1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910815566103321

Autore

Kehoe Alice Beck <1934->

Titolo

A passion for the true and just : Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen and the Indian New Deal / / Alice Beck Kehoe

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Tucson, Arizona : , : University Of Arizona Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-8165-9878-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (246 p.)

Classificazione

SOC021000HIS036060

Disciplina

323.1197

Soggetti

Indians of North America - Government relations - 1934-

Indians of North America - Legal status, laws, etc

New Deal, 1933-1939

United States Politics and government 1933-1945

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Contents --  List of Illustrations --  Acknowledgments --  Introduction --  1. The Indian New Deal --  2. The Indian Reorganization Act --  3. "Frankfurter's Jewish Cabal" --  4. Felix and Lucy --  5. The Handbook of Federal Indian Law --  6. The Indian Claims Commission --  7. The Consequences of Being Jewish --  8. Felix Cohen's Awakening --  9. Of Counsel to Tribes --  10. Sovereignty: Not So Simple --  11. Jewish Science, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence --  12. The White Man, the Jew, and the Indian --  Notes --  Sources by Chapter --  Bibliographic Essay: Sources for This Book -- Bibliography --  Index.

Sommario/riassunto

" Felix Cohen, the lawyer and scholar who wrote The Handbook of Federal Indian Law (1942), was enormously influential in American Indian policy making. Yet histories of the Indian New Deal, a 1934 program of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, neglect Cohen and instead focus on John Collier, commissioner of Indian affairs within the Department of the Interior (DOI). Alice Beck Kehoe examines why Cohen, who, as DOI assistant solicitor, wrote the legislation for the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) and Indian Claims Commission Act (1946), has received less attention. Even more neglected was the contribution that Cohen's wife, Lucy Kramer Cohen, an anthropologist



trained by Franz Boas, made to the process.  Kehoe argues that, due to anti-Semitism in 1930s America, Cohen could not speak for his legislation before Congress, and that Collier, an upper-class WASP, became the spokesman as well as the administrator. According to the author, historians of the Indian New Deal have not given due weight to Cohen's work, nor have they recognized its foundation in his liberal secular Jewish culture. Both Felix and Lucy Cohen shared a belief in the moral duty of mitzvah, creating a commitment to the "true and the just" that was rooted in their Jewish intellectual and moral heritage, and their Social Democrat principles.  A Passion for the True and Just takes a fresh look at the Indian New Deal and the radical reversal of US Indian policies it caused, moving from ethnocide to retention of Indian homelands. Shifting attention to the Jewish tradition of moral obligation that served as a foundation for Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen (and her professor Franz Boas), the book discusses Cohen's landmark contributions to the principle of sovereignty that so significantly influenced American legal philosophy"--