Senator Roscoe Conkling hit this attitude off neatly when some one asked him what had happened in the Senate that day. He replied: "We have been discussing Senator Sumner's annual bill entitled 'An act to amend the act of God whereby there is a difference between white and black.'"
More necessary than legislation is a more vigorous and alert public opinion among the Whites, which will put a stop to social mixing of the two races. Social separation is the key to minimizing the evils of race mixture at the present time. Public opinion might well stop exalting the Mulatto and thereby putting its stamp of approval on miscegenation. Negroes should be encouraged to respect their own racial integrity. Finally, knowledge of methods of Birth Control now widespread among the Whites, should be made universally available to the Blacks.
Compared with the Negro, the American Indian offers no serious problem to American unity. On the entire continent north of Mexico there are only about 432,000. The 1930 census gives the Indian population of the United States as 332,397.
The distribution of these Indians is remarkably irregular. The West has the largest number; then comes the South, because of Oklahoma's 92,000, for the Gulf States have few. North Carolina, on the other hand, stands seventh in the list of States arranged according to Indian population. As against 137,000 in the West and 116,000 in the South, the North has but 78,000. These are widely scattered and often little known to the general public. New York State still has 7000 Indians, Michigan about the same number and North Dakota somewhat more; Wisconsin and Minnesota have 11,000 each, while South Dakota stands fourth on the list of all the States with its 22,000. In the West the Indian population is concentrated mainly in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Montana, and Washington, in the order named.
These Indians now represent 371 tribes, or remnants of tribes. How large their numbers were at the time of the first white settlement in North America has been a matter of interesting conjecture. Most estimates are not much above a million, but the population may have been considerably greater a few hundred years earlier. Since white occupation a few tribes have increased in numbers. Most have diminished, and some have become extinct, more frequently from the white man's diseases and from whiskey than from the results of fighting.
The densest Indian population at the time of the conquest was on the Pacific Coast, which did not come into close contact with the Whites until the last century. This Pacific Coast Indian population was also of a low scale of intelligence and culture, and remarkably broken up into distinct groups which could not understand each other. As many separate languages were spoken by the Indians of this region as by all the other Indians of the United States together. When the first mission on the West Coast was founded by the Spaniards, in 1769, the number of California Indians was computed at 220,000. This has decreased more than 90 per cent at this date.
The policy of the Catholic missionaries was to corral the Indians around the missions. The church considered itself the owner of all the land, and the Indians worked it as tenants. When the Mexican Government confiscated the property of the church, it took title to all the land. Hence the Indians, who had always lived on it, found themselves illegal trespassers, and until about 1913 they were landless, starving fugitives. At that time the government began to provide land for the Indians. While their treatment has decimated them nine times, their isolation prevented intermarriage with the Whites, so the California Indians are of relatively pure blood.
The revolt of the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico against the Spanish in 1680-92 was the beginning of their decline. The Navajos and Apaches, on the contrary, have increased in numbers, at the same time avoiding white mixture.
The Indians of the Atlantic Coast were destroyed partly by disease, partly by war; and their remnants were pushed westward year after year by the Whites until they are mostly now west of the Mississippi, many of them being in Oklahoma. The Iroquois are an exception, and have perhaps increased in numbers. They got hold of firearms before their tribal neighbors and were able to destroy many of the latter, incorporating the remnants in their own tribe. The Sioux of the great plains are also said to have increased.
In the Gulf States, on the other hand, the Indians were largely exterminated before their remnants were moved to the Indian Territory. The Chickasaws told the French explorer, Iberville, in 1702, that in the preceding twelve years they had killed or captured for slave traders 2300 Choctaws, at a cost to themselves of 800 men.