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“AN OLD AND FAITHFUL EMPLOYEE”: OBLIGATION, SOCIAL PROVISION, AND FEDERAL RETIREMENT PENSIONS IN THE U.S. INDIAN SERVICE1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Cathleen D. Cahill
Cathleen D. Cahill*
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
*
email: [email protected]
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Type
Forum: Indigenous Histories of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 531 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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Footnotes

1

This article is adapted from Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 by Cathleen D. Cahill. © 2011 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

References

NOTES

2 The Federal Employee: A Magazine for Government Workers (hereafter Federal Employee), June 26, 1920 (Vol. 5, Issue 20): 2Google Scholar.

3 On Native people and unions, see Nicholas Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 11–30.

4 Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2010); Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); and Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

5 Yellin, Racism in the Nation's Service, 2.

6 http://www.nffe.org/ht/d/sp/i/682/pid/682, accessed Aug. 22, 2014. Margaret C. Rung, “American Federation of Government Employees,” 71–74; “National Federation of Federal Employees,” 956–59; and “United Public Workers of America/United Federal Workers of America,” 1444–46, in Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-class History, Vol. 1, ed. Eric Arnesen (London: Routledge, 2006).

7 See, for example, Margaret C. Rung, Servants of the State: Managing Diversity and Democracy in the Federal Workforce, 1933–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 37–40; and Francis Ryan, AFSCME's Philadelphia Story: Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

8 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

9 Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers, 29–32.

10 Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers; Margaret E. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); and Jane E. Simonson, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

11 Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States (Washington: GPO, 1893), 755–74.

12 Paul Stuart, The Indian Office: Growth and Development of an American Institution (UMI Research Press, 1979), 130–31; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (hereafter ARCIA) (Washington: GPO, 1890), 334.

13 Stuart, The Indian Office, 40–41; and Ari A. Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1982), 260–61.

14 See Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers; Novak, Steven J., “The Real Takeover of the BIA: The Preferential Hiring of Indians,” The Journal of Economic History 50 (Fall 1990): 646CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ahern, Wilbert, “An Experiment Aborted: Returned Indian Students in the Indian School Service” in Ethnohistory 44 (Spring 1997): 263–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also ARCIA, 1881, XII.

15 Yellin, Racisim in the Nation's Service and Masur, Kate, “Patronage and Protest in Kate Brown's Washington,” Journal of American History 99 (Mar. 2013), 1047–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Lawrence F. Schmeckebier, The Office of Indian Affairs: Its History, Activities and Organization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1927), 293–94.

17 Report of the Executive Council on the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians (Wash, 1912), 27.

18 Thomas Jefferson Morgan, “The Education of American Indians” n.p., 1; and ARCIA, 1899, 10, 29.

19 Robert Louis Clark, Lee Allen Craig, and Jack W. Wilson, A History of Public Sector Pensions in the United States (University of Pennsylvania, 2003), 158.

20 There does not appear to be a substantial history of FERA, nor do many scholars discuss it in depth. See Clark, Craig, and Wilson, A History of Public Sector Pensions, 154–66; Ann Shola Orloff The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 275–76; Stephen Skowronek, Building A New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 208; Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service (Evanston, IL.: Row, Peterson, 1958), 276–77; Others do not mention the act.

21 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, p. 6370.

22 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, p. 6372. H. H. Baish, “Retirement Systems and Moral in Public Service,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 113, Competency and Economy in Public Expenditures (May 1924): 338–50.

23 Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998); Linda Gordon, ed. Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

24 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, p. 5133. See also Doyle, John T., “The Federal Civil Service Retirement Law,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 113 (May 1924): 330–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, p. 5133.

26 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, p. 6376. See also 6372.

27 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, pp. 3397–98.

28 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, p. 6373.

29 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., 1920, p. 6369.

30 See “Federal Employees Union No. 14632, A.F. of L. Prospectus March, 1917” (Washington, DC: National Capital Press, Inc., 1917) in National Archives-Pacific Region (SF) RG 75, CA Greenville School and Agency Administrative Files, 1895–1923. Box 92, Series 30, File Federal Employees Union. Hereafter NARA-PR RG 75, Greenville Administrative Files.

31 The United Federal Workers of America (UFWA) later the United Public Workers of America (UPWA) formed in 1937 and affiliated with the CIO. Rung, “United Public Workers of America/United Federal Workers of America” (1444–1446).

32 Amy E. Butler, Two Paths to Equality: Ethel Smith and Alice Paul, 1921–1929 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).

33 The Federal Employee, vol. 1 no. 1 July 1916, 12 and 28; The Federal Employee, 1:4 (Oct. 1916, 155)Google Scholar. See also “Increased Compensation, 1919 Hearings Before Subcommittee of House Committee on Appropriations,” 65th Congress 2nd Session, GPO, 1918, 29–35.

34 See “Statement of Miss Florence Etheridge Employee of the Office of Indian Affairs Department of the Interior” Retirement of Employees in the Classified Civil Service Hearings Before the Committee on Civil Service and Retrenchment, US Senate 65th Congress First Session, July and August 1917 (Washington: GPO, 1917), 184–86; and ”Federal Employees Union No. 14632.”

35 Efficiency Report, May 1, 1924, Personnel File (PF) Rose Dougherty, National Personal Record Center, St. Louis, Missouri (hereafter NPRC).

36 Two more schools were organized in 1920, Fort Totten Indian School in North Dakota and Genoa in Nebraska. The Federal Employee 5:42 (Oct. 16, 1920)Google Scholar, 4 and 13 and “News from the Locals” in The Federal Employee, 5:41 (Oct. 9, 1920), 3Google Scholar.

37 Letter, no name, likely Supt. Miller to Secretary-Treasurer, NFFE, Feb. 28, 1921, NARA-PR RG 75, Greenville Administrative Files.

38 Cathleen D. Cahill, “Moving in Multiple Worlds” in Beyond Two Worlds, eds. Buss and Genetin-Pilawa (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 209–36.

39 Cahill, Federal Fathers & Mothers.

40 See Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Yellin, Racism in the Nation's Service.

41 Florence Etheridge, “Trade Unions in Federal Service” in The Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work 46th Annual Session, June 18, 1919 (Chicago: Rogers & Hall Col, Printers, 1920), 447–53.

42 Thomas W. Cowger, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 38.

43 Baish, “Retirement Systems and Moral in Public Service,” 344; and Clark, Craig, and Wilson, A History of Public Sector Pensions, 163–64.

44 ARCIA 1921, 36.

45 ARICA, 1900, 734; Personal Information Blank, Mar. 1, 1910; and Superintendent McGregor to CIA, Sept. 6, 1927, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC.

46 Efficiency Report, May 1, 1926, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC.

47 O. H. Lipps, District Superintendent in Charge to CIA, Dec. 30, 1927, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC.

48 Efficiency Report, May 1, 1914, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC,

49 Supt. Hall to CIA, May 15, 1921, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC.

50 CIA to Senator McNary, Apr. 15, 1922, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC.

51 Chief of the Division of Appointments, Mails and Files to Superintendent, Sept. 23, 1927, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC.

52 Assistant CIA to District Superintendent, Feb. 8, 1929, PF Katie Brewer, NPRC.

53 ARCIA 1928, 2.

54 Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). See also Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Throughout the U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke UP, 2012); Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Pacific Coast (Durham: Duke UP, 2005); and Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism, ed. Carol Williams (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012).