3)We did not hear Barbour say he would fire someone for saying John Smith did not set foot in Turkey for five years or that the New England story was not exactly straight. Barbour sounds rather like what MIM said before, that "John Smith was around." That's about as far as we want to push what we know, and about as far as an epidemiologist would push it.
Of course, since Ward Churchill's critics are literalist, right-wing authoritarians, memorizing John Smith by heart is what counts. This takes in the uncritical youth who have yet to develop the skills needed to enter into the debates as they actually happen regarding John Smith.
Quite the opposite, Barbour acknowledges his opponents and only disputes them in degree: "Some critics have . . . vigorously oppugned his [John Smith's--ed]reliability as a historian . . . have said that his tales of the Turks were fabrications."(4)
Wikipedia discusses what in John Smith's life was just fiction, but even a Jamestown museum for John Smith says, "it is difficult to know which parts of his life are fact and which are fiction."(5)
Nonetheless, if we did take John Smith literally, MIM finds him testifying against Wesson et. al., because according to Barbour's notes in what Barbour regarded as John Smith's best writing in "Advertisements," John Smith did attempt New England expeditions in 1615 and 1616. Here is what John Smith himself said about "voyages to those coasts"(6) of New England, that he was "forced to returne to Plimoth."(6) So much for John Smith not being around to give the Wampanoags smallpox. That was just from one paragraph in Advertisements." Smith does not spell out all of what he did, just that he took a second and third voyage. Again, it's about at the level to tell us that he had interest in New England, not much more.
Regarding how hard it was to keep the stories straight, John Smith himself spoke of "the misprisions, neglect, grievances, and the causes of all those rumours, losses and crosses that have happened."(7) The way Barbour treats Smith's writings regarding America is that they give readers "vivid glimpses of petty, vindictive warfare and human misery."(8) At the same time, he speaks of one major historical book by John Smith as a "masterpiece of disorganized writing. . . internal weaknesses detract so much from its historical credibility."(8)
Now even if the Wesson et. al. critics had the point right about Smith never returning to New England--based on what unimpugnable authoritative source we don't know-- smallpox is a disease with a germination period. Again, this is something that people studying infectious disease need to speak out about. The GOCC report says the incubation period is 12-14 days,(1) but the incubation period is not the only relevant medical fact for this point of GOCC's. Also relevant is the length of time that smallpox can survive without a host, if GOCC is going to say that Salisbury's "never returned" means John Smith had no opportunity to cause the relevant epidemic.
Again it is an indication of the lack of epidemiological competence of the committee that it questioned Ward Churchill on this point. The County of San Diego has published that smallpox can live on in humyn bodies that are not cremated. Other estimates of the survival of smallpox virus include several months in sewage, three years in clothing and literally centuries in other contexts. U.$. history is filled with examples of people being infected by smallpox years after its previous host was gone.(9) So first comes the question of how long smallpox can survive without humyns. Then comes the question of once there has been definite humyn exposure how long the "incubation" takes. Wesson et. al.'s reference to "incubation" and not the non- humyn survival period is severely misleading. If John Smith gave someone an infected blanket and exposure did not occur immediately, that exposure could nonetheless happen years later. So if a native took a biological warfare blanket, put it down and then picked it up again years later, that could cause the epidemic.
One last point is that Wesson et. al. make a ridiculous assertion about one individual's "intentions" from the 1614-1618 period. The GOCC admits that even Salisbury says that John Smith used "military repression" to get slaves and then goes on to reach whatever conclusion GOCC wants anyway as if Smith obtained slaves non- violently. Even with smallpox warfare, a small portion of natives can survive--maybe just enough for a small band of white settlers to be able to handle in close proximity as slaves.
Unfortunately for the GOCC, the timing argument it introduced goes against it, because if Smith did experiment with using natives as slaves, he would have found that they do not make very good slaves. Here GOCC is taking a theoretical point from one controversial school about slavery and applying it to an individual regarding slaves from a race the research is not about. The point about wanting to keep people alive if they can be slaves is used exactly to contradict GOCC's point. The reason people like John Smith wiped out the indigenous people is that compared with others, the natives did not make good slaves.
Here is what Eugene D. Genovese said:
"The 'domestication' of savages is no easy matter, and only a small percentage of the enslaved usually survive. Europeans first brought Negroes from Africa because they were accustomed to agricultural labor, whereas many of the previously enslaved Indians were not."(10)Blacks endured enslavement and even they only had a "small percentage" survive, but First Nations people faced wipe out, because the whites had no use for them.
While we are on this subject, some of the main scholars arguing that slave-owners kept good care of their slaves started the book with the fourth word as "Black."(11) There was no reference to indigenous people in the book. The generalizations were about slaves of America North and South America, not Black versus indigenous.
Even so, these same authors who said life expectancy of Blacks dropped after slavery ended because slavery was supposedly so good for them(12) also said that Blacks and others suffered terribly from smallpox, plague and similar afflictions. Undercutting any possible use of Thornton that the GOCCers could make, Fogel and Engerman say that "the death rates among European troops in West Indian colonies exceeded that of slaves."(13) That would undercut a genetics point of view that whites were just better genetically-endowed for disease. As Churchill pointed out the really early settlers of John Smith's day did not land equipped to survive nutritionally. The death rates depended on the conditions. Therefore, once again we return to how Churchill's biological warfare thesis makes sense, because genetics as a cause of death patterns does not make sense. If a group were going to die of smallpox at the beginning from "natural" causes, it would be the whites not yet adjusted to their environment, lacking proper nutrition etc. It would be the whites wiped out before the natives.
MIM has already written how "Allegation C" was mostly wrong just from reading Thornton. Scholars submitting research misconduct charges have now pointed to Salisbury as misread by Wesson et. al. Now MIM comes forward to talk about John Smith as further reason to toss the whole "Allegation C" as a vicious lynch-mob libel of Ward Churchill.
Notes:
1. "Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research
Misconduct," MIM refers to as "Great Oppressor Cultural Counterrevolution" leaders or GOCC, p. 37. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mn/sept112001/gocc.pdf
2. John Smith, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631) in Three Volumes, Vol. 3,
Philip L. Barbour ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1986), pp. 135-6.
3. Ibid., p. 135.
4. Ibid., p. 41.
5. http://www.apva.org/history/jsmith.html
6. John Smith, op. cit., p. 278.
7. Ibid., p. 214.
8. Ibid., p. 125.
9. http://www2.sdcounty.ca.gov/hhsa/documents/PandemicInfluenzaAndOtherHighlyInfectiousRespiratoryTransmittedDiseaseResponsePlan.pdf ;
www.shannonthunderbird.com/indigenous_history.htm ; www.thefurtrapper.com/indian_smallpox.htm
An argument about whether more than 100 year is possible is occurring on the Internet.
There are countless readily available sources on this point. Here's an interesting point for our committee to consider:
Dr A. W. Downie has described how some years ago a demolition worker taking down what five years previously had been a smallpox isolation hospital in Aberdeen, caught smallpox at a time when there was no other smallpox in the area. And at the beginning of the 19th century, one of the English medical journals published the following macabre account of a smallpox epidemic originally described in Walpole’s British Traveller (1784 edition, p 365):http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10544&feedId=classic-articles_rss20"The following very singular occurrence happened in the year 1759 at Chelwood a village near Pensford (Somerset); the sexton of the place opened up the grave in which a man, who died of smallpox, had been interred near 30 years before. The coffin was of oak, and so firm, that it might have been taken out whole; but the man forced his spade through the lid, when there issued a most nauseous stench. The person who was to be buried being of eminence, most of the inhabitants of the village attended the funeral: in a few days afterwards, 14 persons were seized with the smallpox in one day; and in three days later, all but two in the whole village, who had not had it, were seized in like manner. It is remarkable, the disease was of so favourable a nature, that no more than two persons died of it." (Medical and Physical Journal, No. 199)