Introduction

“American Progress” by John Gast. In this painting, Divine Providence watches over settlers on their journey west.

After reading these articles, essays and poems, a couple of questions come to mind: How long will we Americans continue to allow the Manifest Destiny doctrine and its supporters in government to dictate our domestic and foreign policy? When will we take our country back, as the Declaration of Independence provides for us to do under such mismanagement by our elected leaders?

History has proven that the values Americans cherish most are not compatible with the direction in which our politicians are leading us. We want peace. We want to be good neighbors in the world community. We want free and fair elections. We want justice. We want democracy. We want equal rights for all. We want the separation of church and state. We want to help those in need. We want corporate regulation and accountability. This is who and what we are, but, unfortunately, there is a discrepancy between what we think we are and what we have become.

We may consider ourselves good, generous people, but when we step back and see ourselves from a different perspective — as most foreigners see us — we discover that our nation has become an arrogant, childish and self-absorbed imperial monster destroying all in its path, taking whatever it wants from others because it believes that it is destined to do so under “divine providence,” a central tenet of Manifest Destiny. Those people and nations we trample upon — our victims — may even like us as a people, but at the same time may despise our nation for what we have become. The 2004 Iraqi torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is a case in point here. The torture of Iraqi inmates by American soldiers hardly promotes the positive, all-American values we once intended to force upon the Iraqis. The Bush spin machine tried to portray the torture as “abuse” limited to a few bad apples in the military, but the problem is systemic because the doctrine of Manifest Destiny — and thus the theft of Iraqi oil — was behind the invasion all along. In similar fashion, the Union cavalry raped and mutilated Indian women as new forts were built and more troops traveled westward to protect settlers as they moved in and began farming Indian land “from sea to shining sea.” We may think of ourselves as good people, as humane people, but we do some very bad things to others in order to get what we want. It wasn’t just a few bad soldiers in those Iraqi torture rooms; we were all there with them.

I, for one, have hope that America can become a positive example for the world when we free ourselves — once and for all — from the yoke of Manifest Destiny. We can then, in true democratic, grassroots fashion, pursue policies aligned with our shared values as Americans and human beings.

This collection is divided into three parts — Plunder, Empire, and Consensus — in order to provide the reader with a logical progression through the stages of the Manifest Destiny doctrine. Readers should remember, however, that this is just an organizational tool and that the works themselves may not fit neatly into a single category.

The plunder began with Columbus’s arrival in the Western Hemisphere as millions of native peoples were either killed outright or died of diseases introduced by the Conquistadors. The process of empire-building in North America began with the first permanent settlement at Jamestown and continues today on an international scale.

From the very beginning, however, there were individuals who thought that plunder and empire-building were wrong because of the horrific effect these policies had upon others. These heroes expressed their human compassion, their hope that humankind would take a different path. Some of these heroes find a voice in these works as they recount what has happened and where we go from here as we seek to build an all-inclusive, humanist America within an all inclusive, humanist world. Such a world will only be possible when we learn how to make decisions by consensus for the common good and maintain the separation of church and state. People of faith must be free to practice their religion, but at the same time, religion and metaphysics must have no place in the process of government. This is the only way to ensure an all-inclusive society.

Violence begets violence and, as Mahatma Gandhi so aptly put it, “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Human progress can only occur when we get past the idea that force and violence will achieve a desired end for us. Forget plunder. Forget empire. Instead, we must come full-circle. We must learn from Native Americans and focus on consensus-building as a way to move human society — finally — out of the dark ages.

Jamie York
May 2004

A Note for Teachers

The Manifest Destiny doctrine was responsible for the slaughter and forced relocation of American Indians and — even today, in the 21st century — the doctrine is still the driving force in U.S. foreign affairs. The central tenets of Manifest Destiny — divine providence, freedom, democracy, and free enterprise — have been and are still used to justify our actions both at home and abroad.

As the world’s population climbs and supplies of natural resources dwindle, human society will one day be forced into abandoning the Manifest Destiny doctrine in favor of sustainable, communal lifestyles. Communal living was a way of life for Native Americans long before Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere. The Indians produced and traded for the common good, treated the land, air and water with respect, and they provided shelter and health care for their people and education for their children. Tribal decisions were made by consensus in councils, with the Chief — usually one of the best orators — in charge of keeping the council discussion moving forward toward a solution that could be agreed upon by group consensus. The tribal council may well become a model for future decision-making in the United States.

I have chosen essays for this compilation that teachers may find useful in history and social studies classes to promote independent thought and enhance classroom discussions. The following discussion questions may help you focus student attention upon particular areas.

PART ONE

What was life like for the Arawak before Columbus? How did this change after Columbus?

Is Columbus a hero? Should we be celebrating a Columbus Day holiday?

Why did Tecumseh call for the Indians to unite?

Explain “divine providence.” Why is it a central tenet of the Manifest Destiny doctrine?

Although the term “Manifest Destiny” was not coined until 1845, when do you think the philosophy behind it actually started in North America?

What is the difference between national and international Manifest Destiny? Is international destiny the same thing as imperialism?

PART TWO

William O. Douglas asserts that “the philosophy of strength through free speech is being forsaken for the philosophy of fear through repression.” What does he mean by this statement? Has anything changed in the 50 years since he said this?

Societal trends seem to affect the youth first. In the 1950s, youth responded to the media-driven fear and hysteria over communism. In the 1960s, youth responded to the war in Southeast Asia. Is it possible that the youth are responding to the Manifest Destiny doctrine? Explain your position.

Do you see any trends or issues that today’s youth may be responding to? If so, what are the issues and how are they responding?

Why might countries that present themselves as good examples, as models for other nations to follow, ever have to be “crushed” by the United States? Why would good examples ever be considered a threat? To whom would they be perceived as a threat?

The “Bush Doctrine” refers to pre-emptive military strikes against nations that pose a threat of biological, chemical, and nuclear attacks. In 2003, The Bush administration made a very specific, detailed case for pre-emptive war and regime change in Iraq that later turned out to be based on false information. The central tenets of the Manifest Destiny doctrine (divine providence, freedom, democracy, and free enterprise) were also used by the Bush administration to justify the war. Do you think the war been a success, a failure, or some of both? Explain you answers.

What does Jamie York mean when he says that Cuba has been a “thorn in the side” for U.S. Manifest Destiny?

PART THREE

What is a rainbow warrior? Are you a rainbow warrior? Why or why not?

How does decision-making through consensus differ from representative government? Which better supports the common good?

Communal, sustainable living has been practiced by Native Americans for hundreds of years? What advantage, if any, does this have over free enterprise?

Why do you think that some early American experimentation with communal living failed? Do you think that Manifest Destiny affected these experiments in any way? Explain.

As the world’s population climbs and supplies of natural resources dwindle, human society will be forced into adapting to sustainable lifestyles. How does the Humanist philosophy fit in with this?

Humanists believe in maximum individual freedom within the framework of social and planetary responsibility. Humanists also believe in the separation of church and state. Is Humanism compatible with religion? Explain.

EPILOGUE

Ninio speaks of changing “the system.” What does he mean by this? How does this tie in with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny? How does it tie in with decision-making by consensus?

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I Before Columbus

by David Stannard

[David E. Stannard received his B.A. degree from San Francisco State University in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1975. His teaching and research interests include American social, cultural, and intellectual history; theory and method in history and social science; the demographic and environmental impacts of Western imperialism; comparative analyses of genocide; and race, racism, and multicultural studies.]

Combined, North America and South America cover an area of 16,000,000 square miles, more than a quarter of the land surface of the globe. To its first human inhabitants, tens of thousands of years ago, this enormous domain they had discovered was literally a world unto itself: a world of miles-high mountains and vast fertile prairies, of desert shrublands and dense tropical rain forests, of frigid arctic tundra and hot murky swamps, of deep and fecund river valleys, of sparkling water lakes, of canopied woodlands, of savannahs and steppes — and thousands upon thousands of miles of magnificent ocean coast.1

There were places where it almost never rained, and places where it virtually never stopped; there were places where the temperature reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and places where it dropped to 80 degrees below zero. But in all these places, under all these conditions, eventually some native people made their homes.

By the time ancient Greece was falling under the control of Rome, in North America the Adena Culture already had been flourishing for a thousand years. As many as 500 Adena living sites have been uncovered by modern archaeologists. Centered in present-day Ohio, they radiate out as far as Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. We will never know how many hundreds more such sites are buried beneath the modern cities and suburbs of the northeastern United States, but we do know that these early sedentary peoples lived in towns with houses that were circular in design and that ranged from single-family dwellings as small as twenty feet in diameter to multi-family units up to 80 feet across.

These residences commonly were built in close proximity to large public enclosures of 300 feet and more in diameter that modern archaeologists have come to refer to as “sacred circles” because of their presumed use for religious ceremonial purposes. The buildings they constructed for the living, however, were minuscule compared with the receptacles they built for their dead: massive tombs, such as that at Grave Creek in West Virginia, that spread out hundreds of feet across and reached seven stories in height — and that were commonplace structures throughout Adena territory as early as 500 B.C..

In addition to the subsistence support of hunting and fishing, and gathering the natural fruit and vegetable bounty growing all around them, the ancient Adena people imported gourds and squash from Mexico and cultivated them along with early strains of maize, tubers, sunflowers, and other plant domesticates. Another import from the south — from South America — was tobacco, which they smoked through pipes in rituals of celebration and remembrance. From neighboring residents of the area that we now know as the Carolinas they imported sheets of mica, while from Lake Superior and beyond to the north they acquired copper, which they hammered and cut and worked into bracelets and rings and other bodily adornments.

Overlapping chronologically with the Adena was the Hopewell Culture that grew in time to cover an area stretching in one direction from the northern Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, in the other direction from Kansas to New York. The Hopewell people, who as a group were physiologically as well culturally distinguishable from the Adena, lived in permanent communities based on intensive horticulture, communities marked by enormous earthen monuments, similar to those of the Adena, that the citizenry built as religious shrines and to house the remains of their dead. Literally tens of thousands of these towering earthen mounds once covered the American landscape from the Great Plains to the eastern woodlands, many of them precise, geometrically shaped, massive structures of a thousand feet in diameter and several stories high; others — such as the famous quarter-mile long coiled snake at Serpent Mound, Ohio — were imaginatively designed symbolic temples.

No society that had not achieved a large population and an exceptionally high level of political and social refinement, as well as a sophisticated control of resources, could possibly have had the time or inclination or talent to design and construct such edifices. In addition, the Hopewell people had trade networks extending to Florida in one direction and Wyoming and North Dakota in the other, through which they acquired from different nations of indigenous peoples the copper, gold, silver, crystal, quartz, shell, bone, obsidian, pearl, and other raw materials that their artisans worked into elaborately embossed and decorative metal foil, carved jewelry, earrings, pendants, charms, breastplates, and other objets d’art, as well as axes, adzes, awls, and more. Indeed, so extensive were the Hopewell trading relationships with other societies throughout the continent that archaeologists have recovered from the centers of Hopewell culture in Ohio more materials originating from outside than from within the region.

To the west of the Hopewell there emerged in time the innumerable villages of the seemingly endless plains — large, usually permanent communities of substantial, multi-family homes and common buildings, the villages themselves often fortified with stockades and dry, surrounding moats. These were the progenitors of the people — the Mandan, the Cree, the Blood, the Blackfoot, the Crow, the Piegan, the Hidatsa, the Arikara, the Cheyenne, the Omaha, the Pawnee, the Arapaho, the Kansa, the Iowa, the Osage, the Kiowa, the Wichita, the Commanche, the Plains Cree, various separate nations of Sioux, and others, including the Ute and Shoshoni to the west — who became the classic nomads on horseback that often serve as the popular American model for all Indian societies. But even they did not resort to that pattern of life until they were driven to it by invading armies of displaced Europeans.

Arawak

Arawak is the general, post-Columbian name given to various peoples who made a long, slow series of migrations from the coast of Venezuela to Trinidad, then across open ocean perhaps first to Tobago, then Grenada, and on up the chain of islands that constitute the Antilles-St. Vincent, Barbados, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Anguilla, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Cuba — then finally off to the Bahamas, leaving behind at each stop populations that grew and flourished and evolved culturally in their own distinctive ways.

Similarly, Arawak (sometimes “Taino,” but that is a misnomer, as it properly applies only to a particular social and cultural group) is the name now given to the melange of peoples who, over the course of many centuries, carried out those migrations across the Caribbean, probably terminating with the Saladoid people sometime around two thousand years ago. By the time of their encounter with Columbus and his crews, the islands had come to be governed by chiefs or caciques (there were at least five paramount chiefdoms on Hispaniola alone, and others throughout the region) and the people lived in numerous densely populated villages, both inland and along all the coasts.

The people of these climate-blessed islands supported themselves with a highly developed level of agriculture-especially on Cuba and Hispaniola, which are among the largest islands on earth; Cuba, after all, is larger than South Korea (which today contains more than 42,000,000 people) and Hispaniola is nearly twice the size of Switzerland. Their staple food was cassava bread, made from the manioc plant yuca, which they cultivated in great abundance. But also, through so many long generations in the same benign tropical environment, the Arawaks had devised an array of unique methods for more than satisfying their subsistence needs-such as the following technique which they used to catch green sea turtles weighing hundreds of pounds, large fish, and other marine life, including manatees.

In sum, as Caribbean expert Carl Sauer once put it, “the tropical idyll of the accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true” regarding the Arawak. “The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings, were dextrous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball games, dances, and music. They lived in peace and amity.”

All that was to change, however, with shocking and deadly suddenness, once those first three Spanish ships bobbed into view on the rim of the Caribbean horizon. For it was then only a matter of months before there would begin the worst series of human disease disasters, combined with the most extensive and most violent programs of human eradication, this world has ever seen.

1 David Stannard, “Before Columbus,” American Holocaust (Oxford University press, 1992) Third World Traveler .

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II Christopher Columbus and the Indians

by Howard Zinn

[Howard Zinn is an author and lecturer. His most noted work, from which this selection is excerpted, is A People’s History of the United States.]

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.2 He later wrote of this in his log:

“They… brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus wrote:

“As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.” The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?

The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone….” He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage “as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask.” He was full of religious talk: “Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities.”

Because of Columbus’s exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans’ intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

The chief source-and, on many matters the only source of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted at length:

“Endless testimonies . . . prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…. But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then…. The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians…”

Las Casas tells how the Spaniards “grew more conceited every day” and after a while refused to walk any distance. They “rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry” or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. “In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings.”

Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.” Las Casas tells how “two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”

The Indians’ attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were found and killed. So, Las Casas reports. “they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could tun for help.” He describes their work in the mines:

“… mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on their backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them; and when water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping up pansful of water and throwing it up outside….

After each six or eight months’ work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.

Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides . . . they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation…. In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . . . and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile … was depopulated…. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write….”

When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it….”

Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas–even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?) is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure–there is no bloodshed-and Columbus Day is a celebration.

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the United States,” subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a “national interest” represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

2 Howard Zinn, “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” A People’s History of the United States .

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III The right of occupancy

by Tecumseh

[Tecumseh, a Shawnee Chief, learned in his youth the ability of the white man to push his people out of their homeland. This speech, in which he called for unity among the tribes, was delivered to Governor William Henry Harrison in council at Vincennes on August 12, 1810. Tecumseh died on October 12, 1813, at the hands of an American soldier.]

It is true I am a Shawnee. My forefathers were warriors. Their son is a warrior. From them I take only my existence; from my tribe I take nothing.3

I am the maker of my own fortune; and oh! that I could make of my own fortune; and oh! that I could make that of my red people, and of my country, as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the Spirit that rules the universe. I would not then come to Governor Harrison to ask him to tear the treaty and to obliterate the landmark; but I would say to him: “Sir, you have liberty to return to your own country.”

The being within, communing with past ages, tells me that once, nor until lately, there was no white man on this continent; that it then all belonged to red men, children of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit that made them, to keep it, to traverse it, to enjoy its productions, and to fill it with the same race, once a happy race, since made miserable by the white people, who are never contented but always encroaching.

The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it never was divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. For no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers — those who want all, and will not do with less.

The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because they had it first; it is theirs. They may sell, but all must join. Any sale not made by all is not valid. The late sale is bad. It was made by a part only. Part do not know how to sell. All red men have equal rights to the unoccupied land. The right of occupancy is as good in one place as in another. There can not be two occupations in the same place. The first excludes all others. It is not so in hunting or traveling; for there the same ground will serve many, as they may follow each other all day; but the camp is stationary, and that is occupancy. It belongs to the first who sits down on his blanket or skins which he has thrown upon the ground; and till he leaves it no other has a right.

3 Tecumseh, “Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, Speeches,” Southwest Missouri State University .

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IV A divine destiny for America

by John L. O’Sullivan

[John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in 1845. This article, which explains the concept of America’s destiny and divine providence, was written in 1839.]

The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity.4

It is so destined, because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal. It presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul — the self-evident dictates of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man’s rights as man. Besides, the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence, that its happiness, its greatness, its duration, were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system of government. . . .

What friend of human liberty, civilization, and refinement, can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity, and not deplore that they ever existed? What philanthropist can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties, and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind, and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect?

America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy.

We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can. We point to the everlasting truth on the first page of our national declaration, and we proclaim to the millions of other lands, that “the gates of hell” — the powers of aristocracy and monarchy — “shall not prevail against it.”

The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High — the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere — its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood — of “peace and good will amongst men.”. . .

Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the cynosure of our union of States, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals; and while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde, without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfilment of our mission — to the entire development of the principle of our organization — freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality.

This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man — the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?

4 John O’Sullivan, “Manifest Destiny,” Civics Online .

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V Manifest Destiny (A poem)

by Anita Endrezze Probst 5

Feathers blacken against the sun
rising like the songs of old warriors,
past whitened skies to die.
I tried too hard to stop the cold wind
from blowing across the miles of my cheeks
so death brought summer, fever bright.
Oh, Indian woman, you carried your corn
in small red pots with painted turquoise
rivers, and now the pots are broken
like your ancient bones. With no wings
to flee from me, my memory dreams your spirit face
and I see you sleeping in shallow blue shade.
My mother used to say, Brown Child
of the red sand, wash your feet
with river flowers, climb high
upon the rocks and smile out
the stars. Now as a woman,
I remember a man who said
all Indians are rich
they just don’t know how to save,
except by cans of beer.
And like the buffalo, you took my brown
skin and hung it on the wall.
I am gentle, but angry:
Is this how you white men
mount your trophies. Tomorrow, I see
my son; in his eyes there is more than quiet pain —
now blood-red flames bloom anger
and he has yet to live.

[Anita Endrezze Probst was born in 1952 in Long Beach, Calif. Ms. Probst, an honors graduate of Eastern Washington State College, is half Yaqui Indian and a mix of Austrian, Italian, Swiss, Hungarian, Spanish, and German. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines.]

5 Anita Endrezze Probst, “Manifest Destiny,” Carriers of the Dream Wheel, Ed. Duane Niatum, (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 163.

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VI The expansionist movement

by Michael T. Lubbrage

[Michael T. Lubbrage is a scholar and author for the “From Revolution to Reconstruction” project of the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. In this article, he provides a comprehensive overview of the Manifest Destiny doctrine and the plight of those affected by it.]

Manifest Destiny, the term first used in 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan, conveyed the idea that the rightful destiny of the US included imperialistic expansion. The mission, the “destiny,” of the United States was to extend its vision of democracy to all peoples capable of self-government. This vision did not apply to people of non-European origin, as they were thought to be “uncivilized” and therefore incapable of self-governent.6

Although the Manifest Destiny movement was named in 1845, the philosophy behind it existed throughout American history. For example, in 1818 Andrew Jackson, while taking a broad interpretation of vague instructions from President Monroe, led military forces into the Floridas during the Florida crisis. In a systematic and ruthless way, he punished the Seminole Indians for taking up arms with the Spanish, destroyed Spanish forces, and captured several cities and forts. Americans who had moral reservations about the rough tactics of Jackson soothed their consciences with this familiar but not yet named philosophy. Their reasoning: the Floridas were part of American territory and destiny intended that America should have them.

The reason why Americans were in Florida in the first place is yet another example of Manifest Destiny. The people of the deep South, wanting more fertile land for farming, exercised what they considered to be their right. The planter class, without any political approval or permission, just took over and started settling and planting the Florida territories. This move was an example of the arrogance that the Americans had towards expansion. Americans believed that they had a right to any land they wanted.

American history was built on a chronological record of significant events, each event having a cause and subsequent effect on another event. Historical events are presented in history as being tangible, being tied to a date, or an exact happening. Manifest Destiny, on the other hand, is a phenomenon. It can not be tied to a date, event or even a specific period of time. Manifest Destiny existed and still exists as the philosophy that embraces American history as a whole. Manifest Destiny is an intangible ideology that created American history. In its simplest form, Manifest Destiny can be defined as, “A Movement.” More specifically, it is the systematic body of concepts and beliefs that powered American life and American culture.

In the months following the Spanish-American War, the idea of expansionism grew stronger across the United States. In Congress, legislators called for the annexation of all Spanish territories. Some newspapers even suggested the annexation of Spain itself. Expansionists such as Roosevelt, former President Harrison, and Captain Mahan argued for creating an American empire. However, others, including Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, and Mark Twain, opposed these ideas.

Much of the talk about Manifest Destiny had many people suggesting that America should assume the role as a world power. In 1822 James Monroe echoed this idea in his famous Monroe Doctrine when he warned Europe and the rest of the world to “Stay out of the Western Hemisphere.” This simple statement established the US as the protector of all the lands in the Western hemisphere. With the Monroe Doctrine blazed on its chest, America could expand its involvement and control in foreign affairs throughout the Western Hemisphere.

While most Manifest Destiny believers felt that America simply had a mission — the altruistic right to extend its liberty to new realms — there were some who believed that the Manifest Destiny doctrine was based on the idea that America had a divine providence that was destined by God to expand its borders with no limit to area or country. Both reasons are key elements of the Manifest Destiny movement in the United States. Whether a person believed that America’s expansion was driven by God or a sense of mission, those promoting Manifest Destiny were certainly not in short demand or variety.

Northwest expansion started with the American fur trappers. In their search for new reserves of beaver, they blazed new trails and passages through the mountains. In doing so, they traversed new and fertile valleys of the far West. Their exaggerated stories and accounts of their travels publicized the newly found region of the West and aroused interest in people contemplating agricultural possibilities. It also gave the land an air of romance and adventure.

For all the positive atmosphere and grand spirit Manifest Destiny created, it also created the dark side of American History, none darker than the plight of the American Indian. While the positive side of Manifest Destiny was a surge of enthusiasm and energy for pushing West, the negative side was the belief that the white man had the right to destroy anything and anyone — namely Indians — who got in the way. Tracing the path of Manifest Destiny across the West would highlight mass destruction of tribal organizations, confinement of Indians to reservations, and full blown genocide. The dark side of Manifest Destiny revealed the white man’s belief that his settlement of the land and civilization of its native peoples was preordained.

The settlements that extended across the western territories promised the American dream: the freedom and independence of a seemingly limitless land. This, coupled with the agrarian spirit produced an attitude that nothing was going to stand in the way of progress, the progress of Manifest Destiny. In the name of this doctrine, Americans took whatever land they wanted. With a belief that Manifest Destiny gave them a right and power to do so, many simply settled, planted and farmed Indian land.

The philosophy that built American history was the rationalization that expansionists everywhere used to justify territorial growth. Some used the Manifest Destiny doctrine as a political philosophy stressing tradition, religious indoctrination, and social stability, while others used it as a simple reason to explore new lands. Expansionists experienced minimal interference of governmental institutions in private economic activities with Manifest Destiny leading their way.

Americans used Manifest Destiny as their proclamation of superiority and insisted that their conquests merely fulfilled the divine mission that man is impelled by forces beyond human control. Manifest Destiny was responsible for creating American history. Without it, American territory would be as big as the property surrounding its first settlement. It was the movement responsible for American Independence and American expansion. Because of the notion of Manifest Destiny, America’s drive to explore and conquer new lands will never die.

The Manifest Destiny doctrine can be divided into two distinct parts. One part could be defined as national Manifest Destiny. This is the drive behind building the American mainland. The America whose borders are between Canada and Mexico on the North and South and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on the East and West.

The other part could be defined as international Manifest Destiny, which started in 1867 when America purchased Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000. Although this acquisition could fall into the example of national Destiny, it was the first time America went beyond its immediate border and acquired land.

If God and mission were the road to Manifest Destiny, imperialism was the light that lit the way. Beginning in the late 1800s, the American businessman fueled the notion of international Destiny. This group strongly believed in America extending its authority over other lands. This authority can be done by either political, military or economic means, but no matter what the method, imperialism was the reason to extend Americas interest beyond the Pacific.

Although there was still an abundant amount of land throughout the world that applied to the Manifest Destiny ideology, acquiring land on opposite sides of the globe required new methods. It would not be as easy as building roads and displacing a few thousand American Indians. Controlling colonial possessions thousands of miles away required a new military commitment. Today, control of airspace is a key tactical advantage in modern warfare, but it all began with the modern Navy. The US steamed into oversees expansion when the federal government commissioned the building of several cruisers and battleships between 1883 to 1890. It was clear to the US that those countries who controlled the seas controlled their own destiny.

Cuba’s war with Spain and the era of “Yellow Journalism” served as the means to get those Americans on the cusp to join the international Manifest Destiny movement. At the time, newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were in fierce competition for readers of their respective newspapers. In an attempt to increase circulation, they sent correspondents to Cuba to cover the fighting between Cuba and Spain. The field journalist’s over-exaggerations of events, sensationalist reporting, and graphic details of the brutality and atrocities being committed by the Spanish, created a new form of journalism. It also helped arouse the popular sentiment of the American people. Yellow Journalism coaxed the American public to rally behind Cuba and America’s involvement. When president McKinley asked for a declaration of war against Spain in April 1898, he had the majority backing of the American public.

6 Michael T. Lubbrage, “Manifest Destiny,” (The Netherlands: University of Groningen, Dept. Of Alfa informatica, 2001), 3 June 2003 .

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VII The black silence of fear

by William O. Douglas

[The following excerpt was published in 1952 during the height of the McCarthy era and remains timely and familiar more than 50 years later. William O. Douglas served as a Supreme Court Associate Justice from 1939 until he retired in 1975.]

There is an ominous trend in this nation. We are developing tolerance only for the orthodox point of view on world affairs, intolerance for new or different approaches. We have over the years swung from tolerance to intolerance and back again. There have been years of intolerance when the views of minorities have been suppressed. But there probably has not been a period of greater intolerance than we witness today. 7

To understand this, I think one has to leave the country, go into the back regions of the world, lose himself there, and become absorbed in the problems of the peoples of different civilizations. When he returns to America after a few months he probably will be shocked. He will be shocked not at the intentions or purposes or ideals of the American people. He will be shocked at the arrogance and intolerance of great segments of the American press, at the arrogance and intolerance of many leaders in public office, at the arrogance and intolerance reflected in many of our attitudes toward Asia. He will find that thought is being standardized, that the permissible area for calm discussion is being narrowed, that the range of ideas is being limited, that many minds are closed . . .

This is alarming to one who loves his country. It means that the philosophy of strength through free speech is being forsaken for the philosophy of fear through repression.

That choice in Russia is conscious. Under Lenin the ministers and officials were encouraged to debate, to advance new ideas and criticisms. Once the debate was over, however, no dissension or disagreement was permitted. But even that small degree of tolerance for free discussion that Lenin permitted disappeared under Stalin. Stalin maintains a tight system of control, permitting no free speech, no real clash in ideas, even in the inner circle. We are, of course, not emulating either Lenin or Stalin. But we are drifting in the direction of repression, drifting dangerously fast.

The drift goes back, I think, to the fact that we carried over to days of peace the military approach to world affairs. Today in Asia we are identified not with ideas of freedom, but with guns. Today at home we are thinking less and less in terms of defeating communism with ideas, more and more in terms of defeating communism with military might.

The concentration on military means has helped to breed fear. It has bred fear and insecurity partly because of the horror of atomic war. But the real reason strikes deeper. In spite of our enormous expenditures, we see that Soviet imperialism continues to expand and that the expansion proceeds without the Soviets firing a shot. The free world continues to contract without a battle for its survival having been fought. It becomes apparent, as country after country falls to Soviet imperialistic ambitions, that military policy alone is a weak one, that military policy alone will end in political bankruptcy and futility. Thus fear mounts.

Fear has many manifestations. The Communist threat inside the country has been magnified and exalted far beyond its realities. Irresponsible talk by irresponsible people has fanned the flames of fear. Accusations have been loosely made. Character assassinations have become common. Suspicion has taken the place of goodwill. Once we could debate with impunity along a wide range of inquiry. Once we could safely explore to the edges of a problem, challenge orthodoxy without qualms, and run the gamut of ideas in search of solutions to perplexing problems. Once we had confidence in each other. Now there is suspicion. Innocent acts become telltale marks of disloyalty. The coincidence that an idea parallels Soviet Russia’s policy for a moment of time settles an aura of suspicion around a person.

Suspicion grows until only the orthodox idea is the safe one. Suspicion grows until only the person who loudly proclaims that orthodox view, or who, once having been a Communist, has been converted, is trustworthy. Competition for embracing the new orthodoxy increases. Those who are unorthodox are suspect. Everyone who does not follow the military policymakers is suspect. Everyone who voices opposition to the trend away from diplomacy and away from political tactics takes a chance. Some who are opposed are indeed “subversive.” Therefore, the thundering edict commands that all who are opposed are “subversive.” Fear is fanned to a fury. Good and honest men are pilloried. Character is assassinated. Fear runs rampant.

Fear has driven more and more men and women in all walks of life either to silence or to the folds of the orthodox. Fear has mounted: fear of losing one’s job, fear of being investigated, fear of being pilloried. This fear has stereotyped our thinking, narrowed the range of free public discussion, and driven many thoughtful people to despair. This fear has even entered universities, great citadels of our spiritual strength, and corrupted them. We have the spectacle of university officials lending themselves to one of the worst witch-hunts we have seen since early days.

This fear has affected the youngsters. Youth, like the opposition party in a parliamentary system has served a powerful role. It has cast doubts on our policies, challenged our inarticulate major premises, put the light on our prejudices, and exposed our inconsistencies. Youth has made each generation indulge in self-examination.

But a great change has taken place. Youth is still rebellious; but it is largely holding its tongue. There is the fear of being labeled a “subversive” if one departs from the orthodox party line. That charge, if leveled against a young man or young woman, may have profound effects. It may ruin a youngster’s business or professional career. No one wants a Communist in his organization nor anyone who is suspect.

This pattern of orthodoxy that is shaping our thinking has dangerous implications. No one man, no one group can have the answer to the many perplexing problems that today confront the management of world affairs. The scene is a troubled and complicated one. The problems require the pooling of many ideas, the exposure of different points of view, the hammering out in public discussions of the pros and cons of this policy or of that.

The great danger of this period is not inflation, nor the national debt, nor atomic warfare. The great, the critical danger is that we will so limit or narrow the range of permissible discussion and permissible thought that we will become victims of the orthodox school. If we do, we will lose flexibility. We will lose the capacity for expert management. We will then become wedded to a few techniques, to a few devices. They will define our policy and at the same time limit our ability to alter or modify it. Once we narrow the range of thought and discussion, we will surrender a great deal of our power. We will become like the man on the toboggan who can ride it but who can neither steer it nor stop it.

The mind of man must always be free. The strong society is one that sanctions and encourages freedom of thought and expression. Our real power is our spiritual strength, and that spiritual strength stems from our civil liberties. If we are true to our traditions, if we are tolerant of a whole marketplace of ideas, we will always be strong. Our weakness grows when we become intolerant of opposing ideas, depart from our standards of civil liberties, and borrow the policeman’s philosophy from the enemy we detest.

7 William O. Douglas, “The Black Silence of Fear,” The New York Times Magazine, 13 January 1952 .

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VIII The Price of Empire

by J. William Fulbright

[As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Fulbright was a vocal and powerful critic of the Vietnam War. In this 1967 speech he connects the urban unrest of the sixties to American foreign policy abroad, linking himself intellectually with those most critical of American society and its expansive role in international affairs. This speech gives insight into where American global engagement during the Cold War Era led-to a period of social unrest, bitter division over the Vietnam War, and disillusionment. Particularly striking is Fulbright’s praise for those “idealistic” young people who, it happens, shared his vision of “the price of empire.”]

Standing in the smoke and rubble of Detroit, a Negro veteran said: “I just got back from Vietnam a few months ago, but you know, I think the war is here.” There are in fact two wars going on. One is the war of power politics which our soldiers are fighting in the jungles of southeast Asia. The other is a war for America’s soul, which is being fought in the streets of Newark and Detroit and in the halls of Congress, in churches and protest meetings, on college campuses, and in the hearts and minds of silent Americans from Maine to Hawaii.8

I believe that the two wars have something to do with each other, not in the direct, tangibly causal way that bureaucrats require as proof of a connection between two things, but in a subtler, moral and qualitative way that is no less real for being intangible.

Each of these wars might well be going on in the absence of the other, but neither, I suspect, standing alone, would seem so hopeless and demoralizing. The connection between Vietnam and Detroit is in their conflicting and incompatible demands upon traditional American values. The one demands that they be set aside, the other that they be fulfilled. The one demands the acceptance by America of an imperial role in the world, or of what our policy makers like to call the “responsibilities of power,” or of what I have called the “arrogance of power.” The other demands freedom and social justice at home, an end to poverty, the fulfillment of our flawed democracy, and an effort to create a role for ourselves in the world which is compatible with our traditional values.

The question, it should be emphasized, is not whether it is possible to engage in traditional power politics abroad and at the same time to perfect democracy at home, but whether it is possible for us Americans, without particular history and national character, to combine morally incompatible roles.

Administration officials tell us that we can indeed afford both Vietnam and the Great Society, and they produce impressive statistics of the gross national product to prove it. The statistics show financial capacity but they do not show moral and psychological capacity. They do not show how a President preoccupied with bombing missions over North and South Vietnam can provide strong and consistent leadership for the renewal of our cities. They do not show how a Congress burdened with war costs and war measures, with emergency briefings and an endless series of dramatic appeals, with anxious constituents and a mounting anxiety of their own, can tend to the workaday business of studying social problems and legislating programs to meet them. Nor do the statistics tell how an anxious and puzzled people, bombarded by press and television with the bad news of American deaths in Vietnam, the “good news” of enemy deaths-and with vividly horrifying pictures to illustrate them-can be expected to support neighborhood antipoverty projects and national programs for urban renewal, employment and education.

Anxiety about war does not breed compassion for one’s neighbors; nor do constant reminders of the cheapness of life abroad strengthen our faith in its sanctity at home. In these ways the war in Vietnam is poisoning and brutalizing our domestic life. Psychological incompatibility has proven to be more controlling than financial feasibility; and the Great Society has become a sick society.

Imperial destiny and the American dream

When he visited America a hundred years ago, Thomas Huxley wrote: “I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?”

The question is still with us and we seem to have come to a time of historical crisis when its answer can no longer be deferred. Before the Second World War our world role was a potential role; we were important in the world for what we could do with our power, for the leadership we might provide, for the example we might set. Now the choices are almost gone: we are almost the world’s self-appointed policeman; we are almost the world defender of the status quo. We are well on our way to becoming a traditional great power-an imperial nation If you will-engaged in the exercise of power for its own sake, exercising it to the limit of our capacity and beyond, filling every vacuum and extending the American “presence” to the farthest reaches of the earth. And, as with the great empires of the past, as the power grows, it is becoming an end in itself, separated except by ritual incantation from its initial motives, governed, it would seem, by its own mystique, power without philosophy or purpose. That is something which none of the great empires of the past has ever done or tried to do or wanted to do, but we were bold enough-or presumptuous enough-to think that we might be able to do it. And there are a great many Americans who still think we can do it-or at least they want to try.

That, I believe, is what all the hue and cry is about-the dissent in the Senate and the protest marches in the cities, the letters to the President from student leaders and former Peace Corps volunteers, the lonely searching of conscience by a student facing the draft and the letter
to a Senator from a soldier in the field who can no longer accept the official explanations of why he has been sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. All believe that their country was cut out for something more ennobling than an imperial destiny. Our youth are showing that they still believe in the American dream, and their protests attest to its continuing vitality.

There appeared in a recent issue of the journal Foreign Affairs a curious little article complaining about the failure of many American intellectuals to support what the author regards as America’s unavoidable “imperial role” in the world. The article took my attention because it seems a faithful statement of the governing philosophy of American foreign policy while also suggesting how little the makers of that policy appreciate the significance of the issue between themselves and their critics.

It is taken for granted-not set forth as an hypothesis to be proved-that, any great power, in the author’s words, “is entangled in a web of responsibilities from which there is no hope of escape,” and that “there is no way the United States, as the world’s
mightiest power, can avoid such an imperial role. . . .” The author’s displeasure with the “intellectuals”-he uses the word more or less to describe people who disagree with the Administration’s policy-is that, in the face of this alleged historical inevitability, they are putting up a disruptive, irritating and futile resistance. They are doing this, he believes, because they are believers in “ideology”-the better word would be “values” or “ideals”-and this causes their thinking to be “irrelevant” to foreign policy.

Here, inadvertently, the writer puts his finger on the nub of the current crisis. The students and churchmen and professors who are protesting the Vietnam war do not accept the notion that foreign policy is a matter of expedients to which values are irrelevant. They reject this notion because they understand, as some of our policy makers do not understand, that it is ultimately self-defeating to “fight fire with fire,” that you cannot defend your values in a manner that does violence to those values without destroying the very thing you are trying to defend.

They understand, as our policy makers do not, that when American soldiers are sent, in the name of freedom, to sustain corrupt dictators in a civil war, that when the CIA subverts student organizations to engage in propaganda activities abroad, or when the Export-Import Bank is used by the Pentagon to finance secret arms sales abroad, damage-perhaps irreparable damage-is being done to the very values that are meant to be defended. The critics understand, as our policy makers do not, that, through the undemocratic expedients we have adopted for the defense of American democracy, we are weakening it to a degree that is beyond theresources of our bitterest enemies.

Nor do the dissenters accept the romantic view that a nation is powerless to choose the role it will play in the world, that some mystic force of history or destiny requires a powerful nation to be an imperial nation, dedicated to what Paul Goodman calls the “empty system of power,” to the pursuit of power without purpose, philosophy or compassion.” The critics of our current course also challenge the contention that the traditional methods of foreign policy are safe and prudent and realistic.

They are understandably skeptical of their wise and experienced elders who, in the name of prudence, caution against any departure from the tried and true methods that have led in this century to Sarejevo, Munich and Dien Bien Phu. They think that the methods of the past have been tried and found wanting, and two world wars attest powerfully to their belief. At present much of the world is repelled by America and what America seems to stand for in the world. Both in our foreign affairs and in our domestic life we convey an image of violence; I do not care very much about images as distinguished from the things they reflect, but this image is rooted in reality. Abroad, we are engaged in a savage and unsuccessful war against poor people in a small and backward nation.

At home-largely because of the neglect resulting from twenty-five years of preoccupation with foreign involvements-our cities are exploding in violent protest against generations of social injustice. America, which only a few years ago seemed to the world to be a model of democracy and social justice, has become a symbol of violence and undisciplined power. Far from building a safe world environment for American values, our war in Vietnam and the domestic deterioration which it has aggravated are creating a most uncongenial world atmosphere for American ideas and values. The world has no need, in this age of nationalism and nuclear weapons, for a new imperial power, but there is a great need of moral leadership-by which I mean the leadership of decent example. That role could be ours but we have vacated the field, and all that has kept the Russians from filling it is their own lack of imagination.

At the same time, as we have noted, and of even greater fundamental importance, our purposeless and undisciplined use of power is causing a profound controversy in our own society. This in a way is something to be proud of. We have sickened but not succumbed and just as a healthy body fights disease, we are fighting the alien concept which is being thrust upon us, not by history but by our policy makers in the Department of State and the Pentagon. We are proving the strength of the American dream by resisting the dream of an imperial destiny. We are demonstrating the validity of our traditional values by the difficulty we are having in betraying them.

The principal defenders of these values are our remarkable younger generation, something of whose spirit is expressed in a letter which I received from an American soldier in Vietnam. Speaking of the phony propaganda on both sides, and then of the savagery of the war, or the people he describes as the “real casualties”-“the farmers and their families in the Delta mangled by air strikes, and the villagers here killed and burned out by our friendly Korean mercenaries”-this young soldier then asks “Whatever has become of our dream? Where is
that America that opposed tyrannies at every turn, without inquiring first whether some particular forms of tyranny might be of use to us? Of the three rights which men have, the first, as I recall, was the right to life. How then have we come to be killing so many in such a dubious cause?”

The sick society

While the death toll mounts in Vietnam, it is mounting too in the war at home. During a single week of July 1967, 164 Americans were killed and 1,442 wounded in Vietnam, while 65 Americans were killed and 2,100 were wounded in city riots in the United States. We are truly fighting a two-front war and doing badly in both. Each war feeds on the other and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either.

Why should not riots and snipers’ bullets bring the white man to an awareness of the Negro’s plight when peaceful programs for housing and jobs and training have been more rhetoric than reality? Ugly and shocking thoughts are in the American air and they were forged in the Vietnam crucible. Black power extremists talk of “wars of liberation” in the urban ghettoes of America. A cartoon in a London newspaper showed two Negro soldiers in battle in Vietnam with one saying to the other: “This is going to be great training for civilian life.”

An unnecessary and immoral war deserves in its own right to be liquidated; when its effect in addition is the aggravation of grave problems and the corrosion of values in our own society, its liquidation under terms of reasonable and honorable compromise is doubly imperative. Our country is being weakened by a grotesque inversion of priorities, the effects of which are becoming clear to more and more Americans-in the Congress, in the press and in the country at large. Even the Washington Post, a newspaper which has obsequiously supported the Administration’s policy in Vietnam, took note in a recent editorial of the “ugly image of a world policeman incapable of policing itself” as against the “absolute necessity of a sound domestic base for an effective foreign policy,” and then commented: “We are confronted simultaneously with an urgent domestic crisis and an urgent foreign crisis and our commitments to both are clear.”

Priorities are reflected in the things we spend money on. Far from being a dry accounting of bookkeepers, a nation’s budget is full of moral implications; it tells what a society cares about and what it does not care about; it tells what its values are. Here are a few statistics on America’s values: Since 1946 we have spent over $1,578 billion through our regular national budget. Of this amount over $904 billion, or 57.29 percent of the total, have gone for military power. By contrast, less than $96 billion, or 6.08 percent, were spent on “social functions” including education, health, labor and welfare programs, housing and community development.

The Administration’s budget for fiscal year 1968 calls for almost $76 billion to be spent on the military and only $15 billion for “social functions.” I would not say that we have shown ourselves to value weapons five or ten times as much as we value domestic social needs, as the figures suggest; certainly much of our military spending has been necessitated by genuine requirements of national security.

I think, however, that we have embraced the necessity with excessive ethusiasm, that the Congress has been all too willing to provide unlimited sums for the military and not really very reluctant at all to offset these costs to a very small degree by cutting away funds for the poverty program and urban renewal, for rent supplements for the poor and even for a program to help protect slum children from being bitten by rats. Twenty million dollars a year to eliminate rats-about one one-hundredth of the monthly cost of the war in Vietnam- would not eliminate slum riots but, as Tom Wicker has written, “It would only suggest that somebody cared.” The discrepancy of attitudes tells at least as much about our national values as the discrepancy of dollars.

The regenerative power of youth

While the country sickens for lack of moral leadership, a most remarkable younger generation has taken up the standard of American idealism. Unlike so many of their elders, they have perceived the fraud and sham in American life and are unequivocally rejecting it. Some, the hippies, have simply withdrawn, and while we may regret the loss of their energies and their sense of decency, we can hardly gainsay their evaluation of the state of society.

Others of our youth are sardonic and skeptical, not, I think, because they do not want ideals but because they want the genuine article and will not tolerate fraud. Others-students who wrestle with their consciences about the draft, soldiers who wrestle with their consciences about the war, Peace Corps volunteers who strive to light the spark of human dignity among the poor of India or Brazil, and VISTA volunteers who try to do the same for our own poor in Harlem or Appalachia- are striving to keep alive the traditional values of American democracy.
They are not really radical, these young idealists, no more radical, that is, than Jefferson’s idea of freedom, Lincoln’s idea of equality, or Wilson’s idea of a peaceful community of nations.

Some of them, it is true, are taking what many regard as radical action, but they are doing it in defense of traditional values and in protest against the radical departure from those values embodied in the idea of an imperial destiny for America. The focus of their protest is the war in Vietnam and the measure of their integrity is the fortitude with which they refused to be deceived about it. By striking contrast with the young Germans who accepted the Nazi evil because the values of their society had disintegrated and they had no normal frame of reference, these young Americans are demonstrating the vitality of American values. They are demonstrating that, while their country is capable of acting falsely to itself, it cannot do so without internal disruption, without calling forth the regenerative counterforce of protest from Americans who are willing to act in defense ofthe principles they were brought up to believe in.

The spirit of this regenerative generation has been richly demonstrated to me in letters from student leaders, from former Peace Corps volunteers and from soldiers fighting in Vietnam. I quoted from one earlier in my remarks. Another letter that is both striking and representative was written by an officer still in Vietnam. He wrote: “For eleven years I was, before this war, I was a Regular commissioned officer-a professional military man in name and spirit; now-in name only. To fight well (as do the VC), a soldier must believe in his leadership. I, and many I have met, have lost faith in ours. Since I hold that duty to conscience is higher than duty to the administration (not ‘country’ as cry the nationalists). I declined a promotion and have resigned my commission. I am to be discharged on my return, at which time I hope to contribute in some way to the search for peace in Vietnam.”

Some years ago Archibald MacLeish characterized the American people as follows: “Races didn’t bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race.
They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls.” Now the possession of their souls is being challenged by the false and dangerous dream of an imperial destiny. It may be that the challenge will succeed, that America will succumb to becoming a traditional empire and will reign for a time over what must surely be a moral if not a physical wasteland, and then, like the great empires of the past, will decline or fall. Or it may be that the effort to create so grotesque an anachronism will go up in flames of nuclear holocaust.

But if I had to bet my money on what is going to happen, I would bet on this younger generation-this generation who reject the inhumanity of war in a poor and distant land, who reject the poverty and sham in their own country, this generation who are telling their elders what their elders ought to have known, that the price of empire is America’s soul and that price
is too high.

8 J. William Fulbright, “The Price of Empire,” 1967 .

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