Debating Democracy

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There is substantial evidence that the framers of the documents and institutions that are the foundation of the American republic were influenced by the long-established democratic traditions of the Iroquois Confederacy. For many, however, this notion represents a perverse attack on American identity -- an attempt to deny American intellectual, cultural, and racial "credentials". A furious and often unseemly debate on this proposition has resulted. Bruce E. Johansen, one of the historians at the center of this storm, became seriously involved in 1978 when his proposal to write a dissertation on the "influence theory" was met with academic scorn and disbelief. Johansen follows the controversy from its beginnings, providing highlights of the battle. He exposes the machinations of the academic establishment and ponders the power of the Eurocentric intellectual elite to distort and control the pool of information from which public and educational policies, media coverage, and public opinion itself are drawn.Johansen notes that in the past few years academic opposition has largely grown quiet as the historical evidence has become known to a more general audience. The controversy, however, has been taken up by right wing media, which have linked non-European "influence" to a multitude of ills besetting contemporary American society from the rise in teenage pregnancies to the fall in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores.Barbara Mann's epilogue examines European assumptions of racial, cultural, and intellectual superiority, which remain the foundation of education and scholarship in the arts and sciences -- despite tokenism and lip service to multicultural values -- and discusses theinevitable result: the continuing exclusion of all but a handful of non-Europeans from truly meaningful participation in our society.