A brief reconstruction of American Exceptionalism-Part 4

In the last chapter I discussed the effects of American exceptionalism on the American policies until the First World War. I also discussed how the exceptional thinking influenced American concepts of “Manifest Destiny” which lead to an aggressive and imperial foreign policy during the early 1900-s in places like Philippines.

In this part I will discuss the development of American exceptionalism from the First World War into the end of the Second World War. Alike the previous periods of American exceptional experience, this particular period will also be marked by the profound fear, anxiety and paranoia among the American exceptionalists.

As we have mentioned previously, the puritans, the forefathers of the American exceptionalists considered American landmass as a God given gift to them and they naturally considered any ideas particularly those coming out of what they considered “Old Europe” as abhorrent and irreconcilably alien to their way of life.

The American exceptionalists were reluctant at best to participate in the First World War when it broke out in 1914. The primary reason behind this was the attitude of the American elite not to get involved in a conflict which they considered being in a far away continent and which did not directly threaten them or their interests. To put it simply the American elite did not wanted to get involved in a conflict which were not their own making and from which they did not have much to gain from. Another reason was that the American army at the time was no match for some of the European armies like Germany. This attitude on the part of the American exceptionalists not to get involved in a foreign conflict is coined by the historians as “isolationism”. This attitude will change soon due to certain events that would force them directly into the conflict.

Although the American elite did not take any direct combat role until 1918, it greatly profited from the war by selling military equipment to the entente powers i.e. Britain, France and Russia. Now the central powers and particularly the Germans wanted to stop this. The Germans decided to wreck havoc in the major sea lanes of the world by targeting any ship which they thought to be cooperating with the allies. The American merchant ships were regularly getting sunk by the German U-boats. This was creating a huge amount of public pressure upon the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to join the allies in the war against the Germans. Another event which also forced the hand of the president Woodrow Wilson to join the war was the Zimmermann telegram. In 1917, the British intelligence caught a telegram from the foreign secretary of German empire Arthur Zimmermann. The telegram promised Mexico German aid for joining the war against the U.S. for getting back lost Mexican territories such as Texas and Arizona, in case the U.S. decided to join the war against Germany.

The Zimmermann telegram along with an all-out and unrestrained total submarine warfare by the Germans against the neutral particularly American ships ultimately led President Woodrow Wilson to declare war against Germany in 1918.
When a student of history looks at the American decision to join the war so late in the day, he will obviously think of certain motives. The primary reason was that the American exceptionalists did not want to be excluded from the process of sharing the war spoils. Another reason was that the American elite did join the war when they knew it for sure that the entente powers will win in the end. They also calculated that America will find a lot of potential profit for rebuilding war-torn Europe after the war was over.
All these led to President Wilson to join the First World War in 1918.

The U.S. as well as the entente powers ended up in the winning side. But the loss of life and property was in colossal proportions all over Europe. Some of the monarchies who have been ruling some of the European empires for centuries, ended up in the ash hip of the history. The Hapsburgs of Austria, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the Romanovs in Russia and the Ottomans in Turkey all were no more. New states and new nations were coming into being for the first time in history. The old great empires were coming at an end.

Among all the tumultuous changes after the First World War, the most significant event was the Russian revolution in 1917. The Romanov dynasty which had ruled the Great Russian landmass for centuries was no more. The people who replaced the Romanovs were called Marxists i.e. followers of the legendary philosopher Karl Marx. The motto of the new rulers of Russia was also unique in human history. Instead of national pride and militarism which were regular norms of the day, the communists in Soviet Union (the new government replacing the Russian empire) talked about hitherto unheard things such as “classless society”, “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “unity of working class people all over the world”. This was a unique experience in terms of human history. Instead of the narrow national sentiments, the communists led by Vladimir Lenin were talking about universal rights for the downtrodden workers and peasants in the world. Instead of any national or religious overtones, for the first time in the Western history there was a government which was calling for universal values. Undoubtedly in the years to come, the reverberations of the Russian revolution would be heard all over the world as well as in the U.S.A.

From the beginning the American exceptionalists were opposed to the ideas of communism. The Soviet Union had eliminated all the existing ruling classes of the Czarist Russia which included the rich landlords and the priesthood. The American exceptionalists had a deep feeling of paranoia about anything that challenges the existing order. Apart from that the American exceptionalists considered any idea coming from Europe to be a possible pollutant which may well end up polluting the body politic of the divinely gifted America. So the American exceptionalists from it’s very beginning were opposed to the ideals of Marx.

Class consciousness also played a very important role in shaping the hatred of the American exceptionalists against Marxist ideas. The rich American industrialist class had a terrible fear of their workers striking en masse for equal rights, it was natural only that they opposed the communist ideas. The American clergy feared communism since they believed that communists will convert their folk to atheism and there will be no work left for them. They also feared that Communism as an atheist and anti-religious idea. The political elite feared communism since they thought that the Communist influence will create rebellion against American hegemony in countries like Cuba and the Philippines.

Communism was considered an alien and foreign, European ideology by the American exceptionalists which they thought was about to destroy the American way of life. Thereby they any one even remotely involved with communism as “un-Americans”. The fear of communist ideas was so great in the mind of the American exceptionalists that a mere mention of the word “revolution” was enough to create paranoia among the American exceptionalists. So much was the fear of the communism among the American exceptionalists that they could not differentiate between the ideas of Communism or socialism or anarchism.

Some of the most common ideas about Communism in the American exceptional mind were as following:

1. Communism would destroy traditional society norms like family and marriage.
2. Women will be made state property under Communism.
3. People will be made to starve under Communism.
4. A strong and omnipotent state which will control all aspects of public life under Communism.
5. Religion and Church will be abolished under Communism.

The American exceptionalists not only were so fearful about Communism but from the beginning made every effort to annihilate and obliterate Communism from the face of the earth.

The exceptionalists decided to make a coordinated effort at both home and abroad for destroying abroad.

The U.S. senate had created a committee called the Overman committee for looking into issues regarding German sabotage acts inside U.S during the First World War In 1919, one after the end of the war, the committee’s mandate was extended to monitor any communist activities inside the U.S. to study any effort to incite the overthrow of the Government of U.S. The committee in its final presentations presented an alarming image of communism as an imminent threat to the U.S. government and American exceptional values. The committee also tried to show communism as a German ploy against the U.S. by pointing out that Karl Marx and Frederic Engels were Germans.
Some prominent U.S. politicians at the time like the U.S. senator Knute Nelson tried to portray American progressives and liberals as agents of communism and Soviet Union.
The Senator Knute Nelson made the comment "Then they have really rendered a service to the various classes of progressives and reformers that we have here in this country."

Some American anti-communists even spread news that Women have been made state property in the Soviet Union. Undoubtedly this was nothing but untrue.
Even the American mass media started sensationalism as a chip trick to gain market share as well as spreading government sponsored propaganda. Some of the headlines described Russians and communists in general as "assassins and madmen," "human scum," "crime mad," and "beasts." After a peaceful march by workers in Cleveland, Ohio in 1919 was violently broken by the authorities The Salt Lake City Tribune did not think anyone had a right to march. It published: "Free speech has been carried to the point where it is an unrestrained menace."

The American exceptionalists had long feared that the African-American community which was facing oppression because of the racial segregation laws might join the international communist movement and create a rebellion inside the U.S.A.
African American communities faced large scale organized racial violence during this time. One of the most infamous events during this time was in Chicago. Chicago's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who swam into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned. Blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted 13 days. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order. In mid-summer, in the middle of the Chicago riots, a "federal official" told the New York Times that the violence resulted from "an agitation, which involves the I.W.W., Bolshevism and the worst features of other extreme radical movements." He supported that claim with copies of Negro publications that called for alliances with leftist groups, praised the Soviet regime, and contrasted the courage of jailed Socialist Eugene V. Debs with the "school boy rhetoric" of traditional black leaders. The Times characterized the publications as "vicious and apparently well financed," mentioned "certain factions of the radical Socialist elements," and reported it all under the headline: "Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt."

American exceptionalists were fearful of any organized worker’s unions. Workers’ unions were considered as mouthpieces for propagating and practicing communism. When the policemen in Boston went onto strike in 1919 for an increase in their wages and betterments in their working conditions, Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis denied that police officers had any right to form a union. The strikers were called "deserters" and "agents of Lenin." The Philadelphia Public Ledger viewed the Boston violence in the same light as many other of 1919's events: "Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a specter. Boston in chaos reveals its sinister substance." President Woodrow Wilson, speaking from Montana, branded the walkout "a crime against civilization" that left the city "at the mercy of an army of thugs."
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge saw in the strike the dangers of the national labor movement: "If the American Federation of Labor succeeds in getting hold of the police in Boston it will go all over the country, and we shall be in measurable distance of Soviet government by labor unions." The Ohio State Journal opposed any sympathetic treatment of the strikers: "When a policeman strikes, he should be debarred not only from resuming his office, but from citizenship as well. He has committed the unpardonable sin; he has forfeited all his rights." Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge who would go on to become 30-th president of the U.S., put the anti-union position simply: "There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime."

The workers did not let up with their protests against the system. Gradually the strikes expanded to core industrial sectors such as steel and coal in the same year of 1919. To crush the protesters the local and Federal governments declared an all-out war. Playing to the traditional nativism of the American people, the steel industry management spread the rumor that strikers were immigrants. This turned the American people against the strikers. After strikebreakers and police clashed with unionists in Gary, Indiana, the U.S. Army took over the city on October 6, 1919, and martial law was declared.

Amazingly on the one hand when the steel industry management were spreading the rumor that the strikers were immigrants at the same time they brought in thousands of Mexican and African immigrants to replace the white English-speaking workers who had gone on to strike.

Congress conducted its own investigation, focused on radical influence upon union activity. In that context, U.S. Senator Kenneth McKellar, a member of the Senate committee investigating the strike, proposed making one of the Philippine Islands a penal colony to which those convicted of an attempt to overthrow the government could be deported.

The American Exceptionalists not only used the threat of deporting the leaders of the striking workers as rhetoric in fact they implemented their threat. A ship named “Buford” which was also known as the “Soviet Arc” left New York Harbor in December, 1920. On board were 249 workers who were allegedly involved in the “Bolshevik plan to destroy the American way of life”. These workers were sentenced to be deported to the Soviet Union as “American Christmas day gift for Lenin and Trotsky”.

Most of the press approved enthusiastically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake." The New York Evening Mail said: "Just as the sailing of the Ark that Noah built was a pledge for the preservation of the human race, so the sailing of the Ark of the Soviet is a pledge for the preservation of America."

Even Hollywood came up with it’s own ideas to denounce communism. Movies made in this era all had a strong anti-communist element to it. Movies like “Bolshevism on trial”, “Dangerous Hours”, “The Volcano” all of which were made in this period had a strong anti-Communist storyline in it.
Some other Movies like “The New Moon” or “The World and it’s Woman” were focused on the particular fear of “Nationalization of Woman by the Bolsheviks” by the American exceptionalists.
President Woodrow Wilson decided to destroy Soviet Union by taking the fight to the Soviet territory, itself. 5,000 US army soldiers were sent in the campaign as the "American North Russia Expeditionary Force" in Archangelsk, north Russia. These troops were part of a coalition of entente powers whose main motive was to expand anti-Bolshevik force of whites and, in the process, stop the spread of communism and the Communist cause in Russia. Another 8,000 US soldiers, organized as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia, were shipped to Vladivostok from the Philippines and from Camp Fremont in California. However as the anti-communist White generals began to lose in the battles against the Soviet red army, gradually all these western mercenaries were withdrawn by their governments. However some remained to perform acts of sabotage and incitement against the Soviet Union.

I must mention that not all American intellectuals opposed Communism at the time. In fact some like John Reed would become biggest supporters of communism with their monumental works like “Ten days that shook the world”.

As time moved on, the exceptionalist mode in the U.S.A continued to be suspicious and hateful towards Communism or any idea which talked about revolutionary changes in traditional social norms.

One of the biggest events in American history between the two world wars was the great depression which started to affect the U.S.A from 1929. The whole western world were affected during the great depression which resulted in a massive rise in unemployment , bank and other industrial foreclosures , stock market and other financial market crashes , and a virtual halt in manufacturing and heavy industries.

In the U.S.A the Unemployment rate reached 25% at early 1933. In the agricultural heartland of the U.S.A particularly in regions like Tennessee and Georgia a drought persisted throughout the period and businesses and families defaulted on record numbers of loans. By this time 5000 banks had failed.

The newly elected president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) who during his election campaign promised to bring in new reforms for alleviating the plight of the impoverished masses, decided on an economic reform program called “new deal”.

The “new deal” wanted to re-distribute wealth by taxing the rich and massive government spending in key economic activities generating employment.

Some of the American exceptionalists were up in arms from the beginning against the new deal. There were different reasons for these exceptionalists to oppose the new deal. As I have mentioned previously the exceptionalists tend to be really afraid of any new idea which might change their way of life. The new deal talked about measures like redistributing of wealth as well as state funding for economic activities and creation of institutions like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) whose job was to monitor the activities of the big business. In the mind of the American exceptionalists all these measures would hinder the freedom of the rich to do business as they pleased. In their minds the exceptionalists also found parallels and similarities with the new deal measures with the planned economic policies of their archenemy, the Soviet Union. The fear of government control in their lifestyles was the main paranoia behind the exceptionalist opposition towards the new deal. The Libertarians among the American exceptionalists, who were always suspicious about government intervention in their lives, grew more suspicious towards the federal government. From this time onwards any new government involvement either socio-economic or political realm will be considered as “socialist” or “communist” by these group of American exceptionalists. This particular tradition would continue till our time. When Barrack Obama wanted to pass his new healthcare reform measures providing benefit to the millions of uninsured patients in the American healthcare system in terms of government sponsored financial aid, the whole gamut of modern American exceptionalists blamed him for spreading “socialism” and endangering the American way of life.

Father Charles Coughlin, the famous catholic preacher who was a megastar in radio talk shows at the time was a virulent critic of President FDR and his new deal measures.

By 1936, Coughlin compared the New Deal to, “…the red mud of Soviet Communism and…the stinking cesspool of pagan autocracy.” Coughlin believed in an international conspiracy led by Jewish bankers and other power brokers. It was these men, according to Coughlin, that had financed the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia.

When Congress considered increasing the amount of silver in order to create more currency – at 25% above world prices, Coughlin maneuvered to get the bill passed although FDR opposed it. Eventually, it was disclosed that Coughlin’s Radio League owned one half million ounces of silver.
(Courtesy: modern-us-history.suite101.com)

Father Coughlin will not be the last exceptionalist to manipulate mass media for personal benefit. He was the predecessor of Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of our time.

When the exceptionalists and their other conservative counterparts were busy denouncing new deal and communism, ominous clouds were gathering on the skies over Europe. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia had created a deep paranoia and reaction among the traditional European societies. Now these attitudes will burst into movements that will ultimately change the face of Europe for years to come.

In Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal reactionary and ultra-nationalists had come to power. Now let us see how the American exceptionalists reacted towards this phenomenon.

Some American exceptionalists were astonished by the success of the Nazi Germany in terms of economics and industrialization. They admired the fact that a people who were so devastated after the First World War could make such great improvement, overcoming all the difficulties in a very short span of time. Another reason for American exceptionalists to have a favorable view of the Third Reich was the view that the Third Reich would work as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. This particular view about Hitler’s Germany was shared by almost all the major Western nations including Britain and France at the time. Another reason for the admiration of the American exceptionalists for Third Reich could be considered as a kind of ideological similarity. Alike the American exceptionalists the Nazis also considered that Germanic race and their Germanic culture is superior over all other Western nations and they have a God-given right to play a special role in shaping the future of the western civilization. This could be one of the ideological considerations that helped establish the attitude of admiration among some of the prominent American exceptionalists of the period like the the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and the industrialist Henry Ford.

Both Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were awarded the “Order of the German Eagle” by Third Reich for their contributions in building relationship between the U.S.A and Third Reich. Charles Lindbergh was a great admirer of German military strength and wanted German to use it’s military might against what he termed “Asiatic communism” of the Soviet Union. In a controversial 1939 Reader's Digest article, Lindbergh said, "Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations... and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection."
Lindbergh deplored the rivalry between Germany and Britain but favored a war between Germany and Russia.

When the Second World War finally commenced from 1939, Lindbergh became one of the prominent members of the anti-war America First Committee whose main job was to campaign against the United States participating in the War in Europe. Lindbergh also said at the time that the “the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization.”

During his January 23, 1941, testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lindbergh recommended the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany.

At a speech at Des Moines on 11-th September, 1941 said that three groups “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” were pushing America into war which will not serve American interests. He also said “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation.”

Lindbergh considered Russia to be a "semi-Asiatic" country compared to Germany, and he found Communism to be an ideology that would destroy the West's "racial strength" and replace everyone of European descent with "a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown." He openly stated, if he had to choose, he would rather see America allied with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia.

Famous industrialist Henry Ford and Adolph Hitler admired each other's achievements. Adolph Hitler kept a life-size portrait of Ford next to his desk. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the Chancellor of Germany in 1933. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal awarded by Third Reich to foreigners.

The U.S.A finally decided to join the war in favor of the allies in 1941 following the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor.

The USA finally avenged the Pearl Harbor with atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the fag end of the Second World War. The reasons behind the decision to use atomic bomb for the first time in history were:

1. To force a quick surrender of the Japanese so as to prevent losing a huge number of American soldiers in the upcoming invasion of the Japanese Islands. One of the senior American military officers in the pacific actually made a remark that “I will sacrifice a million Japs to spare one American life.”
2. To create enormous amount of psychological pressure among the Japanese government and it’s people so that they ultimately surrender. The US Secretary of War Henry L Stimson said in 1947 that “The atomic bomb was more than a weapon of terrible destruction; it was a psychological weapon.”
3. To show the rest of the world particularly to the Soviet Union that the United States of America has and will use such weapons of mass destruction to destroy it’s enemies.


The U.S.A along with the allies Britain and Soviet Union went to war against the axis of Third Reich, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. In the end despite being on the winning side, the suspicion among the US and Britain against the Soviet Union were not coming to an end. The new fear was that the Soviet Union which did the bulk of fighting in the European theater would become more powerful and the influence of Soviet Union will gradually increase throughout the world. The Americans thought that they were helpless to prevent the Soviet Union looming large in Eastern Europe. FDR personally mentioned this to the disappointed Polish ambassador in Washington “Do you expect us and Great Britain to declare war on Joe Stalin if they cross your previous frontier? Even if we wanted to, Russia can still field an army twice our combined strength and we would have no say in the matter after all.”

Although the USA and it’s allies had defeated the Third Reich but they still considered the Soviet Union as their mortal threat. The American exceptionalists will continue to fight Soviet Union in what would be called the “Cold War”.

I will discuss the role of American exceptionalism throughout the cold war and the aftermath of that war in the next chapter.

A brief reconstruction of American Exceptionalism-Part 3

In the first two essays of this current series, we have viewed how American exceptionalism influenced American policies from the early Puritan settlements till the American civil war.

In this part, I will discuss how American exceptionalism shaped the American worldview from the end of the civil war till the beginning of the First World War.

In this time period we will see that the American exceptionalism will be influenced by things like White Supremacism, Imperialism , Militarism and extreme nationalism.

The progressives whom I have mentioned in my previous essay , will evolve more and more to turn to pacifism and anti-imperialism and some of the progressives will ultimately go on to reject American exceptionalism altogether.

As we have observed previously that the US imperial project started with the concepts of “Manifest Destiny” and “Monroe Doctrine”. The American exceptional elite wanted to expand it’s ideas and hegemony beyond it’s borders so they adopted the concept of “Manifest Destiny” which maintains that America is divinely destined to expand it’s ideas and values overseas. Another important point here is that with the concepts of the “Monroe Doctrine” the American exceptional elite wanted to ensure that no European or any other outside power apart from the USA can influence the newly independent Latin American Spanish colonies.

The USA went through rapid industrialization in the period after the end of the civil war. This period is called “reconstruction”. The USA saw rapid industrialization during this period. The growth of railroads, telegraph and telephone, robber companies, banks and other financial companies, car companies and oil companies all happened during this particular period. Some very famous business people like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan all made their names during this period.
The rapid industrialization meant that the USA needed a steady flow of raw materials like iron, coal, timber and oil which are absolutely essential for a rapid, mass production of industrial goods and services. To procure all these materials the USA needed to acquire vast amount of territories from where it can produce the raw materials needed for industrial expansion. Another point is that the US population had grow rapidly during this particular period so the USA needed both the extra territory as well as those raw materials (that comes with new territories) for providing jobs and food for the growing population.

Hence the American exceptional elite, under pressure from the newly affluent industrial class started it’s first moves towards colonialism and imperialism. The exceptional elite at this period were much influenced by a voracious appetite for acquiring new territories. The exceptional ideas at this period also show a greater influence of worldly needs like conquering new territories and the divine justification of those worldly needs.

Actually the USA had started to expand it’s size even before the civil war. USA annexed Texas from Mexico in 1845 and followed it up with a war with that country in 1846 which went until 1848. In that war the USA conquered vast amount of territories in the state of California. The greed to annex vast territories of the resource rich ad fertile Californian state was very much part of the American mainstream political discourse at the time. In 1842 American minister in Mexico, Waddy Thompson, Jr. suggested that "As to Texas I regard it as of very little value compared with California, the richest, the most beautiful and the healthiest country in the world... with the acquisition of Upper California we should have the same ascendancy on the Pacific... France and England both have had their eyes upon it." So it is clear that the exceptional elite had the designs of conquering a large chunk of Mexican territory even before the civil war period.

I mentioned in my previous essay that an important part of US foreign policy was the “Monroe doctrine” which was designed to create an American hegemony in regard to the Latin American countries which were at that time fighting to unshackle themselves from the Spanish colonial yoke.
So when President William McKinley declared war upon Spain in 1898 he was following one of his predecessors James Polk who had declared war upon Mexicans, little more than half a century back. In both the cases the US presidents had explained to their public and to the world in general that the aim of USA in those wars was to liberate oppressed peoples not to seize territory. The oppressed peoples of Cuba and Philippines, who were already fighting the oppressive rule, welcomed the US decision to join them in their freedom struggle against that “Old world colonist” Spain. Little did those naïve people of Cuba and Philippines knew that their benefactor USA would become their oppressor as soon as the Spanish were defeated. Indeed the American role in those two countries will prove to be as tragic to the people of those two nations as the Spanish colonial rule was.

Our readers will notice a pattern between these American wars of remote past and the American wars of the present. President William McKinley will not be the last President to declare a foreign war for “liberating” an oppressed people where the USA will end up being the oppressors themselves. A century later, another US President will declare war upon the people of Iraq for “liberating” them. The similarity between both the wars is that both the wars will bring horrible death and destruction of an entire culture for the people who would be at the other end of the “liberation” in these wars.

I will go into detail into the wars of “Manifest Destiny” but before that let us look at the effects of American exceptionalism in the post-civil war American society.
As I did mention before that the white Supremacism which played a great role among the southern exceptional elite to secede from the union, was alive and well entrenched among the American mainstream particularly among the southern population. Even someone like President Abraham Lincoln is on record in his debates with Stephen Douglas as saying "If I could save the union without freeing one slave, I would." He is also on record in those same debates as saying "I do not hold that the Negro is the equal of the white man." And in his first Inaugural address March 4, 1861, he said: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
Indeed this exceptional attitude among the American southern whites would lead them to produce discriminatory laws against the non-white populations in those southern states which lost the civil war. The southern people in general were angry in losing the civil war and losing the right to own non-whites as slaves. Though they lost the war but they still held dearly to the belief which is “a Negro is not the equal of the White man.” They did not have any intention to lose their privileges or share equal rights with the non-whites. A set of draconian and discriminatory laws, also known as the “Jim Crow” laws were enacted throughout the southern states which fought on the confederate side in the civil war. These laws institutionalized a robust barrier of separation between the Whites and the non-whites in the south. The non-whites were not allowed to vote, own large properties, receive high education or hold high-profile government jobs. People who were not permitted to vote were also not permitted to serve on juries, further excluding them from the political process. The non-whites were not allowed to share any public and private transport system along with the whites. The non-whites were even prevented to worship at the same churches along with their white brethren.
The hold of white Supremacism among the southern white elites can be gathered from the following example.

When Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat and the first southern-born president of the postwar period, appointed southerners to his cabinet, some quickly began to press for segregated work places, although Washington, DC and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, the Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo—an appointee of the President—was heard to express his consternation at black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"

Two other things also raised their ugly heads during this period. The first is the beginning of the notorious group “Ku Klux Klan” often abbreviated as KKK and informally known as The Klan. This group was founded by White Supremacist extremists whose primary aim was to maintain the separation between the Whites and non-Whites by creating terror and fear among the newly emancipated blacks as well as those whites who were in favor of black equality.
Although it is believed that disgruntled former confederate soldiers were behind the creation of the group but now days historians consider that a wide array of socio-political groups were behind this unpleasant phenomenon.
Historian Elaine Frantz Parsons commented on the make up of the Klansmens’ membership:
“Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti-black vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.”
Historian Eric Foner observed on the question of political motives behind the Klansmen:
“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican Party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.”
The picture of a group of Klansmen , hiding in their hoods , going to raid a black church congregation or a republican party office at the dark of night , was a chilling scenario in the southern American states in the 1870-s.
The Klansmen attacked the non-white political institutions as well as Republican Party offices, killed ordinary non-white civilians and assassinated a large group of pro-equality political leaders including some state governors mostly from the Republican Party for undermining any opportunity in breaking down the barriers of separation which were enacted between the whites and non-whites.

The Klan which were mostly active in the 1870-s were later put down by the use of federal troops and government militias by the American state. After that the Klansmen felt disorganized and remained dormant till the mid 1910-s when they again made a come back.

The second unpleasant aspect of the post-civil war south is the widespread occurrence of the incidents of mob lynching throughout post-war south. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,437 incidents of lynching of African Americans and 1,293 incidents of lynching of whites between 1882 and 1968. The reasons behind mob lynching can be considered as the following
1. A deep rooted and widely spread paranoia among southern white population against non-whites snatching their jobs away.
2. A zealous urge to strictly enforce the discriminatory segregation laws.
3. Widespread fear and anger against the black population and those whites considered to be pro-equal rights.
Some anti-equal rights writers and intellectuals can also be considered as helping to maintain the separation wall in the minds of the southern white population. A great example of this kind of writers is Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. whose best-selling novels like “The Klansmen”, “The Leopard’s spots” and “The traitor” created a glorified and romanticized view of the murderous Klansmen. These novels represent a mindset where blacks and abolitionists are considered evil and beastly whereas the white supremacists are considered as glorious and righteous heroes.
Amazingly these novels actually left a lasting and deep impression among the minds of the southern white population who tended to believe the imaginary myths displayed in the novels as naked truth even long after the civil war was over.

So from this discussion about the post-civil war American society we can summarize the main reasons behind the unpleasant phenomena like the “Jim Crow” laws, Ku Klux Klan or the mob lynching as the following:

1. The deeply rooted white supremacist attitude among the southern, white exceptional elite.
2. A deep sense of hostility and resistance against change and reason and ideals like “all men are created equal”.
3. A deep sense of paranoia about outsiders coming and grabbing away local resources which leads to mob lynching of black workers and raids on black settlements by Klansmen.
4. An uncanny attitude to create and glorify an imagined and mythical worldview which leads to creation of “Jim Crow” laws and novels like “the Klansmen”.

Another aspect of post-civil war America was the completion of the annihilation of the Native American culture and way of life about which I have discussed much in my two previous essays on American exceptionalism.
The displacement and destruction of natural native Indian populations were performed mostly in the period before the civil war and now in this particular period the American exceptional elite decided to assimilate the rest of the Native American population so as to complete the process of extinguishing the Native American way of life, once and for all.

The remaining Native American populations were forced to settle in reservations and their land was taken out by the White colonialists. The exceptional elites decided the solution was to allow Indians still on reservations to own land as individuals. In 1887, they created the Dawes Act to divide up tribal land and parcel out 160 acres (0.65 km²) of land to each head of a family. Such allotments were to be held in trust by the government for 25 years, after which time the owner won full title to the land (so that it could be sold or mortgaged), as well as full legal citizenship. Lands not thus distributed, however, were offered for sale to settlers. This policy eventually resulted to the Native American loss, by seizure and sale, of almost half of their lands. It also destroyed much of the communal organization of the Native American tribes, further disrupting the traditional culture of the surviving Native American population.
The Dawes Act was an effort to integrate Indians into the mainstream; the majority accepted integration and were absorbed and assimilated into American society. Those who refused to assimilate were deliberately kept in poverty and destitution by the US government in the reservations.

Although assimilation was the policy of the day as per as the Native Americans but the massacres were never far off. Some horrific massacres against the Native Americans took place during this period.

On November 29, 1864, when a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes encamped in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 70–163 Indians, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. This massacre is another dark-chapter in American relations with the Native Americans and it is called “the Sand Creek Massacre”. The racial attitude which led to the above mentioned massacre towards the Native Americans is very clear from the following comment given by the U.S. Army Colonel John Chivington, the man who was leading the Colorado militia that perpetrated the outrage:

“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe me it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians.”

The irony is that the man in question John Chivington was a Methodist preacher and a person who was opposed to slavery but apparently his support for the rights of slave did not prevent him performing mayhem upon the innocent Native American tribes.
On December 29, 1890, 365 troops of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment, supported by four Hotchkiss guns, surrounded an encampment of Lakota and Sioux (Native American tribes) near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The Sioux had been cornered and agreed to turn themselves in at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota. They were the very last of the Sioux to do so. They were met by the 7th Cavalry, who intended to disarm them and ensure their compliance.
During the process of disarming the Sioux, a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote could not hear the order to give up his rifle and was reluctant to do so. A scuffle over Black Coyote's rifle escalated into an all-out battle, with those few Sioux warriors who still had weapons shooting at the 7th Cavalry, and the 7th Cavalry opening fire indiscriminately from all sides, killing men, women, and children, as well as some of their own fellow troopers. The 7th Cavalry quickly suppressed the Sioux fire, and the surviving Sioux fled, but U.S. cavalrymen pursued and killed many who were unarmed.
By the time it was over, about 146 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux tribe had been killed. This massacre of innocent Native Americans is infamously known as the “Wounded Knee Massacre”, now days.
The American public's reaction to the massacre at the time was generally favorable towards the soldiers who perpetrated the massacre. The Army awarded twenty Medals of Honor, its highest award, for the action. When the awards were reviewed a decade later, American military fraternity was generally supportive of it.
Historian Will G. Robinson noted that in contrast, only three Medals of Honor were awarded to men among the 64,000 South Dakotans who fought for four years of the Second World War.
I would like to remind our readers that the US military tradition to honor those of it’s members who has committed horrendous massacres continues even in our times.
On Sunday 3 July 1988, an Iranian civil airliner Iran Air Flight 655, also known as IR655, was destroyed by the U.S. Navy's guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard, including 66 children, over the Strait of Hormuz. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded Combat Action Ribbons for completion of their tours in a combat zone. Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, received the Navy Commendation Medal, often given for acts of heroism or meritorious service. According to the History Channel, the medal citation noted his ability to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure." In 1990, Rogers was awarded the Legion of Merit "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer ... from April 1987 to May 1989." The award was given for his service as the Commanding Officer of the Vincennes, and the citation made no mention of the downing of Iran Air 655. The Legion of Merit is often awarded to high-ranking officers upon successful completion of especially difficult duty assignments and/or last tours of duty before retirement.
The only good point about this otherwise horrendous massacre was that not all the American intellectuals took a back seat towards this massacre. In an editorial response to the event, the young newspaper editor L. Frank Baum, later the author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, wrote in the “Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer” on January 3, 1891:
“The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.”
This particular criticism from Frank Baum indicates that the progressive, intellectual resistance against the exceptional elite had begun to form and take shape. In the coming years this movement of progressives against different aspects of American exceptionalism like imperialism and militarism, would grow and shape the progressive mind in America which would ultimately rebel against the exceptional elite establishment.
Before that let us look at how American exceptionalism would shape the American policies of imperialism and militarism, leading up to the First World War.

As we have mentioned earlier that the USA decided to go to war against Spain in 1898 for conquering new territories. The USA acquired new territories Cuba and Puerto Rico in the western hemisphere and Philippines and Guam in Asia as spoils from the war.

The USA started the war in Philippines on the pretext of helping out the Filipino people fighting for independence against the Spanish rule but in the end ended up being the new colonial masters in the Philippines.

President William McKinley publicly announced during the Spanish-American war that annexation of the Philippines, "by our code of morality, would be criminal aggression." Immediately after the conclusion of the war, United States took control of Philippines with the excuse that Filipinos were incapable of self-government. The same President McKinley explained that "... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and to uplift and civilize and Christianize them,"

The Filipinos, who thought that they Americans were there to help them break off the Spanish colonial chains, were really bitterly disappointed and resented when they found out that the real intention of the Americans were to colonize the Philippines. They immediately declared war upon the United States in 1899.Unfortunately for Filipinos the United States won the war in 1902. The conflict was a real disaster for the Filipinos as hundreds of thousands were brutally killed during the war and damage to the cultural and other aspects of life were gigantic in nature. It would take the Filipinos many generations to recuperate from all these heavy losses.

An 1899 political cartoon by Winsor McCay aptly describes the situation. In this drawing , Uncle Sam (representing the United States), gets entangled with rope around a tree labeled "Imperialism" while trying to subdue a bucking colt or mule labeled "Philippines" while a figure representing Spain walks off over the horizon. Readers can look at the following URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Philippine-American_War.png

The brutal subjugation of the Filipinos will see little regard for Filipino lives. Prisoners were routinely shot, whole villages burned down, civilians, including children, killed in batches of hundreds – all with the knowledge of – and usually under the direction of – commanding officers. After the Filipinos began guerrilla warfare, the American military routinely began taking no prisoners and shooting surrendering soldiers. Civilians were forced into concentration camps, after being suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers. Thousands of civilians died in these camps. The camps and slaughter of civilians was excused by the fact that the media told the American population that the savages were little children needing America's help and cleansing. The guerilla warfare helped this case by giving a moral right to what the American's were doing since the "savages" were cowardly uncivilized enemies.

General Jacob H. Smith gave an infamous order "KILL EVERY ONE OVER TEN". That order meant killing 10 Filipinos for one American dead soldier. This particular order is reminiscent of Third Reich’s policy of exterminating 50 Jews for the dead of one Nazi soldier. United States attacks into the countryside often included scorched earth campaigns where entire villages were burned and destroyed, torture (water cure) and the concentration of civilians into "protected zones". Furthermore America created several concentration camps in the Philippines. Many of the civilian casualties resulted from disease and famine in those concentration camps.

Massacres will follow invariably the process of subjugating the Philippines during the American colonization period. One of the many infamous massacres will be the “Moro Crater Massacre”.
On March 10, 1906, on the isle of Jolo in the southern Philippines, forces of the U.S. Army under the command of Major General Leonard Wood, a naval detachment comprising 540 soldiers, along with a detachment of native constabulary, armed with artillery and small firearms attacked a village hidden in the crater of the dormant volcano Bud Dajo. More than 600 mostly unarmed Muslim Moro villagers (including many women and children) were killed by the Americans in this massacre.

I have mentioned previously that American progressives would take an increasingly anti-imperialist stand during this period. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (famously known by his pen name Mark Twain) used his mighty pen to write a satire “Comments on the Moro Massacre” on the massacre. Here is an excerpt from the satire.

“They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children -- merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we know and love.”

The full satire can be found in the following URL.
http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/cr/moro.htm

As a result of all these atrocities the population of Philippines dramatically reduced. In 1908 Manuel Arellano Remondo, in “General Geography of the Philippine Islands”, wrote: “The population decreased due to the wars, in the five-year period from 1895 to 1900, since, at the start of the first insurrection, the population was estimated at 9,000,000, and at present (1908), the inhabitants of the Archipelago do not exceed 8,000,000 in number.”

In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:” The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...."
In an article, “We Charge Genocide: A Brief History of US in the Philippines”, appearing in the December, 2005 issue of Political Affairs (the official magazine of the Communist Party USA), E. San Juan, Jr., director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Connecticut, argued that during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) and pacification campaign (1902–1913), the operations launched by the U.S. against the Filipinos, an integral part of its pacification program, which they quoted as claiming the lives 1.4 million Filipinos, constituted genocide. The real number of Filipino dead people will probably never be known.

The whole American military experience in Philippines can be summed up by this comment from Corporal Sam Gillis – “We make everyone get into his house by seven p.m., and we only tell a man once. If he refuses we shoot him. We killed over 300 natives the first night. They tried to set the town on fire. If they fire a shot from the house we burn the house down and every house near it, and shoot the natives, so they are pretty quiet in town now.”

The US exceptional elite justified the imperialism in Philippines by the following points:

1. The US need to continue her occupation of the Philippine islands to protect the Filipinos from the influence of the other colonial European powers.
2. The Filipinos are too primitive and too backward people for self-rule.
3. America needs to impose her own style of governance on the Filipino people for the benefit of Philippines.
Support for American actions in the Philippines was justified by those in the U.S. government and media who supported the conflict through the use of moralistic oration. Stuart Creighton Miller writes “Americans altruistically went to war with Spain to liberate the Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos from their tyrannical yoke. If they lingered on too long in the Philippines, it was to protect the Filipinos from European predators waiting in the wings for an American withdrawal and to tutor them in American-style democracy.”

Rudyard Kipling, famous British author for the children story book “Jungle Book, wrote the famous poem “White Man’s Burden” to support US imperial policies in the Philippine Islands. Here are some lines from the poem:

“Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!”

The full poem “White Man’s Burden” can be found in following URL:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.html
Even some of the famous American product brands supported the concept of “White Man’s Burden”. The Pears soap company in one of their advertisements advised it’s potential customers to offer the soap to the Filipinos to teach them about cleanliness.

Readers can find the advertisement in the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1890sc_Pears_Soap_Ad.jpg

The progressives continued to oppose the imperial designs of the American exceptional elite. Mark Twain who was a supporter of American imperialism, converted to a militant anti-imperialist in the later phase of his life. The Anti-Imperialism league was set up by American anti-imperialist progressives in 1898. Twain became the vice-president of the league.

In his many satirical writings during this period, he bitterly criticized the imperialistic designs of the American exceptional elite. During the Philippine-American War, Twain wrote a short pacifist story entitled “The War Prayer”, which makes the point that the real intentions behind war-mongering of a nation is man’s immortal passion and desire for violence and mayhem.

Reader’s can read the full story in the following link:
http://www.ntua.gr/lurk/making/warprayer.html

Mark Twain tore into pieces the American exceptional concept of “White Man’s Burden” in his brilliant satirical essay “TO THE PERSON SITTING IN DARKNESS”. Here are some excerpts from this essay:
“Of course, we must not venture to ignore our General Macarthur’s reports – oh, why do they keep on printing those embarrassing things? – we must drop them trippingly from the tongue and take the chances:
"During the last ten months our losses have been 268 killed and 750 wounded; Filipino loss, three thousand two hundred and twenty-seven killed, and 694 wounded."
We must stand ready to grab the Person Sitting in Darkness, for he will swoon away at this confession, saying: "Good God, those 'niggers' spare their wounded, and the Americans massacre theirs!" “
And in a separate point in the same essay Mark Twain wrote:

“Now then, that will convince the Person. You will see. It will restore the Business. Also, it will elect the Master of the Game to the vacant place in the Trinity of our national gods; and there on their high thrones the Three will sit, age after age, in the people's sight, each bearing the Emblem of his service: Washington, the Sword of the Liberator; Lincoln, the Slave's Broken Chains; the Master, the Chains Repaired.”

Readers can read the full essay in the following URL:

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/twain.htm

Twain was so critical even about the traditional pro-exceptionalism American Christianity that he wrote "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian".
In 1901 Twain criticized the actions of missionary Dr. William Scott Ament (1851–1909) because Ament and other missionaries had collected indemnities from Chinese subjects in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising of 1900.

Mark Twain was not the only one among the newly emerging class of progressive intellectuals to oppose imperialism and militarism, the twine Avatars of American exceptionalism.

Famous authors like Ambrose Bierce and Henry James and famous industrialist Andrew Carnegie also opposed imperialism. Andrew Carnegie said the following when requested by one of his friends to create a new organization supporting peace:
“I do not see that it is wise to devote our efforts to creating another organization. Of course I may be wrong in believing that, but I am certainly not wrong that if it were dependent on any millionaire's money it would begin as an object of pity and end as one of derision. I wonder that you do not see this. There is nothing that robs a righteous cause of its strength more than a millionaire's money. Its life is tainted thereby.”


I will end this particular period of the history of American exceptionalism with the following quote from famous American historian Howard Zinn

“My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism.”

In my next essay I will focus upon how imperialism and militarism, the twin Avatars of American exceptionalism played their roles during the two world wars.