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.