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.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
A brief reconstruction of American Exceptionalism-Part 2
As I have shown in my previous essay how American Exceptionalism played a great role in shaping the American mind from the early Puritan colonists to the American independence.
As promised I will tell the story of American Exceptionalism from the framing of the constitution till the American civil war.
As we all know that following the victory of the American colonists in the American revolutionary war against the British, George Washington, a war hero, went on to become the first president of the newly independent Unites States of America.
In the concept of the American Exceptionalism we can start to see two separate camps of ideas emerging out among the exceptional elite. One of these groups will be the men who were progressives in nature and used to believe that “all men are equal before their creator”. These will be the people who would go on to become the “Abolitionists”, the movement that would later go on to fight for abolition of slavery in the United States. Another important group of people among the American elite were the “statists” a group represented by people like Alexander Hamilton who believed in a powerful , centralized state with a strong military , a powerful central government , a robust , national exchequer and rapid industrial and land expansion. This group of exceptional elite believed in rapid land expansion of the United States for a growing population. They believed America as an exceptional nation should push outwards to convert other peoples in the world towards American ideas.
The other group to emerge among the exceptional elite was the traditionalists and the conservatives who believed that only white, English-speaking Americans are the owners of the America. This group generally consisted of two elements i.e. the rich, white landowners of the Southern states like South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia and the fiercely independent-minded Libertarians. The white landowners supported slavery since their cotton business was dependent upon the use of slave labor. The libertarians resented any strong central authority and they were particularly critical against the taxes imposed upon them by the American government. The libertarian Americans used to have strong hatred against the British rulers for imposing taxes now that hatred gradually turned against the new American government. Their basic demand was that government should stay away as much as possible from the daily business of the people. They even resented the creation of a permanent national Army and a permanent national bank. Among one of these fierce libertarians was Thomas Jefferson who repeatedly clashed with the ideas of a powerful statist like Alexander Hamilton.
If one looks at a map of the United States in the late 1700-s and the early 1800-s, he will find a pattern. The progressives and the statists usually came from urban centers like New York and Boston which were going through rapid industrialization. The traditionalists and the libertarians were generally from more agrarian and rural states like the two Carolinas and Virginia.
The clash of these two different versions of American exceptionalism would ultimately determine the future of America in the 19-th century.
But when it came to the matter of the Native Americans both the camps held the same belief that America should expand and rapidly expropriate Native American lands since it was a divine right by the white, English-speaking Americans to do so. This can be understood very well from the following writing of Thomas Jefferson. In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:
“To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.... In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us a citizens or the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.”
The ruling elites of the United States were willing to expand greatly in the Indian lands for a rapid expansion and industrialization of America. There was a growing consensus among the ruling American elite across the political spectrum to push the remaining Native Americans across the river Mississippi and claim their land for industrial and agricultural expansion. The famous painting “American Progress” by John Gast in 1872 tells us about the attitude of the American elite towards the Native Americans. In this painting we can see Columbia, intended as a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she travels; she holds a school book. The different economic activities of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. The Native Americans and wild animals flee. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/American_progress.JPG
By the early and middle 1800-s the Native Americans had adopted various aspects of European-American culture, including Christianity. Some of them even fought alongside the US army in some of the military campaigns against some other Native Indian tribes. But this was not going to be enough for their American rulers who were eager to take the lands of the Native Americans away with a religious fervor.
The congress passed the formal “Indian Removal Act” in 1830.Andrew Jackson was the first of the American presidents to start the forceful removal of the Native Americans, a task which will be followed by his successor, President Martin Van Buren.
The Native Americans tried to resist against the mighty American exceptionalism but to no avail. In the beginning they went through the legal recourse. The Cherokee tribe approached the Supreme Court against what efforts of the US state of Georgia to expropriate their lands. But when the Supreme Court judge John Marshall gave the verdict in favor of the Cherokees, President Andrew Jackson said the following about the verdict "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it! Build a fire under them. When it gets hot enough, they'll go.” The Cherokees’ homes were burnt down and their property destroyed and plundered. The White settlers very quickly took over the land. Private Soldier John G. Burnett later wrote "Future generations will read and condemn the act and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter."
In the winter of 1838 the Cherokee were forced to begin the thousand mile march with scant clothing and most on foot without shoes or moccasins. The march began in Red Clay, Tennessee, the location of the last Eastern capital of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee were given used blankets from a hospital in Tennessee where an epidemic of small pox had broken out. The authorities used the tactic deliberately to finish off as many Cherokees as possible before their final removal. Because of the diseases, the Cherokees were not allowed to go into any towns or villages along the way; many times this meant traveling much farther to go around them after crossing Tennessee and Kentucky, they arrived in Southern Illinois at Giaconda about the 3rd of December, 1838. Here the starving Cherokees were charged a dollar a head to cross the river on "Berry's Ferry" which typically charged twelve cents. They were not allowed passage until the ferry had serviced all others wishing to cross and were forced to take shelter under "Mantle Rock," a shelter bluff on the Kentucky side, until "Berry had nothing better to do". Many died huddled together at Mantle Rock waiting to cross. Several Cherokee were murdered by locals. The killers filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Government through the courthouse in Vienna, suing the government for $35 a head to bury the murdered Cherokee.
Martin Davis, Commissary Agent for Moses Daniel's detachment wrote: "There is the coldest weather in Illinois I ever experienced anywhere. The streams are all frozen over something like eight or twelve inches thick. We are compelled to cut through the ice to get water for ourselves and animals. It snows here every two or three days at the fartherest. We are now camped in Missippi swamp four miles from the river, and there is no possible chance of crossing the river for the numerous quantity of ice that comes floating down the river every day. We have only traveled sixty-five miles on the last month, including the time spent at this place, which has been about three weeks. It is unknown when we shall cross the river...."
Finally the removed Cherokees settled near Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
This forceful relocation of the Cherokee tribe is known as “the trail of tears”. It is estimated that 4000 Cherokees died during their forceful removal from Tennessee to Oklahoma.
Some of the Native Americans tried to resist their forceful relocation by taking up arms against the US government but ultimately they also failed. A set of wars, called the “Seminole Wars”, between the American military and the Native Americans took place during this time which ultimately sealed the fate of the Native Americans. A Native American leader Osceola fought bravely for freedom but ultimately failed. Osceola was seized at the orders of Gen. Thomas Jessup when he appeared for a peace meeting under a white flag. Osceola died in prison, probably of malaria. With the death of leaders like Osceola, the Native American resistance eventually petered out.
With these defeat the Native American fate ultimately sealed. A fiercely proud people who had lived freely in the American lands for centuries now stood on the verge of extinction. Their fate would ultimately take them to be preserved like rare animals in different reserve forests called “Indian preservation centres”, located around America.
Two important concepts that dominated the foreign policy of the USA were the “manifest destiny” and the “Monroe doctrine”. Both these two concepts were based upon the belief among American exceptional elite that America is the god-given land of purity and the concepts and ideas of the “old world” i.e. Europe should not come to the sacred soil of America. Another important belief among the American elite was that America should expand it’s ideals to the whole of the North American continent as part of a divine plan.
The “Monroe Doctrine” came to effect in 1823. The doctrine states that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed by the United States of America as acts of aggression requiring US intervention.
The doctrine was issued at the time when Latin American colonies of Spain were revolting against Spanish rule. Had the Latin American countries succeeded it would have meant that there will be no pre-dominant European power in the Americas. In that situation the USA could easily have access to these free Latin American countries’ markets.
The American elite saw a great chance in being the hegemonic power in the Americas if the Latin American colonies become independent of Spanish rule. This is the background behind Monroe doctrine.
The manifest destiny was another important concept used by the American elite of the time. The American journalist John Louis O'Sullivan was one of the pioneers behind this idea. He called the US government in 1845 to annex Texas and Oregon County from Mexico and Great Britain, respectively. He wrote in 1845 “And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” As I did mention earlier the basic belief behind the idea of “Manifest Destiny” was that since American ideals are divine and more virtuous they should be spread around the world as part of a divine plan to civilize the world. In this way O'Sullivan could be considered as the predecessor to the modern day American neo-conservatives who also sought to expand American system in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We can see that both “Monroe Doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny” are very much interrelated. The American exceptional elite saw a great chance in expanding their hegemony and to spread their influence throughout the Americas particularly at a time when Latin American Spanish colonies were revolting against Spanish colonial presence in the continent. The American elite thought that they would fill the vacuum when finally the Spanish would depart. They also believed that all these are part of a divine plan for exporting American ideals throughout the American continent.
Manifest destiny also influenced the policy of American government at the time towards the Native Americans. The American intellectual elite wanted the Native Americans to abandon hunting and adopt agriculture as a means of civilization. Hunting was considered as a primitive occupation. It was believed that by adopting agriculture, the Native Americans will be civilized i.e. “Americanized”.
There was a white supremacist attitude also included in the “manifest destiny” idea. A portion of the American exceptional elite believed that American land and nation were only meant for the White English-speaking Americans and the presence of large Native Americans or other non-White; non-English speaking people would pollute and dilute the divine mandate given to the White; English-speaking American people. This was expressed in the following remark by the politician John C. Calhoun in 1848 on the issue of whether America should annex and colonize the whole of Mexico.
“[W]e have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.... We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged ... that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake.”
The inherent idea of Manifest Destiny which is to expand a state’s influence beyond it’s own borders also appealed to some other overseas ideologues. It left a profound impact on the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel who visited North America beginning in 1873. His ideas would later go on to create the German idea of “Lebensraum” which would go on to become the chief ideology of the Third Reich.
I mentioned earlier in this essay that after the American Independence, two separate groups emerged among the American exceptional elite. One of the were progressives who believed that all men were equal including the Negro slaves of the white population and the other were the traditional libertarians who believed that a white man is superior over the negroes and he certainly has the god-given right to keep them as his slaves.
The clash between these two separate ideas over the issue of slavery ultimately led to the gradual polarization of the whole American political map into two distinct parts; the north which was dominated by the progressives and the abolitionists and the south which consisted of the rich cotton farmers and conservative libertarians.
The main reasons behind the north-south divide could be considered as following:
1. The north was more densely populated and dependent completely upon industry whereas the south was more sparsely populated and dependent completely upon the production of cotton. As a consequence the north did not need slaves as much whereas the south being dependent upon agriculture needed the slaves for farming the precious cotton crop.
2. The northern people were influenced more by progressive minded Christian Churches such as the Quakers and the Methodists. Some of the Quaker leaders had earlier fought legally and constitutionally alongside the Native American Cherokee tribes for their rights. This led to a moderate and progressive and thereby anti-slavery attitude among the northern people. The south was more influenced by more fundamentalist Christian Churches like the southern Baptists who believed that slavery was a curse upon the Negroid people as a continuation of the Biblical concept of “curse of Ham”. The southern Baptists thereby supported slavery by justifying it with Biblical quotes.
3. The people in the southern states of the USA tend to be generally more conservative and traditionalist in nature. Alike their Puritan ancestors they generally tend to be more suspicious towards central government authority and they are particularly hateful towards the taxes. In the 1820-s and 1830-s the central government in Washington enacted a set of tariffs which were very unpopular among the free-natured southerners. They resented the Washington-based US central government. The whole US freedom movement against the British was based upon resentment upon the tariffs imposed by the British monarchy. Now the southern hatred of taxes and the central government found a new enemy, the Washington-based central government.
4. The founders of the US constitution did not have any clear understanding of the coming great division on the issue of slavery. In fact some of the famous founding fathers of the USA like the first three US presidents i.e. George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson all owned slaves. These founding fathers did not build any constructive constitutional mechanism to resolve the issue of slavery. They left it to individual American states to decide the issue of slavery among themselves. The southern states thought it useful to continue slavery whereas some of the northern states who thought slavery was a morally corrupt and regressive idea, banned it. So there was a great division among the individual states of the American state on the issues of slavery.
5. The fierce and proud libertarians in the south considered any law opposing slavery, passed by the government in Washington D.C. as a grave intervention in the rights of individual states by the central government. They were always eager to secede from the American Union each time any new anti-slavery legislation was passed by the federal government in Washington.
Added to this was the Zeal showed by some in the abolitionist movement like John Brown who sacrificed his life to free slaves in Kansas. The pro-slave media considered people like John Brown as terrorists. Writer Benjamin F. Stringfellow of the southern newspaper Squatter Sovereign proclaimed that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose."
These southern denunciations did not deter abolitionist movement’s premiere volunteers like Frederic Douglas or Harriet Beecher Stowe. They kept pushing for emancipation of all slaves in the USA and the banning of slavery as a practice in the USA.
Among their opponents in the pro-slavery camp stood men like the famous South Carolina Politician James Henry Hammond or the famous lawyer William Harper who believed that non-whites should do the menial jobs so that the Whites can make progress in civilization. They also supported slavery based upon a belief that a paternalistic slave-owner takes care of his slaves in their old age, thereby helping the slaves. They also believed that slavery protects the slaves in south from northern industrial exploitation.
Ultimately the two camps came to a final showdown when Abraham Lincoln was elected the president of the Unites States in 1860. Immediately the American state of South Carolina declared independence from the American Union. In the following year Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed suit. They were later followed by Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. The secessionist states came together to form “the Confederate states of America”.
President Abraham Lincoln had no option but to call in the American army to bring the rebellious states back to the fold. It was clear that the prior motivation behind the southern states to secede was their feeling of racial superiority. This was clearly mentioned in the following excerpt of the Cornerstone speech by Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate states.
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
The white supremacist attitude mentioned in the above speech is clear. It will be interesting to note that not even Abraham Lincoln was a believer that the Negro and the white are equal men. Indeed he maintained throughout the civil war that his most pressing concern was preserving the unity of the union and not abolishing the slavery.
So we can see that the American civil war was indeed a war between the two different ideas of American Exceptionalism. Ultimately, for the betterment of the United States of America and the rest of humanity, the progressives won. Emancipation for the slaves throughout the United States was declared on 1862 by President Lincoln.
But the plight of the Negroes did not end even though slavery had ended. Indeed the belief that Negroes were not the equal to their white counterparts, had already taken deep root among the people both in the south as well as in the north. The deep distaste of the Whites towards the blacks was institutionalized through many different laws in the southern states whose main aim was to keep the black and white populations, separate. Though the south could not keep the Negro slaves but they could still prevent the Negroes from being equal citizens, by law. The post-Lincoln central governments in the Washington did not want to further take on the southern states for fear of igniting another civil war.
The discriminatory laws against the blacks would continue to reign until the Civil rights movement, a century later.
Meanwhile the American exceptionalism through it’s ideas of “Monroe doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny” had taken it’s first steps towards the next level of American exceptionalism; the American Empire.
In my next essay I would discuss how American exceptionalism influenced American psyche from the end of the American civil war to the beginning of the First world war.
As promised I will tell the story of American Exceptionalism from the framing of the constitution till the American civil war.
As we all know that following the victory of the American colonists in the American revolutionary war against the British, George Washington, a war hero, went on to become the first president of the newly independent Unites States of America.
In the concept of the American Exceptionalism we can start to see two separate camps of ideas emerging out among the exceptional elite. One of these groups will be the men who were progressives in nature and used to believe that “all men are equal before their creator”. These will be the people who would go on to become the “Abolitionists”, the movement that would later go on to fight for abolition of slavery in the United States. Another important group of people among the American elite were the “statists” a group represented by people like Alexander Hamilton who believed in a powerful , centralized state with a strong military , a powerful central government , a robust , national exchequer and rapid industrial and land expansion. This group of exceptional elite believed in rapid land expansion of the United States for a growing population. They believed America as an exceptional nation should push outwards to convert other peoples in the world towards American ideas.
The other group to emerge among the exceptional elite was the traditionalists and the conservatives who believed that only white, English-speaking Americans are the owners of the America. This group generally consisted of two elements i.e. the rich, white landowners of the Southern states like South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia and the fiercely independent-minded Libertarians. The white landowners supported slavery since their cotton business was dependent upon the use of slave labor. The libertarians resented any strong central authority and they were particularly critical against the taxes imposed upon them by the American government. The libertarian Americans used to have strong hatred against the British rulers for imposing taxes now that hatred gradually turned against the new American government. Their basic demand was that government should stay away as much as possible from the daily business of the people. They even resented the creation of a permanent national Army and a permanent national bank. Among one of these fierce libertarians was Thomas Jefferson who repeatedly clashed with the ideas of a powerful statist like Alexander Hamilton.
If one looks at a map of the United States in the late 1700-s and the early 1800-s, he will find a pattern. The progressives and the statists usually came from urban centers like New York and Boston which were going through rapid industrialization. The traditionalists and the libertarians were generally from more agrarian and rural states like the two Carolinas and Virginia.
The clash of these two different versions of American exceptionalism would ultimately determine the future of America in the 19-th century.
But when it came to the matter of the Native Americans both the camps held the same belief that America should expand and rapidly expropriate Native American lands since it was a divine right by the white, English-speaking Americans to do so. This can be understood very well from the following writing of Thomas Jefferson. In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:
“To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.... In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us a citizens or the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.”
The ruling elites of the United States were willing to expand greatly in the Indian lands for a rapid expansion and industrialization of America. There was a growing consensus among the ruling American elite across the political spectrum to push the remaining Native Americans across the river Mississippi and claim their land for industrial and agricultural expansion. The famous painting “American Progress” by John Gast in 1872 tells us about the attitude of the American elite towards the Native Americans. In this painting we can see Columbia, intended as a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she travels; she holds a school book. The different economic activities of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation. The Native Americans and wild animals flee. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/American_progress.JPG
By the early and middle 1800-s the Native Americans had adopted various aspects of European-American culture, including Christianity. Some of them even fought alongside the US army in some of the military campaigns against some other Native Indian tribes. But this was not going to be enough for their American rulers who were eager to take the lands of the Native Americans away with a religious fervor.
The congress passed the formal “Indian Removal Act” in 1830.Andrew Jackson was the first of the American presidents to start the forceful removal of the Native Americans, a task which will be followed by his successor, President Martin Van Buren.
The Native Americans tried to resist against the mighty American exceptionalism but to no avail. In the beginning they went through the legal recourse. The Cherokee tribe approached the Supreme Court against what efforts of the US state of Georgia to expropriate their lands. But when the Supreme Court judge John Marshall gave the verdict in favor of the Cherokees, President Andrew Jackson said the following about the verdict "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it! Build a fire under them. When it gets hot enough, they'll go.” The Cherokees’ homes were burnt down and their property destroyed and plundered. The White settlers very quickly took over the land. Private Soldier John G. Burnett later wrote "Future generations will read and condemn the act and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter."
In the winter of 1838 the Cherokee were forced to begin the thousand mile march with scant clothing and most on foot without shoes or moccasins. The march began in Red Clay, Tennessee, the location of the last Eastern capital of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee were given used blankets from a hospital in Tennessee where an epidemic of small pox had broken out. The authorities used the tactic deliberately to finish off as many Cherokees as possible before their final removal. Because of the diseases, the Cherokees were not allowed to go into any towns or villages along the way; many times this meant traveling much farther to go around them after crossing Tennessee and Kentucky, they arrived in Southern Illinois at Giaconda about the 3rd of December, 1838. Here the starving Cherokees were charged a dollar a head to cross the river on "Berry's Ferry" which typically charged twelve cents. They were not allowed passage until the ferry had serviced all others wishing to cross and were forced to take shelter under "Mantle Rock," a shelter bluff on the Kentucky side, until "Berry had nothing better to do". Many died huddled together at Mantle Rock waiting to cross. Several Cherokee were murdered by locals. The killers filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Government through the courthouse in Vienna, suing the government for $35 a head to bury the murdered Cherokee.
Martin Davis, Commissary Agent for Moses Daniel's detachment wrote: "There is the coldest weather in Illinois I ever experienced anywhere. The streams are all frozen over something like eight or twelve inches thick. We are compelled to cut through the ice to get water for ourselves and animals. It snows here every two or three days at the fartherest. We are now camped in Missippi swamp four miles from the river, and there is no possible chance of crossing the river for the numerous quantity of ice that comes floating down the river every day. We have only traveled sixty-five miles on the last month, including the time spent at this place, which has been about three weeks. It is unknown when we shall cross the river...."
Finally the removed Cherokees settled near Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
This forceful relocation of the Cherokee tribe is known as “the trail of tears”. It is estimated that 4000 Cherokees died during their forceful removal from Tennessee to Oklahoma.
Some of the Native Americans tried to resist their forceful relocation by taking up arms against the US government but ultimately they also failed. A set of wars, called the “Seminole Wars”, between the American military and the Native Americans took place during this time which ultimately sealed the fate of the Native Americans. A Native American leader Osceola fought bravely for freedom but ultimately failed. Osceola was seized at the orders of Gen. Thomas Jessup when he appeared for a peace meeting under a white flag. Osceola died in prison, probably of malaria. With the death of leaders like Osceola, the Native American resistance eventually petered out.
With these defeat the Native American fate ultimately sealed. A fiercely proud people who had lived freely in the American lands for centuries now stood on the verge of extinction. Their fate would ultimately take them to be preserved like rare animals in different reserve forests called “Indian preservation centres”, located around America.
Two important concepts that dominated the foreign policy of the USA were the “manifest destiny” and the “Monroe doctrine”. Both these two concepts were based upon the belief among American exceptional elite that America is the god-given land of purity and the concepts and ideas of the “old world” i.e. Europe should not come to the sacred soil of America. Another important belief among the American elite was that America should expand it’s ideals to the whole of the North American continent as part of a divine plan.
The “Monroe Doctrine” came to effect in 1823. The doctrine states that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed by the United States of America as acts of aggression requiring US intervention.
The doctrine was issued at the time when Latin American colonies of Spain were revolting against Spanish rule. Had the Latin American countries succeeded it would have meant that there will be no pre-dominant European power in the Americas. In that situation the USA could easily have access to these free Latin American countries’ markets.
The American elite saw a great chance in being the hegemonic power in the Americas if the Latin American colonies become independent of Spanish rule. This is the background behind Monroe doctrine.
The manifest destiny was another important concept used by the American elite of the time. The American journalist John Louis O'Sullivan was one of the pioneers behind this idea. He called the US government in 1845 to annex Texas and Oregon County from Mexico and Great Britain, respectively. He wrote in 1845 “And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” As I did mention earlier the basic belief behind the idea of “Manifest Destiny” was that since American ideals are divine and more virtuous they should be spread around the world as part of a divine plan to civilize the world. In this way O'Sullivan could be considered as the predecessor to the modern day American neo-conservatives who also sought to expand American system in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We can see that both “Monroe Doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny” are very much interrelated. The American exceptional elite saw a great chance in expanding their hegemony and to spread their influence throughout the Americas particularly at a time when Latin American Spanish colonies were revolting against Spanish colonial presence in the continent. The American elite thought that they would fill the vacuum when finally the Spanish would depart. They also believed that all these are part of a divine plan for exporting American ideals throughout the American continent.
Manifest destiny also influenced the policy of American government at the time towards the Native Americans. The American intellectual elite wanted the Native Americans to abandon hunting and adopt agriculture as a means of civilization. Hunting was considered as a primitive occupation. It was believed that by adopting agriculture, the Native Americans will be civilized i.e. “Americanized”.
There was a white supremacist attitude also included in the “manifest destiny” idea. A portion of the American exceptional elite believed that American land and nation were only meant for the White English-speaking Americans and the presence of large Native Americans or other non-White; non-English speaking people would pollute and dilute the divine mandate given to the White; English-speaking American people. This was expressed in the following remark by the politician John C. Calhoun in 1848 on the issue of whether America should annex and colonize the whole of Mexico.
“[W]e have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.... We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged ... that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake.”
The inherent idea of Manifest Destiny which is to expand a state’s influence beyond it’s own borders also appealed to some other overseas ideologues. It left a profound impact on the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel who visited North America beginning in 1873. His ideas would later go on to create the German idea of “Lebensraum” which would go on to become the chief ideology of the Third Reich.
I mentioned earlier in this essay that after the American Independence, two separate groups emerged among the American exceptional elite. One of the were progressives who believed that all men were equal including the Negro slaves of the white population and the other were the traditional libertarians who believed that a white man is superior over the negroes and he certainly has the god-given right to keep them as his slaves.
The clash between these two separate ideas over the issue of slavery ultimately led to the gradual polarization of the whole American political map into two distinct parts; the north which was dominated by the progressives and the abolitionists and the south which consisted of the rich cotton farmers and conservative libertarians.
The main reasons behind the north-south divide could be considered as following:
1. The north was more densely populated and dependent completely upon industry whereas the south was more sparsely populated and dependent completely upon the production of cotton. As a consequence the north did not need slaves as much whereas the south being dependent upon agriculture needed the slaves for farming the precious cotton crop.
2. The northern people were influenced more by progressive minded Christian Churches such as the Quakers and the Methodists. Some of the Quaker leaders had earlier fought legally and constitutionally alongside the Native American Cherokee tribes for their rights. This led to a moderate and progressive and thereby anti-slavery attitude among the northern people. The south was more influenced by more fundamentalist Christian Churches like the southern Baptists who believed that slavery was a curse upon the Negroid people as a continuation of the Biblical concept of “curse of Ham”. The southern Baptists thereby supported slavery by justifying it with Biblical quotes.
3. The people in the southern states of the USA tend to be generally more conservative and traditionalist in nature. Alike their Puritan ancestors they generally tend to be more suspicious towards central government authority and they are particularly hateful towards the taxes. In the 1820-s and 1830-s the central government in Washington enacted a set of tariffs which were very unpopular among the free-natured southerners. They resented the Washington-based US central government. The whole US freedom movement against the British was based upon resentment upon the tariffs imposed by the British monarchy. Now the southern hatred of taxes and the central government found a new enemy, the Washington-based central government.
4. The founders of the US constitution did not have any clear understanding of the coming great division on the issue of slavery. In fact some of the famous founding fathers of the USA like the first three US presidents i.e. George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson all owned slaves. These founding fathers did not build any constructive constitutional mechanism to resolve the issue of slavery. They left it to individual American states to decide the issue of slavery among themselves. The southern states thought it useful to continue slavery whereas some of the northern states who thought slavery was a morally corrupt and regressive idea, banned it. So there was a great division among the individual states of the American state on the issues of slavery.
5. The fierce and proud libertarians in the south considered any law opposing slavery, passed by the government in Washington D.C. as a grave intervention in the rights of individual states by the central government. They were always eager to secede from the American Union each time any new anti-slavery legislation was passed by the federal government in Washington.
Added to this was the Zeal showed by some in the abolitionist movement like John Brown who sacrificed his life to free slaves in Kansas. The pro-slave media considered people like John Brown as terrorists. Writer Benjamin F. Stringfellow of the southern newspaper Squatter Sovereign proclaimed that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose."
These southern denunciations did not deter abolitionist movement’s premiere volunteers like Frederic Douglas or Harriet Beecher Stowe. They kept pushing for emancipation of all slaves in the USA and the banning of slavery as a practice in the USA.
Among their opponents in the pro-slavery camp stood men like the famous South Carolina Politician James Henry Hammond or the famous lawyer William Harper who believed that non-whites should do the menial jobs so that the Whites can make progress in civilization. They also supported slavery based upon a belief that a paternalistic slave-owner takes care of his slaves in their old age, thereby helping the slaves. They also believed that slavery protects the slaves in south from northern industrial exploitation.
Ultimately the two camps came to a final showdown when Abraham Lincoln was elected the president of the Unites States in 1860. Immediately the American state of South Carolina declared independence from the American Union. In the following year Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed suit. They were later followed by Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. The secessionist states came together to form “the Confederate states of America”.
President Abraham Lincoln had no option but to call in the American army to bring the rebellious states back to the fold. It was clear that the prior motivation behind the southern states to secede was their feeling of racial superiority. This was clearly mentioned in the following excerpt of the Cornerstone speech by Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate states.
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
The white supremacist attitude mentioned in the above speech is clear. It will be interesting to note that not even Abraham Lincoln was a believer that the Negro and the white are equal men. Indeed he maintained throughout the civil war that his most pressing concern was preserving the unity of the union and not abolishing the slavery.
So we can see that the American civil war was indeed a war between the two different ideas of American Exceptionalism. Ultimately, for the betterment of the United States of America and the rest of humanity, the progressives won. Emancipation for the slaves throughout the United States was declared on 1862 by President Lincoln.
But the plight of the Negroes did not end even though slavery had ended. Indeed the belief that Negroes were not the equal to their white counterparts, had already taken deep root among the people both in the south as well as in the north. The deep distaste of the Whites towards the blacks was institutionalized through many different laws in the southern states whose main aim was to keep the black and white populations, separate. Though the south could not keep the Negro slaves but they could still prevent the Negroes from being equal citizens, by law. The post-Lincoln central governments in the Washington did not want to further take on the southern states for fear of igniting another civil war.
The discriminatory laws against the blacks would continue to reign until the Civil rights movement, a century later.
Meanwhile the American exceptionalism through it’s ideas of “Monroe doctrine” and “Manifest Destiny” had taken it’s first steps towards the next level of American exceptionalism; the American Empire.
In my next essay I would discuss how American exceptionalism influenced American psyche from the end of the American civil war to the beginning of the First world war.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
A brief reconstruction of American Exceptionalism-Part 1
“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
“Democracy in America “
Individual human beings have always tended to consider themselves unique or exceptional in their own way from other individual. I might tend to think that I can play cricket better than some other boy in the street and that boy may tend to think that he can write love poems better than me. These are all small feelings of uniqueness or Exceptionalism that we as human beings tend to think about each other. This feeling is as normal as any other human emotion such as love, hate, fear, shame, pride or fear. It is normal for us human beings to feel in this way since we can think for ourselves unlike other animals those cannot.
Like individuals, nations also do tend to think that they are unique or exceptional than others. This has been true in particular for all the major nations who had created vast empires for themselves. The Greeks used to think themselves as the only civilized men and the rest as barbarians. The Jews call themselves as the “Chosen People” and the rest as Gentile or Goyim. The Romans called their empire “Pax Romana” and they also thought the German tribes as “barbarians”. The British used to think that sun will never set on their empire.
But what happens when every aspect of a nation’s culture, politics, social norms, commerce and foreign policy is based upon the sense of exceptionalism? This is exactly the case with the most powerful nation in the late 20-th and early 21-st century i.e. United States of America.
I will try to discuss in a series of writings how the sense of exceptionalism has been the most potent issue which has effectively influenced the policies (both domestic and foreign) of the USA from her birth to the very present day.
I will focus in this particular essay how American Exceptionalism shaped America from the early puritan settlements until American declaration of independence.
Let us go to the beginning. What today most of us call the United States of America(USA) was formed largely by a group of English-speaking , fundamentalist Christians whom we now a days call “Puritans”. This was a people who had strong sense of what they considered “good and evil”, these people used to have complete blind faith in Christian doctrines and did not use reason or rational thinking to understand Christian scripture.
These puritans were driven by two other characteristics,
1. A militant resistance towards progressive thinking and change.
2. A great sense of fear and hatred towards anyone whom the puritans considered “non-believer” towards their beliefs.
3. A great belief that they are the “Chosen people of God” and the US is the new land of Israel. The belief signifies that the importance of the US is to the Puritans is same as the importance of Israel to the ancient Israelites.
4. Invoking of divine providence in all the works of daily life. This explains Puritan justification of colonization of Native American lands on biblical grounds since Joshua also colonized the Palestinian lands in the Old Testament.
5. A belief that the USA is the only hope for salvation for an immoral humanity and the USA has a god-given mandate to convert the whole of humanity according to her values and ideas. This concept is also called “manifest destiny”.
6. A sense of superiority of the American nation, American values and American way of life over all the other nations.
I will now try to give examples from the past as well as that of the modern times to emphasize how the above mentioned behavior have influenced American policies in both home and abroad and how it may continue to effect them in future.
Let’s start from the beginning. John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts colony, was the first of the American leaders to propagate some ideas akin towards modern American exceptionalism when he gave the famous “city on a hill” sermon to the people of the Massachusetts colony in 1630. In this he was the first to start the tradition of thinking that the USA has been chosen by divine providence for great things in the world.
Things started to move gradually from there. As the English colonialization started to take effect, the Native Americans who have been living in the Americas for centuries before the coming of European colonists , slowly but surely started to feel the heat.
The new arriving English settlers first started to encroach upon the land of the natives then they started to convert the natives into their different versions of Christianity and after that it was followed by Europeans spreading diseases that would kill the natives by hundreds of thousands. If the native Indians tried to fought back they will be silenced in strong military actions perpetrated by their English overlords. The native survivors of these wars were always sold as slaves.
The colonists justified their actions by explaining that God has given them the Native American land as a chosen people.
On May 26, 1637, the English Captain John Mason burnt down the village of Misistuck (present day Mystic) killing all but 7 of the 700 inhabitants of the village, mostly old men, women and children. This event is called “Mystic massacre”. In the aftermath of the massacre Captain Mason had the following to say about the whole thing: “the attack against the Pequot was the act of a God who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven . . . Thus did the Lord Judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies.”
The Puritan colonists had the following to say after the destruction and extermination of the Pequot Indians in 1637.
“Let the whole Earth be filled with his Glory! Thus the LORD was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts and to give us their Land for an Inheritance”.
Although one must admit that the English puritan colonists were not the first to commit these sorts of massacres upon the Native Americans. Long back Christopher Columbus had the following to say upon seeing the Tarawa Indians of the Bahamas,
“They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.”
do whatever we want".
The mystic massacre was by no means the end of the plight for the Native Americans. In 1644, At New Amsterdam (present day New York), John Underhill, an English mercenary and a veteran of the Pequot war, hired by the Dutch, repeated the “Mystic massacre” strategy of burning a sleeping village, killing about 500 Indian people.
While analyzing these above atrocities committed against the native Indians we can find some common points among them.
1. Rapid colonization and expropriation of Native American lands.
2. The justification of this colonization with divine and other supernatural reasons.
3. The de-humanization of the Native Americans by the colonists which ensures that the Native Americans are treated no better than the animals which can be sacrificed at the alter of new-born American exceptionalism.
The oppression of the Native Americans by the English settlers can be considered one of two greatest ironical tragedies of History when an oppressed people go on to become oppressors themselves. The puritans were themselves heavily oppressed by the British Monarchy for Puritan beliefs and practices which challenged the traditional Anglican belief system as well as the regal authority. Many of the puritans came to the new world to survive from the persecutions at home. The fact that these people who would ultimately go on to oppress and annihilate the Native Americans is a tragic twisting of history. There is only one precedent in history for this scenario where the oppressed become oppressors themselves. The Jews who were brutalized and massacred through the Holocaust went on to create the state of Israel by displacing and oppressing the Palestinians.
Slavery was a common practice in those days. The Atlantic slave trade was in full swing. The colonists for their rapid colonization of the American lands needed massive proportions of labor to fulfill it’s needs for industrial and agricultural expansion. Slaves from Africa were going to be used to fulfill those labor shortages.
From this point onwards in History the colonial intellectual elite started thinking in terms of a new philosophical concept “Libertarianism”. The American elite were most impressed by the writings of the English philosopher John Locke. Thomas Jefferson ranked him alongside Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton as three most influential persons in his life.
American exceptionalism also took a new turn from this time. Thomas Paine in his book “a common sense” expressed for the first time that America was not just an extension of Europe but a new land, a country of nearly unlimited potential and opportunity that had outgrown the British mother country. These sentiments laid the intellectual foundations for the Revolutionary concept of American exceptionalism and were closely tied to “Republicanism”, the belief that sovereignty belonged to the people, not to a hereditary ruling class.
The English King had introduced some new tariffs in this time around which also made him unpopular among the new American intellectual elite. Some other decisions by the English monarch was to place foreign mercenaries (i.e. German and Dutch troops) onto American soil for fighting the French in neighboring Canada or cutting deals with some of the Native American tribes to secure the frontiers were very unpopular among most American religious leaders. They used to belief that American land was a gift of the God towards the American colonists. The coming of these foreign troops was to them a pollution of their sacred land. This is reminiscent of Osama Bin Laden’s objection of American troops on Saudi soil.
The mood in these times can be understood from the story “The Gray Champion” by Nathaniel Hawthorne who uses supernatural overtones in this story where an American town is saved from the oppressive rule of its English ruler by a supernatural American patriot.
Some important characteristics of these libertarian Americans at this time were a deep sense of paranoia and a hitherto unseen zeal for action.
All these came to be seen in the events of Boston Tea Party in 1773 when after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor.
Even someone like Benjamin Franklin who at the time of the event was in Europe, trying to negotiate a solution for the issue of high taxes with the British, was overwhelmed by this situation.
All these events culminated in the declaration of American Independence in 1776.
The religious exceptional overtone can be seen very frequently even during the American revolutionary war also.
Benjamin Franklin who was not a very religious man had the following to say about the war in 1787:
“ ... In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. -- Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. ... And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance. I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that "except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: ...I therefore beg leave to move -- that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.”
The Revolution strengthened millennialist strains in American theology. At the beginning of the war some ministers were persuaded that, with God's help, America might become "the principal Seat of the glorious Kingdom which Christ shall erect upon Earth in the latter Days." Victory over the British was taken as a sign of God's partiality for America and stimulated an outpouring of millennialist expectations--the conviction that Christ would rule on earth for 1,000 years.
An independent historian will be surprised to see the amount of religious overtone in the American Revolution when considering that the French revolution which took place within a decade of the American revolution, did not have any explicit religious overtones like the American one. Another irony is that in both the revolutions the intellectual elites of the revolution were followers of the same set of liberal beliefs which were proposed to the world by philosophers like John Locke.
American colonists won their war with the British (with the help of the French) in 1783.
The American constitution was adopted in 1787 and George Washington went on to become the first US president in 1789. The colonists had now become the masters in the land which they had conquered from it’s native inhabitants.
The colonists might had won the war and gained independence from their mother country but the plight of the Native Americans and the African-American slaves were not over.
Although the makers of the American constitution had included very lofty and grandiose goals and ideals like liberty, equality and pursuit of happiness and beliefs like “All men are created equal” but obviously these ideals did not include any provisions for the slaves and the Native Americans.
Indeed the issue of slavery will play an increasingly greater role in the coming years of the American nation.
I will discuss the role of American exceptionalism in the next chapter of this essay where I will cover the time from the American independence till the American civil war.
Alexis de Tocqueville
“Democracy in America “
Individual human beings have always tended to consider themselves unique or exceptional in their own way from other individual. I might tend to think that I can play cricket better than some other boy in the street and that boy may tend to think that he can write love poems better than me. These are all small feelings of uniqueness or Exceptionalism that we as human beings tend to think about each other. This feeling is as normal as any other human emotion such as love, hate, fear, shame, pride or fear. It is normal for us human beings to feel in this way since we can think for ourselves unlike other animals those cannot.
Like individuals, nations also do tend to think that they are unique or exceptional than others. This has been true in particular for all the major nations who had created vast empires for themselves. The Greeks used to think themselves as the only civilized men and the rest as barbarians. The Jews call themselves as the “Chosen People” and the rest as Gentile or Goyim. The Romans called their empire “Pax Romana” and they also thought the German tribes as “barbarians”. The British used to think that sun will never set on their empire.
But what happens when every aspect of a nation’s culture, politics, social norms, commerce and foreign policy is based upon the sense of exceptionalism? This is exactly the case with the most powerful nation in the late 20-th and early 21-st century i.e. United States of America.
I will try to discuss in a series of writings how the sense of exceptionalism has been the most potent issue which has effectively influenced the policies (both domestic and foreign) of the USA from her birth to the very present day.
I will focus in this particular essay how American Exceptionalism shaped America from the early puritan settlements until American declaration of independence.
Let us go to the beginning. What today most of us call the United States of America(USA) was formed largely by a group of English-speaking , fundamentalist Christians whom we now a days call “Puritans”. This was a people who had strong sense of what they considered “good and evil”, these people used to have complete blind faith in Christian doctrines and did not use reason or rational thinking to understand Christian scripture.
These puritans were driven by two other characteristics,
1. A militant resistance towards progressive thinking and change.
2. A great sense of fear and hatred towards anyone whom the puritans considered “non-believer” towards their beliefs.
3. A great belief that they are the “Chosen people of God” and the US is the new land of Israel. The belief signifies that the importance of the US is to the Puritans is same as the importance of Israel to the ancient Israelites.
4. Invoking of divine providence in all the works of daily life. This explains Puritan justification of colonization of Native American lands on biblical grounds since Joshua also colonized the Palestinian lands in the Old Testament.
5. A belief that the USA is the only hope for salvation for an immoral humanity and the USA has a god-given mandate to convert the whole of humanity according to her values and ideas. This concept is also called “manifest destiny”.
6. A sense of superiority of the American nation, American values and American way of life over all the other nations.
I will now try to give examples from the past as well as that of the modern times to emphasize how the above mentioned behavior have influenced American policies in both home and abroad and how it may continue to effect them in future.
Let’s start from the beginning. John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts colony, was the first of the American leaders to propagate some ideas akin towards modern American exceptionalism when he gave the famous “city on a hill” sermon to the people of the Massachusetts colony in 1630. In this he was the first to start the tradition of thinking that the USA has been chosen by divine providence for great things in the world.
Things started to move gradually from there. As the English colonialization started to take effect, the Native Americans who have been living in the Americas for centuries before the coming of European colonists , slowly but surely started to feel the heat.
The new arriving English settlers first started to encroach upon the land of the natives then they started to convert the natives into their different versions of Christianity and after that it was followed by Europeans spreading diseases that would kill the natives by hundreds of thousands. If the native Indians tried to fought back they will be silenced in strong military actions perpetrated by their English overlords. The native survivors of these wars were always sold as slaves.
The colonists justified their actions by explaining that God has given them the Native American land as a chosen people.
On May 26, 1637, the English Captain John Mason burnt down the village of Misistuck (present day Mystic) killing all but 7 of the 700 inhabitants of the village, mostly old men, women and children. This event is called “Mystic massacre”. In the aftermath of the massacre Captain Mason had the following to say about the whole thing: “the attack against the Pequot was the act of a God who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven . . . Thus did the Lord Judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies.”
The Puritan colonists had the following to say after the destruction and extermination of the Pequot Indians in 1637.
“Let the whole Earth be filled with his Glory! Thus the LORD was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts and to give us their Land for an Inheritance”.
Although one must admit that the English puritan colonists were not the first to commit these sorts of massacres upon the Native Americans. Long back Christopher Columbus had the following to say upon seeing the Tarawa Indians of the Bahamas,
“They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.”
do whatever we want".
The mystic massacre was by no means the end of the plight for the Native Americans. In 1644, At New Amsterdam (present day New York), John Underhill, an English mercenary and a veteran of the Pequot war, hired by the Dutch, repeated the “Mystic massacre” strategy of burning a sleeping village, killing about 500 Indian people.
While analyzing these above atrocities committed against the native Indians we can find some common points among them.
1. Rapid colonization and expropriation of Native American lands.
2. The justification of this colonization with divine and other supernatural reasons.
3. The de-humanization of the Native Americans by the colonists which ensures that the Native Americans are treated no better than the animals which can be sacrificed at the alter of new-born American exceptionalism.
The oppression of the Native Americans by the English settlers can be considered one of two greatest ironical tragedies of History when an oppressed people go on to become oppressors themselves. The puritans were themselves heavily oppressed by the British Monarchy for Puritan beliefs and practices which challenged the traditional Anglican belief system as well as the regal authority. Many of the puritans came to the new world to survive from the persecutions at home. The fact that these people who would ultimately go on to oppress and annihilate the Native Americans is a tragic twisting of history. There is only one precedent in history for this scenario where the oppressed become oppressors themselves. The Jews who were brutalized and massacred through the Holocaust went on to create the state of Israel by displacing and oppressing the Palestinians.
Slavery was a common practice in those days. The Atlantic slave trade was in full swing. The colonists for their rapid colonization of the American lands needed massive proportions of labor to fulfill it’s needs for industrial and agricultural expansion. Slaves from Africa were going to be used to fulfill those labor shortages.
From this point onwards in History the colonial intellectual elite started thinking in terms of a new philosophical concept “Libertarianism”. The American elite were most impressed by the writings of the English philosopher John Locke. Thomas Jefferson ranked him alongside Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton as three most influential persons in his life.
American exceptionalism also took a new turn from this time. Thomas Paine in his book “a common sense” expressed for the first time that America was not just an extension of Europe but a new land, a country of nearly unlimited potential and opportunity that had outgrown the British mother country. These sentiments laid the intellectual foundations for the Revolutionary concept of American exceptionalism and were closely tied to “Republicanism”, the belief that sovereignty belonged to the people, not to a hereditary ruling class.
The English King had introduced some new tariffs in this time around which also made him unpopular among the new American intellectual elite. Some other decisions by the English monarch was to place foreign mercenaries (i.e. German and Dutch troops) onto American soil for fighting the French in neighboring Canada or cutting deals with some of the Native American tribes to secure the frontiers were very unpopular among most American religious leaders. They used to belief that American land was a gift of the God towards the American colonists. The coming of these foreign troops was to them a pollution of their sacred land. This is reminiscent of Osama Bin Laden’s objection of American troops on Saudi soil.
The mood in these times can be understood from the story “The Gray Champion” by Nathaniel Hawthorne who uses supernatural overtones in this story where an American town is saved from the oppressive rule of its English ruler by a supernatural American patriot.
Some important characteristics of these libertarian Americans at this time were a deep sense of paranoia and a hitherto unseen zeal for action.
All these came to be seen in the events of Boston Tea Party in 1773 when after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor.
Even someone like Benjamin Franklin who at the time of the event was in Europe, trying to negotiate a solution for the issue of high taxes with the British, was overwhelmed by this situation.
All these events culminated in the declaration of American Independence in 1776.
The religious exceptional overtone can be seen very frequently even during the American revolutionary war also.
Benjamin Franklin who was not a very religious man had the following to say about the war in 1787:
“ ... In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. -- Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. ... And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance. I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that "except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: ...I therefore beg leave to move -- that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.”
The Revolution strengthened millennialist strains in American theology. At the beginning of the war some ministers were persuaded that, with God's help, America might become "the principal Seat of the glorious Kingdom which Christ shall erect upon Earth in the latter Days." Victory over the British was taken as a sign of God's partiality for America and stimulated an outpouring of millennialist expectations--the conviction that Christ would rule on earth for 1,000 years.
An independent historian will be surprised to see the amount of religious overtone in the American Revolution when considering that the French revolution which took place within a decade of the American revolution, did not have any explicit religious overtones like the American one. Another irony is that in both the revolutions the intellectual elites of the revolution were followers of the same set of liberal beliefs which were proposed to the world by philosophers like John Locke.
American colonists won their war with the British (with the help of the French) in 1783.
The American constitution was adopted in 1787 and George Washington went on to become the first US president in 1789. The colonists had now become the masters in the land which they had conquered from it’s native inhabitants.
The colonists might had won the war and gained independence from their mother country but the plight of the Native Americans and the African-American slaves were not over.
Although the makers of the American constitution had included very lofty and grandiose goals and ideals like liberty, equality and pursuit of happiness and beliefs like “All men are created equal” but obviously these ideals did not include any provisions for the slaves and the Native Americans.
Indeed the issue of slavery will play an increasingly greater role in the coming years of the American nation.
I will discuss the role of American exceptionalism in the next chapter of this essay where I will cover the time from the American independence till the American civil war.
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