The term white arose as a designation for European explorers, traders and settlers who came into contact with Africans and the indigenous people of the Americas. As such, it appeared even before permanent British settlement in North America. Its early usages in American served as much to distinguish European settlers from Native Americans as to distinguish Africans from Europeans. Thus, the prehistory of the white worker begins with the settlers' images of Native Americans. Moreover, the images developed by colonists to rationalize dispossession of Native Americans had a strong connection to work and to discipline. Settler ideology held that improvident, sexually abandoned 'lazy Indians' were failing to 'husband' or 'subdue' the resources God had provided and thus should forfeit those resources. Work and whiteness joined in the argument for dispossession. Settlers, whether or not they worked harder or more steadily than Native Americans, came to consider themselves 'hardworking whites' in counterpoint to their imagination of Indian styles of life. By the early nineteenth century, the small and dwindling numbers of Native Americans, especially in the Northeast where the laboring and artisanal white population was concentrated, made direct experience with Indians less than common. However, anti-Indian racism and frontier myths had considerable staying power. As Herman Melville sardonically put it, 'Indian rapine having mostly ceased through regions where it once prevailed...Indian-hating has not in like degree ceased with it.' 'Civilization' continued to define itself as a negation of 'savagery'--indeed, to invent savagery in order to define itself. 'White' attitudes toward manliness, land use, sexuality, and individualism and violence were influenced by real contacts with, and fanciful ideas about, Native Americans. Working people certainly did not escape these attitudes, even if they did not internalize them in exactly the same way as other social groups. Moreover, the question of expansion into lands occupied by Native Americans remained an important political issue and one of particular interest to working people through the Revolution and early Republican and Jacksonian years. Land was, as we shall see, a central issue in the early labor movement, an issue that many organizers closely connected to the possibilities of economic independence in the United States. Not surprisingly, anti-Indian thought played a huge role in the development of 'American Racial Anglo-Saxonism', the particular brand of 'whiteness' that Reginald Horsman has convincingly argued was intellectually ascendant in the US by 1850. But despite the manifest importance of anti-Indian racism in fashioning the self-perceptions of white Americans, Indians were not ultimately the counterpoint against which Euro-American workers could define themselves as white. After the failure of early attempts to 'reduce the savages to civility' by enslaving them, it became clear that the drama of white-Indian contact outside the fur trade would turn on land and conquest, not on labor. By the time that significant numbers of Americans came to grips with wage labor, those Native Americans who did remain were in either case often confusingly categorized, legally at least, as 'colored' or even 'mulatto', sometimes because they had mixed with more numerous Black populations and sometime even when they had not. In folk usage, the interesting term red nigger appeared in the 1820s as a description of Native Americans through racial language originally applied to the more familiar Black population. Even on a mythic level, without widespread direct white-Indian contact Native Americans served poorly as foils against which slaves could measure themselves as workers. Comparisons with Black slaves or even Northern 'free' Blacks were tempting because whites had defined these groups as servile. Thus, by considering a range of comparisons with Blacks in weighing his status as a white worker, the white laboring man could articulate either his pride in independence or his fears of growing dependency. But the mythical/historical Native American male was seen as independent, so much so that he was used, oddly enough, as a symbol of the American Revolution, not just at the Boston Tea Party but by many political cartoonists of the day. Any systematic social construction of the white worker's position that used the Native American as the 'other' would therefore have to take people of color as a model rather than as a negative reference point. This image would not catch on in any way more widespread than the 'going native' of a few whites in the fur trade. In the context of the Western land question, workers who did reflect on Indians shared the general propensity of colonial settler populations to minimize the numbers of natives in contested areas and the amount of land to which they could lay claim. The idea that the Indian was disappearing made him less available as a yardstick against which white labor could measure its own position. One nineteenth-century minstrel book, for example, included an elaborate sketch titled 'Races', full of puns turning on the distinction between race as a social category and horse races. The short, single pun on Native Americans simply observed, "The Indian's race is nearly run." For a variety of reasons, the white worker could meaningfully speak of being a 'wage slave' but not of being a 'wage Indian'. He could complain of having to 'work like a nigger' but not of having to 'work like an Indian'. >From David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness" Louis Proyect
