Morgan, Lewis Henry

MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY (1818–1881). Anthropology in the United States did not begin as an academic discipline but as a scholarly pastime of self-taught amateurs seeking a better understanding of the culture of the indigenous peoples. Its founders included George Catlin, Major John Wesley Powell, Frank Hamilton Cushing and, most influential by far, Lewis Henry Morgan.

Born in Aurora, New York, Morgan graduated from Union College in 1840 and shortly afterward was admitted to the bar in Rochester, where he lived most of his life. Legal adviser to a railroad for many years, he was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1861 and to the State Senate in 1868, but the real focus of his life lay elsewhere. In his early years he became interested in “primitive” society, especially that of his Iroquois neighbors. A chance encounter with a young Seneca, Ely S. Parker, in a bookstore in 1844 quickly led to meetings with others and started Morgan on the research that would remain his consuming passion for the rest of his days. He was not only a student of Native American culture, but an admirer and defender of that culture; it was largely because of his instrumental role in defeating an effort to seize Seneca land for commercial use in 1847 that he was inducted into the tribe’s Hawk Clan.

The Seneca and other tribes of the Iroquois Nation provided the subject of Morgan’s first book, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), which was followed by three more important anthropological studies: Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), published by the Smithsonian Institution, Ancient Society (1877), and Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines, published shortly before his death in 1881. His only nonanthropological book, The American Beaver and His Works (1868), was long recognized as the classic monograph on the subject and warmly praised by Charles Darwin; of special interest to modern readers are its lengthy discussion of animal intelligence and its affirmation of animal rights.

In his lifetime Morgan was one of the most respected scientific figures in the United States and was by no means regarded as a radical. The evolutionary theory of property, the family, and government that he developed in his most famous and later most controversial book, Ancient Society, did, however, challenge the prevailing views on these matters, and some passages in the book’s five-hundred-plus pages have a distinctly radical ring. His rhapsodic descriptions of primitive “communism in living,” for example, and his highly critical estimate of property in civilization, which he concluded by arguing that “a mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind,” and that “the next higher stage of society” would be “a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity” of the ancient tribal cultures, suffice to confirm Leslie A. White’s contention that Ancient Society was “revolutionary in import as well as evolutionary.” But such passages did not prevent the book from receiving long and flattering reviews in such mainstream publications as the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation and the New York Times. If Morgan acquired a posthumous reputation as a radical, the credit (or blame) belongs to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who discerned the revolutionary implications of his theories and proclaimed them to the world.

In the winter of 1880–1881 Marx made an assiduous study of Ancient Society, evidently intending to devote a substantial work to it. The long illness that culminated in his death in 1883 made it impossible for him to complete this task, and his extensive notes were not published integrally until 1972. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) drew on Marx’s notes, but was essentially a summary and defense of Morgan’s views. Recognized ever since as one of the Marxist classics, Engels’s little book set the stage for the enduring socialist interest in Morgan, an interest soon multiplied by other popular works such as August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism and Paul Lafargue’s The Evolution of Property. In his book as well as in letters, Engels’s praise for Morgan was boundless; indeed, he went so far as to credit him with the independent discovery of the materialist conception of history. Thus, with the possible exception of Benjamin Franklin, Morgan became the only American thinker universally recognized as an important influence on, and contributor to, the Marxism of Marx and Engels.

Well before the The Origin of the Family appeared in English translation, Morgan’s work had an impact on the American movement. In an autobiographical sketch published shortly before his execution in 1887, Haymarket martyr August Spies cited Ancient Society as one of the three books that had influenced him most. In Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party, Morgan’s work was recognized as a canonical authority equal to the works of Marx and Engels themselves. Again and again De Leon referred to the “Morgan-Marxian materialist conception of history,” or similar formulations, and in later years he boasted that the popularity of Ancient Society among American workers was the direct result of his party’s educational efforts. Morgan was also boosted in the Socialist Party press. The Comrade, edited by John Spargo, offered subscribers copies of the Holt edition of Ancient Society at a special rate.

Morgan’s views reached a much larger readership when Charles H. Kerr’s Chicago-based socialist publishing house brought out Ernest Untermann’s translation of The Origin of the Family in 1902, and an inexpensive edition of Ancient Society five years later. Promoted in the socialist press as “required reading” for all class-conscious workers, these books were reviewed, summarized, and commented on at length by countless aspiring Marxist theorists over the next three decades. They were used as textbooks at Detroit’s Proletarian University, the Work People’s College of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Duluth, and in socialist study-classes throughout North America. The Kerr edition of Ancient Society sold some four thousand copies in four years, was subsequently reprinted several times, and was still in print in the 1960s.

As Morgan’s working-class readership grew, his reputation in academic circles declined sharply. For the socialists and Wobblies of the 1910s, as for the various later factions of Communists, academic disdain for Morgan was regarded almost as proof of his revolutionary correctness. In the Left press the dominant trends in American anthropology—especially the school of Franz Boas—were scornfully dismissed as bourgeois and pro-imperialist, and Morgan’s views were defended against all comers. In 1925, for example, the IWW’s Industrial Pioneer ran a lengthy three-part series titled “Was Morgan Wrong?” Responding to all the arguments of the “anti-Morgan” anthropologists, the author, Vern Smith, concluded that Morgan was, on all disputed points, emphatically right. In 1937 anthropologist Robert Lowie summed up the prevailing academic attitude toward Morgan in his History of Ethnological Theory, faulting Morgan’s works for their alleged “mystical nonsense” and “fatal errors,” though begrudgingly conceding him something of a bumbling pioneer’s status. Fifteen years later William Z. Foster, in his History of the Communist Party, expressed the sentiment of a sizable segment of the American Left when he blithely hailed Ancient Society as “perhaps the most important book ever written in the Western Hemisphere.”

Too often, in these polemics, radicals contented themselves with the simple assertion of Morgan’s infallibility, quoting Engels as proof. But there was more than a little truth in their charges that academic anthropology was a deeply conservative discipline, and that the rejection of Morgan by Boas, Lowie, and others was motivated by something more than the disinterested pursuit of Science. Within the field of anthropology itself, in the 1930s, a few independent thinkers arose to challenge their colleagues’ conventional wisdom on Morgan. Foremost among these was Leslie A. White, who devoted numerous journal articles to Morgan’s vindication, and edited several volumes of his unpublished writings, most notably his Indian Journals, 1859–1862 (1959). Although he was Red-baited because of an early visit to Soviet Russia, White was not particularly interested in Marxism; he tended to avoid the political dimension of the debate on Morgan, and defended the latter’s work on strictly scientific grounds.

The Charles H. Kerr Company’s advertisement for Ancient Society emphasized that the book “points the way to a cleaner, freer, happier life for women,” and it is remarkable how many of the best-informed and most militant defenders of Morgan have been women radicals. In a letter to Engels dated 9 June 1886, Florence Kelley noted that “a large section of the Suffrage Association in Iowa took for the subject of its discussions through the winter Morgan’s works, especially his Ancient Society.” In her first exposition of basic Marxist principles, the 1887 essay on “The Need of Theoretical Preparation for Philanthropic Work,” addressed to young women entering the field of social work, Kelley strongly urged the reading both of Ancient Society and Engels’s then-untranslated Origin of the Family. In Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s autobiography, Eighty Years and More (1898), the venerable suffragist who became an avowed socialist in her last years signaled Morgan’s work as “truth [that] cannot be questioned” on the subject of matriarchy. Lida Parce, author of Lesson Outlines in the Economic Interpretation of History (1908), drew heavily on Morgan in her Economic Determinism, an introduction to Marxism published by Charles H. Kerr in 1913.

Morgan’s work proved to be of interest to soapbox agitators no less than to theorists. Kate Richards O’Hare, one of the Socialist party’s most effective speakers and pamphleteers, outlined the theses of Ancient Society in detail in “The Tale of a Rib,” an essay on the “woman question” published in the National Rip-Saw in 1916. Also based on Morgan’s magnum opus was the popular series of Stories of the Cave People, by the ebullient Mary E. Marcy, in the International Socialist Review (1909–1916); published as an illustrated book in 1917, these tales were used in socialist children’s classes through the late 1930s.

One of the most zealous and persistent proponents of Morgan was Communist Party activist Mary Inman, remembered today especially for her theories regarding housework as a form of slavery, i.e., unpaid labor. Her books, In Woman’s Defense (1940) and others, as well as her militant monthly, Facts for Women, stressed that Ancient Society was a work “highly important to the woman’s movement.” Morgan’s work was a central reference-point in Inman’s long intraparty struggle for the creation of a Communist-led national women’s organization, a struggle that eventually led her to break with the Communist Party. A few years later, in the early 1950s, Morgan and Engels’s commentary figured prominently in a protracted and heated internal debate on cosmetics, beauty, and the role of women in the revolutionary movement between Evelyn Reed, Myra Tanner Weiss, and others within the internal bulletins of the Socialist Workers Party.

The 1960s-1970s but also later have witnessed a notable revival of interest in Morgan on the part of socialist and feminist scholars and activists. Carl Resek’s excellent biography, collections of Morgan’s unpublished writings, and English translations of influential studies such as Emmanuel Terray’s Marxism and “Primitive” Societies (1972) and Wilhelm Reich’s The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (1971) provided essential material for a new approach to his many-sided achievements. But to Eleanor Burke Leacock, a Marxist anthropologist active in the women’s movement, we owe what is probably the most thoughtful and influential critical reassessment of Morgan in recent decades. Published originally as an introduction to a new edition of Ancient Society in 1964 and reprinted in her Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally (1981), Leacock argued that Ancient Society, while not the unassailable gospel that some of its naive Left defenders have tried to pretend, nonetheless is a book with a “tremendous meaning for today.” She concludes, “That the causes of our difficulties lie not in the nature of humanity, but in our social commitment to property, is the profoundly important message.”

Krader, Lawrence, ed. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972.

Moses, Daniel Noah. The Promise of Progress: The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009.

Resek, Carl. Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Rosemont, Franklin. “Karl Marx and the Iroquois.” Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion 4. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989.

White, Leslie A. “Morgan’s Attitude toward Religion and Science.” American Anthropologist 46, no. 2 (1944).