Federal Agency - An Inception

Just finished this.. What a thorough investigative reporting! Amazing how all the time we talk about the Holocaust, racism all in the context of Nazis and yet how much of that was lurking around on the so called "good side" is revealing.

For all those who grew up reading fictional adventures from writers like Louis L'amour, making heros from the wild West, this is a rude awakening call. There were always heroic cowboys, gun toting Texas rangers, Sheriff's, fantasy characters like Tex Willer, etc. fighting the blood thirsty native Indians - always the crazy blood thirsty red Indian - in our fantasy world. This book shows the dark side of that.

This is about how in early 20th century, just around the time Germany had lost the first world war and Hitler was planing his ascent, there were large scale, systematic murder of rich native Indians of Osage tribe, for gaining their share of the land and oil money by white Americans who were their friends, spouses, lawyers and just about everyone the Indians trusted. The subsequent large scale corruption and cover up that was done was unprecedented, ruthless and methodical.It all stemmed from the fact how the system considered native Indians as less than human.

It all started when the Osage nation, which was moved around a couple of times from their original lands, was finally settled on a strip of land in Oklahoma that was practically considered useless and dry, which later turned up to be sitting on a huge cache of Oil. The oil Boom of the 20th Century made their possession lucrative and the white man government stepped in to force their hand to give up the riches. 

Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers. The allotment system, which had already been imposed on many tribes, was designed to end the old communal way of life and turn American Indians into private-property owners—a situation that would, not incidentally, make it easier to procure their land.

In practice, the decision to appoint a guardian—to render an American Indian, in effect, a half citizen—was nearly always based on the quantum of Indian blood in the property holder, or what a state supreme court justice referred to as “racial weakness.” A full-blooded American Indian was invariably appointed a guardian, whereas a mixed-blood person rarely was. John Palmer, the part-Sioux orphan who had been adopted by an Osage family and who played such an instrumental role in preserving the tribe’s mineral rights, pleaded to members of Congress, “Let not that quantum of white blood or Indian determine the amount that you take over from the members of this tribe. It matters not about the quantum of Indian blood. You gentlemen do not deal with things of that kind.” 

The ordinary white American who despised the Native Indians, usually  felt that the Indians were too good to deserve their wealth, thought of them as no better than cattle but had no qualms about running to marry them for the access to that wealth. 

The role of the Media in promoting such jealousy, hypocrisy and animosity has to be particularly mentioned and called out. Time and again, fascist societies are primed up by biased media slanting the facts and there by abetting the crimes that follow.

A reporter from Harper’s Monthly Magazine wrote, “Where will it end? Every time a new well is drilled the Indians are that much richer.” The reporter added, “The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.” A growing number of white Americans expressed alarm over the Osage’s wealth—outrage that was stoked by the press. Journalists told stories, often wildly embroidered, of Osage who discarded grand pianos on their lawns or replaced old cars with new ones after getting a flat tire. Travel magazine wrote, “The Osage Indian is today the prince of spendthrifts. Judged by his improvidence, the Prodigal Son was simply a frugal person with an inherent fondness for husks.” A letter to the editor in the Independent, a weekly magazine, echoed the sentiment, referring to the typical Osage as a good-for-nothing who had attained wealth “merely because the Government unfortunately located him upon oil land which we white folks have developed for him.” John Joseph Mathews bitterly recalled reporters “enjoying the bizarre impact of wealth on the Neolithic men, with the usual smugness and wisdom of the unlearned.” 

All this made a deadly concoction where swindlers, rustlers, cut throats and unscrupulous elements who thronged the reservation, together conspired to dispose of the Indians and later covered up the stench systematically. The families were exploited and everyone from the Judges, people’s offices, Media and right about every White man that the Osage interacted with were exploiting them and were covering each other's back. The mixed and blue blood offsprings who survived the injustice, later had to reconsile with the fact that their white Dads, Moms and so called friends of families were all scheming to murder them all the time and were actually in the process of realizing that, going by the numbers . The trauma that cold realization left in the aftermath is a life long tragedy by itself.

Margie then mentioned something that I had not seen in any of the FBI records. Her father had told her that on the night of the explosion he and his sister and Mollie had been planning to spend the night at the Smiths’ house. But Cowboy had a bad earache, and they had stayed home. “That’s why they escaped,” Margie said. “It was just fate.” It took a moment for the implication to sink in. “My dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him,” Margie said.

This case gave the opportunity to Young J Edward Hoover who was trying to forge a nation wide powerful Policing organisation from a small, failed Bureau of investigation which later became the powerful Federal bureau of Investigation. This was a shot in the arm for him and he made the most out of it. He appointed a very fair and thorough investigator who had cut his teeth in the wild west as a successful Ranger and no nonsense guy, to lead the effort in unearthing the conspiracy. The story of how this case was built piece by piece from the mountain load of false allegations, misdirections and cover ups is a story by itself which is well captured by the author. In fact, the way they pieced this together rivals any mainstream fiction and is a textbook case for those who try to understand the criminal investigation at the time of limited resources and technology. 

How Hoover used this to build a systematic organisation that is the FBI today is another story by itself.

In the end, a conservative estimate of wealth that was swindled out of the Osage nation is staggering, considering the cover up trail it left. Worst of all,  most of the people who did that were left to walk free without even a shade of guilt tainting their existence.

Like others on the Osage tribal roll: Many white settlers managed to finagle their way onto the roll and eventually reaped a fortune in oil proceeds that belonged to the Osage. The anthropologist Garrick Bailey estimated that the amount of money taken from the Osage was at least $ 100 million.

The point I want to make is not about these dark pages of history alone. As I read the book, one thing which struck me was the availability of data and transparency, that one could virtually recreate the trial after hundred years while researching the issue. The memos of the lawmen, bureau agents, receipts, notes, dossiers everything was available to the author. He goes back to say even after the bureau (then just bureau of investigation, not federal Bureau of Investigation yet) convicted a kingpin, the crime was going on well after that until the Osage stood up and won their rights in the court and formed a watchdog.. The author also finds that one other kingpin, who murdered a white lawyer helping the Osage, walked scot free. This detection was possible due to the fact that the system was designed to systematically document and register the trial which was all part of their culture honed by history. 

Proper Investigative reporting is something that is seriously lagging and unknown in India. To give you an idea on proportion and about the sincerity of the manuscript, out of the pages in the book, more than 20% is just references. I have rarely seen any book written with such an amount of references to documents supporting what the author claims. Usually, in most books, it is just left as an afterthought with some impressive books and that's about it.  If we compare the situation with what David Grann has done here, we wonder why such detailed research is not coming out ever. To explain that, let me pick out an example. Rana Ayub, who reported about the Gujarat Carnage had to dig up the facts risking her life and was under life threat all the time. In Spite of that, she had to assume a false identity to get closer to the people involved, the police officer, Politicians and Government officials to collect her facts. In the end her own media house buried the facts and forced her to go underground to save her life, after whatever unspecified short term need that it wanted out of her work was fulfilled. The Union and state governments of the day saw the issue as something to spin their political posturing and opportunism and for them it was a mere irritation. Even the opposition used that to extract their pound of flesh and then wanted it to be given a convenient burial after that.  So the work released could not get beyond the point of being just a Tabloid level report, without any research data to back it up, the way David could do. Why is that so? Don’t the Indian reader deserve better material? Don't the victims need their voice heard and facts layed out right?  Why?

For one, the alleged perpetrators as pointed out by her work, are still at large, assuming higher offices and so the system which is supposed to prosecute and protect is instead, actively subverting and sabotaging any action in that direction. Even David Garan could do this remarkable research in the US only after a hundred year and when Edward J Hoover was finally laid to rest. In India that can never be possible even in two hundred years or at no time at all, because unlike in the case of David who could get hold of the documents, here the proofs would have been already buried and laid to rest by the same custodians who were tasked to protect them. It is our culture that thrives on hearsay and not on data. It is our society that propagates graded inequality that stifles voices and justifies that time and again.  So it is insane even to think , or for that matter, wish for such a research based work in India. Rana Ayub did what she could do best and that is all the best that is expected given the situation.

However, such work by David Grann is nevertheless important for us to see the value of sound research and what it takes to enable such a level of transparency and justice. In that sense this is a valuable read for those who seek to understand how far we have to go as a democracy and a system of social Justice.