A very early statement from U.S. revolutionaries on the plight of the indigenous and the responsibility of Capital from Albert Parsons’ ‘The Alarm.’

‘Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ from the Alarm. Vol. 1 No. 6. November 8, 1884.

Hiram Price, commissioner of Indian affairs, has made his annual report to the secretary of the interior. The commissioner says that more Indians are living in houses and fewer in tepees than a year ago; more are cultivating the soil and few or following the chase, and there are more in the mechanical shops, and several hundred and more Indian children in. the schools. In the near future it is fair to presume that the Indian will be able to care for himself, and be no longer a burden on the government.

With regard to the cost of the Indian service, the commissioner says:

“The Indians actually get of the money appropriated to feed and clothe them only about $7 per annum per capita, or a fraction less than 2 cents a day for each Indian. The appropriation is too small, if it is expected to transform the Indians into peaceable, industrious and self-supporting citizens in any reasonable time. Among the items for which more liberal appropriations should be made is for pay of police, pay of additional farmers, and pay of the officers who compose the courts of Indian offences. More liberality in paying Indian agents and assisting such Indians as show. a disposition to help themselves, would be true economy.”

The commissioner says the needs of the Indians require that the Indian appropriation bill be passed early in the Congress session. The misfortunes of the Piegan, Blackfeet and other Indians, he says, are due to the disappearance of game, and their inability to support themselves for the present by agriculture. They will have to depend almost wholly on the government for food for several years. These Indians, with proper assistance, will in a few years own teams and have land under cultivation, which, with a few cattle, will be sufficient to make most of them independent.

What a commentary the above, report is upon our boasted civilization. What a jargon of meaningless assertions. The Indian has been “civilized” out of existence and exterminated from the continent by the demon of “personal property.” Originally a docile race, full of pride, spirit, kindness and honor, they were betrayed, then kidnapped, and sold into slavery by the early settlers of the Atlantic coast. Their lands appropriated “by law,” the surveyor’s chain reaching from ocean to ocean, driven from the soil, disinherited, robbed, and murdered by the piracy of capitalism, this once noble, but now degraded, debauched, and almost extinct race have become the “national wards,” of their profitmongering civilizers. Under the aegis of “mine and thine,” barbarism became so cruelly refined that man prospers best and only when he exterminates his fellowman. Left to themselves, left to the exercise of free will and personal liberty–anarchy–the red man would be alive and prospering today, dwelling in peace and fellowship with his Caucasian brother. But “personal ownership” requires masters and slaves, and the Indian through a ceaseless struggle of more than three centuries has always preferred death to the latter.

The Alarm was an extremely important paper at a momentous moment in the history of the US and international workers’ movement. The Alarm was the paper of the International Working People’s Association produced weekly in Chicago and edited by Albert Parsons. The IWPA was formed by anarchists and social revolutionists who left the Socialist Labor Party in 1883 led by Johann Most who had recently arrived in the States. The SLP was then dominated by German-speaking Lassalleans focused on electoral work, and a smaller group of Marxists largely focused on craft unions. In the immigrant slums of proletarian Chicago, neither were as appealing as the city’s Lehr-und-Wehr Vereine (Education and Defense Societies) which armed and trained themselves for the class war. With 5000 members by the mid-1880s, the IWPA quickly far outgrew the SLP, and signified the larger dominance of anarchism on radical thought in that decade. The Alarm first appeared on October 4, 1884, one of eight IWPA papers that formed, but the only one in English. Parsons was formerly the assistant-editor of the SLP’s ‘People’ newspaper and a pioneer member of the American Typographical Union. By early 1886 Alarm claimed a run of 3000, while the other Chicago IWPA papers, the daily German Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Newspaper) edited by August Spies and weeklies Der Vorbote (The Harbinger) had between 7-8000 each, while the weekly Der Fackel (The Torch) ran 12000 copies an issue. A Czech-language weekly Budoucnost (The Future) was also produced. Parsons, assisted by Lizzie Holmes and his wife Lucy Parsons, issued a militant working-class paper. The Alarm was incendiary in its language, literally. Along with openly advocating the use of force, The Alarm published bomb-making instructions. Suppressed immediately after May 4, 1886, the last issue edited by Parson was April 24. On November 5, 1887, one week before Parson’s execution, The Alarm was relaunched by Dyer Lum but only lasted half a year. Restarted again in 1888, The Alarm finally ended in February 1889. The Alarm is a crucial resource to understanding the rise of anarchism in the US and the world of Haymarket and one of the most radical eras in US working class history.

PDF of full issue: https://dds.crl.edu/item/54010