CHAPTER ONE

The Closing of the Interior

The task of developing the immense resources of the archipelago appeals most congenially to a nation descended from pioneers.
George F. Becker, U.S. geologist in the Philippines
AMERICA’S MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY expansion was vexing, or at least Henry Foote thought so in the spring of 1849. From the perspective of the brazen senator from Mississippi, who would gain notoriety for drawing a pistol in defense of slavery in a heated congressional debate over the Compromise of 1850, the nation’s expansive unfolding had advanced at a pace that far exceeded the capacities of the federal government to oversee it. In just three years, the United States had acquired a continental land base spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the annexation of Texas, negotiations for Oregon, and war with Mexico and indigenous nations. “Some immense space of territory,” Foote summarized, “is every year or two falling into our hands by some treaty effected with these children of the forest, which speedily becomes subject to all our general regulations for the disposition of the public domain.” Foote left unuttered the state and settler-driven violence that belied this enlarged domain, but he did observe a fundamental problem of governance at its heart. The nation had grown from a population of 3 million to 20 million, with a “proportionate increase” in the nation’s “territorial extent” and its attendant “resources.” He thus reasoned that there must be “expansion in the governmental machinery itself.”1 On the evening of March 3, 1849, Congress would create such a federal machinery—it would give birth to the U.S. Department of the Interior.
One hundred years after the founding of the Interior Department, one of its leaders would obliquely reference this origin story in justifying the work of the department in a wider world. Vernon Northrop pointed to Interior’s history managing the undeveloped West as explanation for its new role in the undeveloped world; its task, he offered, was once again to bring about “the opening of a new frontier.”2 This chapter begins in the nineteenth century in order to investigate these claims about Interior’s past and its implied reverberations in the twentieth-century world. Charting the birth of the Interior Department in the wake of the Mexican-American War and its messy bureaucratic evolution in the first five decades of operation reveals that the Interior Department—which had come to appear as the innermost arm of the American state—was born of and for American expansionism. The Interior Department was, in reality, always exterior.3 Interior oversaw indigenous peoples and expropriated lands that were, in important ways, foreign. It came to appear as a singularly domestic entity through forceful narratives of nation building that made the continental projection of the United States seem inevitable and the persistent racial and gendered hierarchies that made indigenous sovereignty appear to be of a lesser order than European sovereignty.4 Throughout, Interior’s relationships with both the military and private interests were enabling conditions, as well as sources of formidable tension. First, trailing behind the U.S. Army, Interior transformed lands expropriated from indigenous peoples and Mexico into properly American ones, a consciously civilian antidote to military power. Playing the self-styled role of passive administrator, Interior helped the nation to portray its forceful extension of sovereign power in the benevolent light of a civilizing mission. Second, Interior cleared the way for white settlers and private interests, creating conditions favorable in once-foreign lands to capitalist activities ranging from the development of individual small farms to the construction of railroads and the extraction of minerals.5
As America’s continental expansion seemed more and more assured at the turn of the twentieth century, the Interior Department entered a period of uncertainty. When Frederick Jackson Turner heralded the close of the American frontier, however inaccurately, he was not just describing the culmination of America’s westward settlement, as intended.6 He was also implicitly memorializing the life’s work of the Interior Department. Through its various bureaus, the Interior Department parceled the land, contained the indigenous populations, and mapped the resources that eventually signaled to Turner the end of an era. Even the 1890 census that prompted Turner’s elegy had been compiled and distributed at the command of the secretary of the interior. Put differently, the humdrum of settler colonialism, its daily exertions and happenings, was the lot of the Interior Department. If the advance of settlement posed an existential crisis for the nation, one that scholars argue partially redirected American imperial ambition from the continent to overseas territories, then it also posed an organizational crisis for the department born of and for expansion.7 In this moment of transformation, the Interior Department drew criticisms for being out of joint with a new era defined by different national interests, including the conservation of natural resources. Some critics, like conservationist Gifford Pinchot, went so far as to call for the closure of the Office of the Secretary.
Yet Interior persisted. Its leaders ensured institutional survival by redirecting the skill set of expansion to new contexts. First and most centrally, Interior leaders embraced—and Interior became the new institutional home of—the conservation movement. Although Interior had once maintained equal roles in population and natural resource issues, it increasingly consolidated expertise over natural resources and minerals in particular, which provided a more capacious arena in which to exert an institutional power devoted more and more to extraction. The fact that this resource “know-how” was conditioned by and supportive of the subjugation of indigenous peoples and lands would become almost entirely forgotten over time. Second, and related to the first, Interior personnel became indispensable to America’s new projects of empire, beginning with the Philippines and Cuba. An exploration of Interior’s role in insular affairs and resource surveys, particularly through the experiences of the geologist George F. Becker on the ground in the Philippines, reveals this constancy of purpose. Ultimately, although the Interior Department evolved from a constellation of clerks to a streamlined natural resource bureaucracy over the course of half a century, it also retained the outward disposition of its origins and early operations, allowing its staff to be enlisted to new fronts of U.S. global reach. Interior therefore reveals important continuities between continental expansion, conservation, and overseas imperialism stemming from the United States’ deep attachment to settler colonial governance. Institutions like the Interior Department laid important foundations for the domestication of settler colonialism in the first place, rendering the nation’s original empire effectively invisible. Interior helped uphold the fiction of an inward-looking national self, while the fiction of the inward-looking self, in turn, would make Interior’s ongoing expansionism so difficult to see. In the end, Interior’s domesticity, rather than its imperial projection, was its most astonishing achievement, for that domesticity was the product of systematic and painstaking efforts to disavow the U.S. settler expansion it oversaw.

Expansion

Before and after the founding of the American republic, white settlers fought and negotiated with indigenous peoples to claim land for settlement, but the process of expansion had yet to be backed by the full force of a system of governance. The British government had even attempted and failed to place limits on westward movement in the years leading up to the American Revolution. After securing independence from Britain, the new “Americans” expropriated land with increasing levels of coordination and violence, clearing pathways to white property ownership and capitalist development. They did so out of a faith in the racial, religious, and gendered superiority of European-descended settlers to indigenous peoples, but also out of a belief that indigenous peoples did not properly utilize the land. Western rationales that reduced nonhuman nature to potential economic gain and disregarded other approaches to nature as mere incompetence were therefore key drivers of settler expansion.8 When hunger for lands suitable to cotton plantations, which would run on labor extracted from enslaved peoples, and gold mining in indigenous lands swept the new republic, the more locally driven process of encroachment gave way to federal engines of expansion. The southerner Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1830 on a settler-expansionist platform and, upon winning the election, petitioned Congress to advance legislation to dislodge indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. This agenda materialized in the Indian Removal Act.9 In the judicial branch, Chief Justice John Marshall issued a series of Supreme Court rulings, including Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), which both enabled and constrained the process of removal by defining indigenous peoples, most equivocally, as “domestic, dependent nations.”10 The status upheld that indigenous peoples maintained a semi-sovereign authority that required the U.S. government to secure treaties to acquire land for its eventual disposal to white settlers. This combination of executive order, legislative action, and judicial decision catalyzed the removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminoles in the lethal Trail of Tears and ushered in an era of federal oversight of settler colonialism.11
This nascent federal apparatus of dispossession was in place when Manifest Destiny, the belief in America’s providential right to span the continent, reached a fever pitch in the 1840s. A new order of expansionists in the Democratic party, including would-be president James K. Polk, eyed regions to the west in which to extend their prized institution of slavery, first in the newly independent Republic of Texas and eventually in distant California. Polk and the expansionists routed the protests of abolitionists against slavery’s extension and Americans loath to incorporate nonwhite masses into the national framework, beginning a swift and comprehensive land grab culminating in the blood and bullets of the Mexican-American War. Despite the dogged resistance of the Mexican Army and indigenous nations that participated as belligerents on their side, the U.S. Army secured Mexican surrender in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. The combination of the earlier Texas Annexation of 1845 and Oregon Treaty of 1846 with the new Mexican cession of 1848 added 1.2 million square miles to the United States (the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, by comparison, had added 820,000 square miles)—effectively projecting U.S. sovereignty across the continent.12
Almost immediately, the federal government apparatus began buckling under the weight of this radically augmented territory, as well as the people and resources attached to it. Expansion was especially taxing on the different cabinet-level departments.13 Robert J. Walker, the proslavery expansionist from Pennsylvania who had helped propel the war and had been named the new secretary of the Treasury, pleaded with Congress for assistance. The General Land Office under his supervision, Walker claimed, faced an onslaught of legal battles emerging from heated land claims in the Mexican cession. The situation was particularly acute in mineral lands throughout New Mexico and California, where gold had been discovered several months earlier near Sutter’s Mill, initiating a frenzied gold rush. Walker feared that arbitrating these land claims would lead to an endless parade of corruption charges aimed at his division.14 Other concerns emerged for the leadership of the Indian Service under the War Department. A great deal more personnel, the secretary explained, would be required to conduct ongoing relations with American Indians of lands acquired from Texas and Mexico, a population estimated at 124,000 people. Many of these nations, including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache, would continue to assert sovereignty following a war that had been pivotally shaped by their involvement.15 The Pension Office, meanwhile, was similarly overwhelmed by the responsibilities in paying out dividends due to the war’s veterans, who had fought, killed, and given limbs to secure the nation’s juridical reach beyond extant borders.16 In short, continental expansion created a logistical and organizational problem. It had catalyzed a hurried piling on of federal responsibilities.
The enlarged domain of the United States leading up to the Interior Department’s founding in 1849.
For Henry Foote, like other senators intent on inaugurating a new federal department, this vast increase of territory at the midcentury clearly required a new mode of governance. But in calling for a new department to manage the “domestic” or “interior” matters of the nation, they were also rethinking the relationship between foreign and domestic in American governance—or rather, they were calling attention to the gradual process by which this relationship had already begun to shift. Since the founding of the nation, domestic affairs had fallen largely under state rather than federal jurisdiction, even though the first Congress in 1787 had briefly considered installing a “Home Department” in the federal government.17 By 1849, the bifurcation of foreign and domestic affairs along lines of federal and state power had largely, though not completely, been etched into the government system. For example, the pro–Interior Department senator from Virginia, James Murray Mason, pointed out that there already was a clear precedent for certain domestic matters falling under the discretion of the national level: the General Land Office and the Patent Office, both proposed to be brought under the new department, and the Post Office, which was briefly slated to move there, dealt in domestic issues. Mason concluded that matters of “domestic interest” should fall under federal authority. Ultimately, part of what allowed the Interior Department legislation to move so quickly and seemingly without vigorous debate through the Senate and House was the fact that it recombined existing offices in one place rather than conjuring new mechanisms of government out of thin air. Critics, like the noted legislator and staunch defender of states’ rights and slavery, John C. Calhoun, still found this rearrangement a di...