Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren Bogelbaum. Here a woman in white floats above a verdant plane, her eyes turned westward, a star glowing on her forehead. She's a phantasm hovering at the center of the oil on canvas painting completed in eighteen seventy two by the Prussian American artist John Gast. The work
is called American Progress. This simple painting, less than a foot tall, is the artistic realization of a concept that's been at the center of America's psyche for most of its existence. It's right there in the paintings, settled but brutal allegory. The woman, a white woman with wavy golden hair, leads a group of farmers and other settlers, also all white. In her left hand is a string of telegraph wire.
In her right, a book, A stage coach, and a train also follow in her wake, and the land behind her is bright and bountiful. Ahead of her, to the west, dark skies and foreboding mountains await. A herd of buffalo rumbles away in the distance. A wild beast, perhaps a bear or badger, snarls at her as it retreats, a band of Native Americans flees As she glides ever onward. She is manifest destiny, a belief born in America's infancy and fully implemented with the country's drive west during the
eighteen hundreds. Manifest destiny was a doctrine that basically espoused that the Christian God wanted European Americans to take over the continent. In a single word, manifest destiny was and still is trouble. The term manifest destiny sprung from the fingers of a newspaper columnist and editor in eighteen forty five, though the basic idea had been around from the country's
get go. After all, it takes a hefty dose of self entitlement to claim a land as your own, even though millions of people lived there already in the early days of what we now know as America. What lands couldn't be relatively easily taken were bought, like in the Louisiana Purchase, split with others like the Oregon Country, or fought over like big parts of the West in the
Mexican American War of eighteen forty to eighty eight. It was the latter that pushed to annex land held by Mexico before it was one in the war, the prompted editor John O'Sullivan to coin the term manifest destiny. He wrote, it is our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. But of course, the concept of manifest destiny was inextricably tied into the politics of the time, which were, as
they are now, fueled by something decidedly unholy money. America's land must was driven first and foremost by the first four more wealth for its colonists, but distributing that often ill gained bounty wasn't easy in a time when the scourge of slavery was already beginning to rip apart the nation.
The issue of how to divide the newly acquired land, which states to be would allow slavery and which would not became a political hot button, and declaring the land grabs a divine right seemed, if nothing else, a nice cover story for expansionists of the time. But even more than money, politics, or religion, manifest destiny demonstrated something else
about the mindset of many Americans. For the article, this episode is based on how stuff Works spoke with Don Hayter Markle, the head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas. He said, implied in the notion of Manifest Destiny is that we know best. And basically when we say we, we mean sort of Anglo Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as sort of white. That's telling Native Americans, that's telling Mexicans, that's telling Africans, we kidnapped,
it enslaved, that we are superior. Our way is superior. I don't see how you can escape from the notion that this is a form of white supremacy. So did
people really accept this idea at the time. Certainly many people at the time believed in Manifest Destiny that God wanted the newcomers to take over the continent, to work the land, to bring Christianity to the Indians and Mexicans, to be biblically fruitful and multiplied as a Sullivan pudd it, and if God found it within his grace to grow rich while doing it, expelling more than a hundred thousand Native Americans from their homes in the American South, murdering
thousands of others, and taking land from Mexicans, wasn't just accepted as a divine American right, it was a duty. But not everyone bought into the notion. Many saw the idea as little more than a dodge. Housta Works also spoke with Harry Watson, a professor of Southern culture at
the University of North Carolina. He said there were people, for example, who thought that the drive to annex Texas was a ploy to gain more land to create more slave states, because eastern Texas was suitable for growing cotton. Even then, there were people who were bitterly opposed to slavery and desperately wanted to abolish it, and the first step to abolishing it might be to prevent it from growing. They did not want to admit Texas. They did not want to fight Mexico to get Texas. They did not
want slavery to be allowed to spread. All of this was fought out very bitterly in Congress. Still, politicians like President James K. Polk founded politically and economically favorable to press onward. His call to annex both Texas and Oregon, which would appeal to both northern and southern political stances, helped him win the presidency in eighteen forty five over
anti expansionist Henry Clay. Even though Polke's drive threatened war with both Great Britain and Mexico, and despite fears from many, Polk believed that a vast nation transversing the continent would be more easily defended and mightier than one concentrated on the eastern seaboard. He said in his inaugural address, it is confidantly believed that our system may be safely extended to the utmost bounds of our territorial limits, and that as it shall be extended, the bonds of our union,
so far from being weakened, will become stronger. By the time Polk left office in eighteen forty nine, Manifest Destiny was all but complete. Barely sixty years after the U s Constitution was ratified, America stretched from sea to Shining Sea. In historical terms, Manifest Destiny is defined only as the doctrine that increased the United States landholdings on the North
American continent. The idea, though, is still reference today, though it's us about expansionism and divine intervention, and more about spreading the American way of life to other places. In that way, Manifest Destiny is a precursor to what's now termed American exceptionalism, the belief that America is uniquely exceptional and that its virtues the freedom, democracy, capitalism, are worthy of sharing with, or perhaps even imposing on other countries
and cultures. Historically, that's often meant more trouble. The Philippine American War, the business led Coup of Hawaii, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf Wars, just for example. America's bloody history after the country's continental expansion, which continues today in places like the Middle East, shows that the idea of American exceptionalism that was so evident in Manifest Destiny
still lives on. Watson said, I think the idea of Manifest Destiny supported the idea of a global role for the United States in the twentieth century, and they there is still this notion that it's not only America's right, but America's obligation to extend its influence over various countries, and that can work both ways or many ways. The
Woman in White, it seems, presses ever onward. Today's episode is based on the article how Manifest Destiny stretched the US from Sea to Shining Sea on House to works dot Com, written by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with Houstfworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.