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Corporal Punishment and the Politics of Indian Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Robert A. Trennert
Robert A. Trennert*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Extract

In May 1930, at the peak of his public campaign to discredit federal Indian policy, John Collier charged that widespread brutality existed at government boarding schools. As executive secretary of the American Indian Defense Association, Collier persuaded the U.S. Senate to investigate charges of flogging and other forms of excessive punishment. At the center of the controversy stood the Phoenix Indian School, its administration accused of crass brutality, whippings, beatings, and even death—a prime example of what seemed to be wrong with federal Indian policy in the United States. As sensational as this case became for a brief time in 1930, it was primarily a politically staged event that Collier sought to use to his own advantage in bringing down the current administration of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. An examination of this incident reveals the nature of Collier's feud with old guard government employees and how the inflammatory issue of corporal punishment became a key tool in discrediting government Indian schools. The 1930 controversy over flogging provides an excellent case study in the dynamics of the Collier-led reform movement's challenge to the old order.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Winter 1989 , pp. 595 - 617
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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7 For the history of the Phoenix Indian School, see Trennert, Robert A., The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891–1935 (Norman, 1988); idem, “‘Peaceably if they Will: Forcibly if they Must': The Phoenix Indian School, 1890–1901,” Journal of Arizona History 20 (Fall 1979): 297–322; and idem, “From Carlisle to Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of the Indian Outing System, 1878–1930,” Pacific Historical Review 52 (Aug. 1983): 267–91.Google Scholar

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40 The New Republic, 7 May 1930; New York Times, 30 Apr. 1930.Google Scholar

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42 New York Times, 16 May 1930.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., 23 May 1930.Google Scholar

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