American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In “Robert L. Berner’s ‘Howlers’: A Reply” (in American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25:1) Bruce E. Johansen and Donald A. Grinde Jr., responding to my commentary in the same issue on their long campaign to claim for the Iroqouis League a significant influence on the writing of the United States Constitution, have written this sentence: “When Berner asserts that ‘No founding father knew what the Iroquois structure was,’ he commits a rather astounding ‘howler’ by writing out of the record Benjamin Franklin, who was probably the most influential founder of them all.” As any reader of my commentary should notice, I assumed that in Exemplar of Liberty (1991) Johansen and Grinde claimed John Adams as a Founding Father significant in the introduction of Iroquois elements into the Constitution. Not so, we now learn. Adams “did not endorse the Iroquois system of government.” On the other hand, because he knew about the Iroquois white-dog sacrifice his reference to fifty Greek families in his discussion of the ancient society of Argos “must apply to the Iroquois, not to the Greeks.” I can only refer those who might be mystified by this argument—or, as Johansen and Grinde put it, “[miss] many of the nuances of our presentation” —to my quotation of the pertinent passage from Adams in my commentary, reinforced by my endnote citation of its source.