Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • March 10, 2010 Sitting Bull opposed the Dawes Allotment Act right into the ground, which is probably the reason he was killed “resisting arrest” by Indian Police in U.S. pay. Grover Cleveland, maybe the last honest president, took one look at the first draft and kicked the crooks out of his office. Cleveland also rejected the first attempt to annex Hawaii. Imagine American history without a war with Japan in the Pacific, followed by a war in Korea and a war in Vietnam. Imagine how many American lives could have been saved. It would have been entirely possible with a little political integrity. When the Dawes Allotment Act was finally approved, the Indians lost any hope of self-sufficiency because their allotments were too small and too subdivided among the children of multiple wives to make a success of dry-farm agriculture. The Indians then used their remarkable adaptive intelligence to fleece the taxpayers in revenge and they have been doing it ever since. We left them no choice. A Lakota friend recently told me that land claims left over from Sioux allotments alone may soon cost the taxpayers a billion dollars in reparations. He was smiling when he said it. Do not kick and scream. We had our chance for justice and equity in 1887 and we blew it. They have a right to that money. What does that have to do with Ridgewood? Plenty. Building on a well-established record of American racism, the Council on Affordable Housing has somehow given itself a mandate to tell municipalities exactly how many “affordable” units each town must build. There are cases where this might be seen as poetic justice. When I was a young man, real estate sales people practiced what was called “steering.” If you were a bluecollar Protestant and wanted to move to Northwest Bergen County, you were “steered” to Midland Park. If you were a blue-collar Catholic, you were “steered” to Waldwick. If you were black, you didn’t ask, except in the section of Ridgewood and Glen Rock where black people had lived for decades and where real estate people might give you a chance. That was what made the neighbor now at risk so special. It was a place where people who had passed through the fire could enjoy a modicum of safety and send their kids to good schools. Tragically, this neighborhood has become the target for state-mandated housing that most of Northwest Bergen County does not want, most recently for a group-care home for patients with Asperger’s Syndrome, a milder form of autism that reduces a person’s ability to adapt to his or her surroundings. Those with Asperger’s are not particularly dangerous, their conditions are not their fault, and, barring a miracle, they are not going to just “get over it.” The people of the Broad Street neighborhood, about evenly divided between black and white, objected with civil logic to having yet one more group-care facility plunked down in the neighborhood they cherish. The council listened to them. In the end, it came down to a vote based not on whether the Ridgewood Village Council felt that this was a good idea – nobody did – but as to whether the expense of a lawsuit was a good idea. The council voted 3-2 to go ahead with a plan the neighborhood unanimously opposed, and that not one council member thought was a good idea in that location. The needs of Asperger’s patients were seen by some council members as a rationalization for what all council members thought was bad planning. I don’t agree at all. Once upon a time it was 1936, and Adolf Hitler had an absolute right to demand that the Rhineland, German since late Roman times and demilitarized after World War I, be returned to Germany. Britain and France knew they had overdone things with the Treaty of Versailles, so they let Hitler get away with it. They were wrong. Hitler would have collapsed like a house of cards if the British and French had shown any fight in 1936. His own generals were hoping to dump him if the English and the French showed any fight. Hitler had already shown he was a dangerous tyrant with the Nuremburg Laws in 1935, promulgated the year before the Rhineland incident, had deprived Jews of the civil rights they had enjoyed in Prussia 1813 and in Germany since 1871. Hitler massacred some of his own supporters. He was evil. He should have been stopped without regard to technicalities. He wasn’t. Millions of combat deaths and millions of murders were the result. COAH is not Hitler, but it is still wrong-headed. The solution to America’s genuine and harrowing racial problem, which I know something about through the family, is not the threat of lawsuits by an agency that cannot get what it wants. The solution is a fair minimum wage so people of every race have to be paid enough to be self-supporters despite the inconvenience to employers who prefer to underpay, and a ban on immigration by people who enter the country unwilling to learn English or prove they will not become a drain on society. Telling people what they have to put up with in their own neighborhoods because they don’t have the resources to hire expensive lawyers is not an antidote to racism: It’s an attempt to capitalize on the results of racism by bureaucrats on a power trip. COAH needs to hear that. Let us pause to remember the Dawes Allotment Act. I have no apologies to people who see this as irrelevant. The fact that many school systems in the towns we cover have handed history teaching over to adjuncts of the athletic department may do us more harm than people who use the literal interpretation of the Koran as a guide to etiquette. Henry Laurens Dawes inherited a mantle that was too big for him. A graduate of Yale, he succeeded Charles Sumner as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts in 1875, a seat he held until 1893. Sumner was a man who opposed slavery so ardently that he was beaten half to death with a cane by Preston Brooks, a legislator whose relatives profited from slavery. Slavery was no longer an issue in 1875, but the rights of American Indians were. Dawes was put to the test. Was he the kind of man in the critical 1870s that Sumner had been in the crucial 1850s? Dawes failed the test miserably. We are still paying for his failure, in taxes and in national disgrace. Dawes posed as a moral model. He also took money under the table from some of the biggest crooks in the nation, including the Credit Mobilier, which financed railroad construction in ways that left small farmers at the mercy of railroads that offered sweetheart contracts to big shippers and left the farmers struggling to break even. On the surface, Dawes was a man who did the right thing. He opposed slavery. Anybody who didn’t oppose slavery could not get elected in Massachusetts. He supported the founding of Yellowstone National Park. The one challenge to his integrity he could not overcome was the Indian Allotment Act. The Indian wars had functionally ended in the later 1870s, after the tribes who wiped out General Custer had run out of food and gave up on the promise of reservations and decent treatment. Crazy Horse was shortly murdered through the complicity of envious Indian rivals and wary government officials. The other Indian leaders were marginalized. Spotted Tail retained some credibility, but he was murdered by another Indian who was acquitted. It was deemed no crime for an Indian to kill another Indian, especially when the victim might have been able to help his people keep some of their rights. Sitting Bull lived until 1890 when he was murdered by Indians in government pay. While all this was going on, Dawes was promulgating the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act. The Dawes Allotment Act was purportedly grounded on the concept that Indians should be “just like us” and that the best way to make them “just like us” was to reduce their holdings to 160 acres per head of family – no matter how many were in the family – and let whites have the rest of the land. If the British had tried this in Ireland or the Germans or Russians in Poland, we would know what to call it, but you can cover up a lot of chicanery when you wrap the flag tightly enough around your head. A tough decision: Rights & wrongs revisited John Fell House (continued from page 3) an $800,000 grant from the Bergen County Open Space Trust Fund and a $500,000 grant from New Jersey Green Acres. The site includes some wetlands, and is the habitat of a rare wood turtle. However, an additional Open Space request obtained only $50,000 instead of the $300,000 the group hoped for. As a result, the group intends to raise the remaining $250,000 it needs for the $1.6-million purchase price with a series of events now in the planning stages. Allendale third-graders in the schools have already donated the proceeds from their school’s Strawberry Festival. Above: Carol Anton and Pat Finn at the most elegant of the John Fell House’s many fireplaces. Left: The most impressive view of the 1760-era John Fell House with its addition from the 1820s is on the side facing the back yard, away from the Franklin Turnpike.