Arthur V. Watkins
Arthur Vivian Watkins was a Republican U.S. Senator from Utah, serving two terms from 1947 to 1959. He was influential as a proponent of terminating federal recognition of American Indian tribes, in the belief that they should be assimilated and all treaty rights abrogated. In 1954 he chaired the Watkins Committee, which led to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had made extensive allegations of communist infiltration of government and art groups. Watkins voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Biography
Watkins was born in Midway, Wasatch County, Utah to Arthur Watkins and Emily Adelia Gerber. He was the eldest of 6 siblings. He attended Brigham Young University from 1903 to 1906, and New York University from 1909 to 1910. He graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1912, and returned to Utah. There he was admitted to the bar the same year and commenced practice in Vernal, Utah.He founded and edited a weekly newspaper in Utah County in 1914 called The Voice of Sharon, which eventually became the Orem-Geneva Times. In the same year, Watkins was appointed assistant county attorney of Salt Lake County. From 1919 to 1925, he ran a 600-acre ranch near Lehi.
Watkins served as district judge of the Fourth Judicial District of Utah 1928–1933, losing his position in the Roosevelt Democratic landslide in 1932. In the early 1930s, he served as the director of the Provo River Water Users Association and director of the Orem Chamber of Commerce. An unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination to the Seventy-fifth Congress in 1936, Watkins was elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1946, and reelected in 1952. He served from January 3, 1947, to January 3, 1959.
Personal life
Watkins was a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and took up his missionary call in 1907, going to missions in New York and New Jersey. In 1929, he moved to the Wasatch Front Community near Orem, and was selected to serve as the president upon the creation of Utah's Sharon Stake by the LDS Church. Watkins held that position until he left to move to Washington, DC as a Senator in 1946. His orthodoxy and faith blurred the lines between civic and religious duties, as can be seen in correspondence to the church general authorities written on April 13, 1954:While serving as a missionary in New York, Watkins met Andrea Rich. They married in Salt Lake City on June 18, 1913, and had six children. After his first wife's death, on March 1, 1972, Watkins married Dorothy Eva Watkins in Salt Lake City. After their marriage, they relocated to Orem.
Senate
Weber Basin Project
Planning for the Weber Basin Project began in 1942, but was suspended during the war years. After Watkins' election to the Senate in 1946, with increasing demand for municipal water and the need for irrigation of farmland, he began pushing for a reintroduction of legislation supporting the development plan. Investigations were made in January 1948, leading to a report issued in July 1949 recommending creation of a reservoir to store surplus water from the Ogden and Weber rivers that could later be accessed for use on farmland.On August 29, 1949, Congress authorized the project which empowered the United States Secretary of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation "to construct, operate, and maintain reservoirs, irrigation and drainage works, power plants, and transmission lines in the area." It authorized that a conservancy organization within the State of Utah could be developed to collect taxes and make the project self-supporting.
On July 9, 1952, the first appropriation of construction funds was made. In 1969, to honor Watkins for making the project come to life, the Willard Dam was renamed the Arthur V. Watkins Dam.
Indian affairs
Watkins was appointed chair of the Senate Interior Committee Subcommittee on Indian Affairs in 1947, shortly after he was elected to the Senate. Though his Mormon beliefs concerning Native Americans have been cited by many as a basis for the Indian termination policy Watkins pursued, he was also influenced by not only his childhood growing up in the west on the fringe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, but also by various cultural movements at the time. The "Culture of Conformity" –endless pressure to be stable and normal, and to fear the "godless Communist menace" – which characterized 1950s America, pushed society as a whole to relish the American sense of freedom, as well as responsibility.These values can clearly be seen in what Watkins called his policy, "the freeing of the Indian from wardship status," equating it with the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves during the Civil War. Watkins was the driving force behind termination. His position as chairman of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs gave him tremendous leverage to determine the direction of federal Indian policy and he consolidated his influence through other western legislators. While partisanship may have played a role, geographic location may have been a much stronger motivator than party affiliation. The largest concentration of Native populations and federal lands were located in western states, as were national parks and dam projects.
He initially met with Wyoming Republican Congressman William H. Harrison and Orme Lewis, Arizona Republican and Assistant Secretary of the Interior, to map out a strategy on February 27, 1953. Subsequent talks were held with South Dakota Republican Congressman E.Y. Berry, Nevada Democratic Senator Patrick McCarran, South Dakota Republican Senator Karl E. Mundt, North Dakota Republican Senator William Langer, and Washington Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson. After a series of consultations, the policy Watkins envisioned was set out with four fundamental tenets:
- 1. To eliminate laws that treated Native Americans as different from other Americans;
- 2. To dismantle the BIA, giving responsibility for their affairs to the tribes themselves, or if necessary transferring some of its duties to other federal and state agencies;
- 3. To end federal supervision of individual Indians; and
- 4. To cease federal guardianship responsibilities for Indian tribes and their resources.
Watkins and his fellow legislators acted out of a belief that they needed to "fix the Indian problem" once and for all, and they believed that assimilation of the tribes into mainstream culture was their best hope for survival. It was a pressing problem, costing the government money at a time of huge war debt, and the means seemed to justify the wanted end.
At the time, many Indian tribes reacted against this proposed policy; in the afterword of her novel, The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich quotes from the letters of her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who served as the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band Chippewa Advisory Committee. At the nadir of Indians' power, the delegation by this committee pushed back, Erdrich writes, being the first Indian band to "mount a fierce defense and prevail." The Menominee, led by Ada Deer regained Federal recognition, details described in her memoir, Making a Difference: My fight for Native Rights and Social Justice.
By 1954, the policy was also being questioned at a conference of social scientists, primarily anthropologists, who concluded that the thought that "assimilation of the American Indian into the normal stream of American life is inevitable, that Indian tribes and communities will disappear" is completely unwarranted.
Though the legislation was supposed to give tribes input and obtain their consent, many tribes felt pressure to agree. For example, the Menominee received an appropriation of $8.5 million in 1951 to settle a claim of BIA mismanagement, but to receive the payment, were told to come up with a plan for termination. When speaking with the Klamath Tribes, Watkins invoked God's blessing upon termination and if that was not enough motivation, the three options proposed were clearly aimed at terminating the tribal relationships with the government: 1) Withdraw from the tribe and accept a cash settlement for any share they were due of tribal assets; 2) Remain in the tribe and help form a tribal association to manage the trust responsibilities instead of the federal government; or 3) Refuse a cash settlement and the government would appoint a guardian to manage the remaining assets of the tribe. Even the Osage Nation of Oklahoma was told by Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Dillon S. Myer, to prepare for termination and paying taxes because "'the best country in the world' needed financial support from all citizens to fight communists in North Korea".
When Watkins proposed termination of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, despite the fact that they did not meet the established "readiness" benchmarks of policy, it contained no protections for the tribe's mineral rights. Only public outcry over loss of the mineral rights forced addition of protections for their oil into their termination bill. It was widely believed that Alaskan natives' rights to the Tongass National Forest had been forsaken in favor of corporate timber interests. The western Oregon terminations of the Siletz and Grand Ronde tribes were seen by settlers and state politicians as a means of releasing tribal natural resources as a no-cost means of improving local economies.
Even before Watkins lost his re-election bid, the policies he had pursued were proving to have disastrous effects on Native peoples, as anticipated. Tribes were cut off from services for education, health care, housing, sanitation and utility sources, and related resources. Termination directly caused decay within the tribe including poverty, alcoholism, high suicide rates, low educational achievement, disintegration of the family, poor housing, high dropout rates from school, trafficking of Indian women for prostitution, disproportionate numbers in penal institutions, increased infant mortality, decreased life expectancy, and loss of identity. In addition, the era of conformity was moving into the Sixties and its calls for social change and a growing sensitivity to minority rights and the status of women.