By the 1830s, the booming success of European-style civilization in North America had become an inspiration to white people everywhere, on religious, cultural and even scientific grounds. A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, endeared himself to U.S. Americans forever by seeming to endorse their swelling estimation of themselves after a tour in 1831. He had come, he said bemusedly, to see the future—“the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress.” His book, the work of a 25-year-old aristocrat, can be wildly inconsistent in argument, but it never wavers on three points: that the U.S. is carrying the ball for European social organization and that the U.S. success not only demonstrates the superiority of white people but predicts the extinction of nonwhite societies.
Far from making him a prophet, his racial views were entirely conventional, his predictions of doomsday for dark races exactly what Europeans were banking on. White people, says Tocqueville—grouping the U.S. with Europe’s colonizing efforts in Africa—are “superior in intelligence, in power and in enjoyment” around the world, while native Americans and Africans “occupy an inferior rank in the country they inhabit.” Civilization itself, he argues, is a European invention, and other races have little taste for it and even less ability. America’s natives, he confides, think they are too dignified to work. “It may therefore be said, in a general way, that savages go forth in arms to seek knowledge, but do not receive it when it comes to them.” The “success” of the Cherokee, he says in self-contradiction, proves only that they are “capable of civilization,” not “that they will succeed in it.”
The American natives’ misfortune: to be introduced in a “semi-barbarian” state to “a civilized people, who are also ( it must be owned ) the most grasping nation on the globe. . .” so that they are educated and oppressed at the same time. The U.S. and its member states, in fact, are “alike deficient in good faith” in dealing with them, though the U.S. deals with “less cupidity and violence.” But these behaviors, apparently, are not actual character faults: Several sentences later, the U.S. is winning a gold medal in the New World ethics elimination:
“The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they succeed even in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.”
Leaving aside the morality of exterminating another race and depriving it of rights by any means as a national “purpose,” the claim is still a howling distortion of the historical record, but only from today’s vantage point (and only if noticed). What enabled Tocqueville to get away with absolving the U.S. of responsibility was his confidence—a widely shared idea and growing at the time—that the native die-off had simply followed the course of nature. In much the same way as arriving “Pilgrims” had taken the disease-emptied Atlantic Coast for granted as a “Providence” of their deity, Tocqueville could look on the wars of dispossession—the destruction of native society by alcohol and of the native belief system by Christianity—as the working out of natural processes by which a superior European civilization replaced an inferior native barbarity.
This assumption, which Thomas Jefferson shared—as far as possible from Jefferson’s rash words in the Declaration of Independence but taken to be self-evident too—was what U.S. Americans, whether they credited God or mysterious forces, would call “Manifest Destiny.” So popular already was the concept at home, when magazine editor John L. O’Sullivan, a Jacksonian, found a name for it in an 1845 editorial, that the term quickly took on a life of its own (obscuring its originator—his name dug up only in 1927 by a curious historian). O’Sullivan’s common-stock harangue: England and France had tried to prevent the U.S. from annexing Texas, thereby . . .
“. . . hampering our power, limiting our greatness, and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
Ridiculing criticisms that annexation would be “unrighteous,” he called on “common sense” to “acquiesce with decent grace” to the “inevitable fulfillment of the general law which is rolling our population westward. . . .” The swallowing of Texas, let’s face it, was a done deal.
“The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on [California’s] borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses.”
And all this, marveled O’Sullivan, without the actual involvement of the U.S. government or its people—“in the natural flow of events.”
In Britain, the biologist and early sociologist Herbert Spencer, a rival of Charles Darwin’s, was simultaneously putting to paper a scientific doctrine to dignify this kind of event flow: He called it “survival of the fittest.” Though Darwin copped credit for the evolutionary hypothesis by identifying natural selection as its mechanism, Spencer, who originated the term, went on to separate fame as the exponent of “Social Darwinism.” With his references to “the Aryan race” and his expectation that “the mixture of the allied varieties” would produce “a more powerful type of man than has hitherto existed,” he anticipates Adolf Hitler and the Nazis of Germany, who failed the survival test, after all (or have to date). But Spencer was talking about the U.S. “I think,” he said, . . .
“whatever difficulties they may have to surmount, and whatever tribulations they may have to pass through, the Americans may reasonably look forward to a time when they will have produced a civilization grander than any the world has known."
Spencer, like Tocqueville, was especially popular in the U.S. with “America”-boosters such as William G. Sumner, Simon N. Patten and Josiah Strong. The Reverend Strong, a Congregationalist minister from Ohio, supercharged Spencer’s ideas with the American additives of patriotism and a smug Christianity. “It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write,” wrote Strong, that “a pure, spiritual Christianity” and “civil liberty” were humanity’s greatest needs.
“It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon, as the great representative of these two ideas, the depositary of these two greatest blessings, sustains peculiar relations to the world’s future, is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper.”
Applauding the population growth of “this mighty Anglo-Saxon race,” he notes especially that the Anglo population in America, in the 200 years since “the reign of Charles II,” has increased by 250 times. This population swelling is the same prodigy that appears in an Iroquois prophecy of a white serpent that, once taken in and nourished, crowds out its host. In the Iroquois account, the relationship ends in brotherhood after calamity. But in the vision of Strong, it ends in Anglo-Saxon domination of the entire world. The U.S. experience is God’s way of providing the “training” necessary for Anglos to win “the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled” (his emphasis)
Long before “the thousand millions” of other races get there, Strong predicts in unconscious irony, Anglos will sweep down to engulf Mexico, Central and South America and the islands. Similarly, the whites of South Africa will occupy the whole Dark Continent. Even now, the aborigines of Australia and New Zealand are “disappearing” before “the all-conquering Anglo-Saxons.” Why, already, English-speakers occupy a third of the globe’s surface. (The same fraction was still a point of pride to English-speaking white South Africans in the 1950s as native independence movements shook the ground.) Exclaims Strong: “It seems as if these inferior tribes were only precursors of a superior race, voices in the wilderness crying: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord!’"
What gives the Anglo his edge, says the Rev. Strong, is “his money-making power” and his “instinct or genius for colonizing.” The U.S. already is outpacing Britain “in the race after wealth”; while the Anglo generally “excels all others in pushing his way into new countries,” Americans are those in whom “this inherited tendency” is strongest,” a tendency “further developed” by the “westward sweep of successive generations across the continent.”
If the U.S. plays its cards right “during the next ten or fifteen years,” he hints (promoting a posture of U.S. belligerence toward European rivals), “Christians” here have it fully in their power “to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years.” It could have been television evangelist Pat Robertson talking about U.S. support for Israel.
{Adapted from Looking for the Bahana, © 2008}
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