PC, PC. I have always looked upon the "Iroquois" tale the same way I look upon the "Greek Civilization invented by Sub-Sarahan blacks" invention.
Betsy's page - Jack Rakove, a professor at Stanford and expert on Madison and the Constitution, scoffs at Charles Mann's column from the Fourth of July writing about the influence of the Iroquois Confederation on the writing of the Constitution.What's wrong with the Iroquois influence hypothesis? There are two principal and, I think, fatal objections to the idea that anything in the Constitution can be explained with reference to the precedents of the Haudenosaunee confederation.
The first is a simple evidentiary matter. The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois. It is of course possible that the framers and ratifiers went out of their way to suppress the evidence, out of embarrassment that they were so intellectually dependent on the indigenous sources of their political ideas. But these kinds of arguments from silence or conspiratorial suppression are difficult for historians to credit.
But, it is objected, there were no real European antecedents and sources for the institutions that Americans created, or for the democratic mores by which they came to live. Again, this is a claim that cannot escape serious scrutiny. All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like. Even on the egalitarian side of the political ledger, 17th-century English society did give rise, after all, to the radical sentiments and practices we associate particularly with the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Levellers and the Putney debates, and the abolition of the House of Lords and the monatchy. And on this side of the water, New England colonists managed to set up town meetings before they had made much progress creating vocabularies of Indian words. The same can of course be said for the famous meeting of the Virginia assembly in 1619.
Well, other than there being no evidence to support the theory and lots of evidence to support the counter-theory, there's nothing wrong with the idea. Unfortunately, this PC myth crediting the Iroquois with being a major inspiration for our Constitution endures. I have seen several middle school history textbooks with this in it. It fulfills all the needs of multiculturalism even though there is no evidence to back up the story. Why the New York Times would have given space to this perpetuation of a nice myth is the real question.
I blogged about this last week, writing "There is very little evidence that the American Founding Fathers were looking to the Iroquois for their inspiration. This is reading history backward from our own PC period rather than arguing from evidence." It's nice to be supported by such a prominent historian.
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