Word: matthiessen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...aesthetes frequented the Fogg Museum, where Paul Sachs produced platoons of future museum directors in his museum course, and the intellectual elite concentrated in history and literature, where a remarkable group of tutors like Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdoch created an atmosphere of excitement for whole generations of students. The emphasis in literature seemed to have been on English authors. If one read Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, or dipped into Zuleika Dobson, it was a true sign of sophistication. French literature was pretty much uncharted territory, except in my case, for I received...
...threat to the first Americans demands something more than mere polemic. Unfortunately, that is chiefly what Matthiessen offers. According to In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, the Indians, who have been exploited since the white man's arrival, are currently being manipulated by "huge energy consortiums" with everything from lavish handouts to hushed-up homicides for mineral rights to reservation land...
...spirits rose again at South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation in June 1975 when militant leaders of the American Indian Movement and federal authorities faced off. It began when agents arrived to arrest a young man for the theft of a pair of boots. But the FBI, claims Matthiessen, saw AIM as a conspiracy against the Government, and matters accelerated beyond reason. In came a "large force of sweating, nervous men in new battle fatigues. After all the smoke and gas had blown away, there was only this solitary Indian, killed much earlier...
...there was more: the bodies of two FBI agents, apparently executed at close range. Leonard Peltier, a leader of AIM, was convicted of the murders on circumstantial evidence. Employing trial transcripts and FBI documents secured under the Freedom of Information Act, Matthiessen argues that the authorities were out to get Peltier long before the crime and that the FBI infiltrated the movement and provoked anti-AIM sentiment among the majority of law-abiding Indians...
...Matthiessen makes Peltier's trial something very like a 1960s-style conspiracy drama. He rehashes an "ambush theory" advanced by the defense and makes too much of the negligent autopsy of a former AIM member. Finally, the author drops all pretense of impartiality: "From the Indian's viewpoint-and increasingly from my own-any talk of innocence or guilt was beside the point...