Manifest Destiny

            Since the European’s first step on American soil it has been the belief that it was their destiny to expand the throughout the continent. This idea has led to challenging ourselves to go farther, bigger, and faster. It has led to positives and negatives including both European vs. Native battles as well as invention and innovation. This has been commonly known as Manifest Destiny. From the expansion of the west, to the race to the moon, Americans have felt that it was our destiny to go beyond where we are today. But with the defunding of NASA and overall apathy towards anything outside the United States by our typical citizens, are our expansion days over?

Expanding the West

            The philosophical justification for Manifest Destiny was based on the idea that America was destined to expand the establishment of democracy in North America. This gave us a sense of moral superiority which justified our actions. We felt like we had the right to govern areas where they did not support this goal of expanding democracy (Crocker, 2006).

            One of the most important roles that Manifest Destiny played was in the boundary dispute with Britain over Oregon. The Anglo-American Convention of 1818 had provided for the joint occupation of the Oregon Country, and thousands of Americans migrated there in the 1840s over the Oregon Trail (Merk, 1963). The British rejected a proposal by President John Tyler to divide the region along the 49th parallel, and instead proposed a boundary line farther south along the Columbia River. This would have made most of what later became the state of Washington part of British North America. Manifest Destiny supporters protested and called for the annexation of the entire Oregon Country up to the Alaska line (54°40ʹ N). Presidential candidate James K. Polk used this popular outcry to his advantage, and the Democrats called for the annexation of "All Oregon" in the 1844 U.S. Presidential election (Greenber, 2005). Once Polk became President, however, he was more willing to compromise. The British refused the offer so the Manifest Destiny advocates responded with slogans like, “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” and “The Whole Oregon or None!” This led to the British agreeing to divide the region. Even though it was not all of Oregon like they had claimed that they would only accept, this treaty was very popular. The US was about to begin war with Mexico and they did not want to also fight the British as well. This was the last of the expansion of the North during this time. “The compass of Manifest Destiny pointed west and southwest, not north…” (Hietala, 2003).

            Manifest Destiny played another important role in the expansion of Texas. In 1836, the Republic of Texas declared independence from Mexico and, after the Texas Revolution, sought to join the United States as a new state. This was an idealized way of expansion which had been advocated from Jefferson to O'Sullivan. Instead of forcing people who did not want to join the US to join, newly democratic and independent states would request entry. The annexation of Texas was controversial as it would add another slave state to the Union. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren declined Texas's offer to join the United States because the slavery issue threatened to divide the Democratic Party (Fuller, 1936).

This issue led to an unexpected shift by the Democratic Party away from President Martin Van Buren and towards Polk because Polk favored annexation while Van Buren opposed annexation. The victory was small but Polk took the victory as justification for mandating expansion (Fuller, 1936).

Manifest Destiny was very negative for the Native Americans. Continental expansion meant the occupation and annexation of Native American land and the expansion of slavery. This ultimately led to the ethnic cleansing of several groups of native peoples. The United States continued the European practice of recognizing only limited land rights of indigenous peoples. In a policy formulated largely by Henry Knox, Secretary of War in the Washington Administration, the U.S. government sought to expand into the west through the purchase of Native American land in, typically unethical, treaties. Native Americans were encouraged to sell their vast tribal lands and become "civilized The United States therefore acquired lands by treaty from Native Nations, usually under nonconsensual circumstances by the Native signers (Fisher, 1985).

Advocates of civilization programs believed that the process of settling native tribes would greatly reduce the amount of land needed by the Native Americans, making more land available for settling by white Americans. Thomas Jefferson believed that Native Americans had to live like the whites or inevitably be pushed aside by them. Jefferson's belief, rooted in Enlightenment thinking, that whites and Native Americans would merge to create a single nation did not last his lifetime, and he began to believe that the natives should emigrate across the Mississippi River and maintain a separate society, an idea made possible by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 (Fisher, 1985).

With Manifest Destiny, the idea known as "Indian removal" gained ground. Although some humanitarian advocates of removal believed that Native Americans would be better off moving away from whites, an increasing number of Americans regarded the natives as nothing more than savages who stood in the way of American expansion. Americans increasingly believed that Native Americans would fade away as the United States expanded. (Fisher, 1985).

During this time of heavy expansion, Manifest Destiny was used to justify unethical acts as well as very well-timed political moves. The effective rhetoric used by the politicians and expansionists was very effective in increasing the land controlled by the US. Although I believe that the expansion of democracy was just a tool to make these unethical moves seem justified, the fact remains that Manifest Destiny was very effective in expanding US control.

The Space Race

The belief that it was America’s mission to expand and defend democracy continued on, adding two states and 14 territories. In the 1950s, there was a shift in where we would be looking to for our expansion.

The Space Race was a competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States, for supremacy in spaceflight capability. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and symbolic of ideological superiority. The Space Race spawned pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, unmanned probes of the Moon, Venus and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon. It began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the United States announcement of intent to launch artificial satellites, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviets won the first "lap" with the October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 (Polmer, 1990).

The Soviet success caused public controversy in the United States, and Eisenhower ordered the civilian rocket and satellite project, Vanguard, to move up its timetable and launch its satellite much sooner than originally planned. The December 6, 1957 Project Vanguard launch failure occurred at Cape Canaveral in front of a live broadcast television audience (it was the first live countdown broadcast nationally) in the United States. It was a monumental failure, exploding a few seconds after launch, and it became an international joke. The satellite appeared in newspapers under the names Flopnik, Stayputnik, Kaputnik, and Dudnik (Brzezinski, 2007). In the United Nations, the Russian delegate offered the U.S. representative aid "under the Soviet program of technical assistance to backwards nations.” (Brzezinski, 2007). Only in the wake of this very public failure did von Braun's Redstone team get the go-ahead to launch their Jupiter-C rocket as soon as they could (Brzezinski, 2007). Nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, the United States successfully launched its first satellite under the name Juno 1.

On April 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, asking him to look into the state of America's space program, and into programs that could offer NASA the opportunity to catch up. Johnson responded about one week later, concluding that the United States needed to do much more to reach a position of leadership. Johnson recommended that a piloted moon landing was far enough in the future that it was likely that the United States could achieve it first (Chaikin, 1994).

On May 25, Kennedy announced his support for the Apollo program and redefined the ultimate goal of the Space Race in an address to a special joint session of Congress: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

On 1969, after year of failure and devastation, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. At 4:17 pm EDT, July 20, 1969. At 10:56:15 pm EDT, July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon (Chaikin, 1994).

Manifest Destiny found a new meaning during this time. What was previously a tool for conquering became a tool for unity. The Space Race helped create huge advances in technology and education and gave so many students motivation to study science. It also helped America regain its superiority over the USSR. For a generation, America valued science, space exploration, and adventure. This justified years of funding for NASA which led to countless inventions that are used today.

After the Space Race

What is now commonly phrased as Nation-Building, Manifest Destiny has been used throughout the world in the last few decades. In 1980s the United States had strategic interests in urging its autocratic Latin American and East Asian allies toward democracy. And so, in the 1980s, the United States supported land reforms in El Salvador that were deeply unpopular among ruling elites; facilitated the departure of General Augusto Pinochet as Chile’s leader; and pushed Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines in the direction of veritable electoral democracy.

After 9/11, President George W. Bush elevated democratization in the Middle East as a strategic priority. Bush led a successful push to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan in his push for democracy. This aim, however, was undermined by several factors:

The association of democracy promotion with military intervention in Iraq. The entire idea of democracy is a government by the people. By forcing it onto the people and killing those who opposed, it completely undermined the idea that democracy and freedom were one in the same

The use of torture undermined our moral authority that we had over other countries. All the power we have in America over tyranny is economic sanctions, invasion, and moral authority. Economic sanctions do very little against tyrannical leaders because they will not feel the pain of the sanctions. Only the people of the country do. In the time of nuclear weapons, invasion will lose its effect. Once every country has the nuclear capability, the fear of invasion will be too high. That leaves only moral authority. We lost that authority when we violated the Geneva Convention (rules of war) by torturing prisoners.

The tendency to be unhappy when likely winners of elections were not ideal. We often preach elections and democracy but when an election does not go the way we want it, we do not hesitate to complain or try to tell the country what to do. We know of at least one case that we have helped to overthrow a democratically elected leader. It is known for sure that the CIA was involved in the overthrowing of Mohammad Mossadegh (National Security Archive, No 43, 2013). In 1953, democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a military coup after he threatened to nationalize British oil.

            Just like we did during the Western Expansion, we used democracy rhetoric to justify our countless unethical acts. We support democracy and freedom when it helps our agenda but ignore the lack of freedom from countries like Saudi Arabia because we get things from them. We continue to expand out empire and continue to hide behind democracy to do it.

Conclusion

America has used the Manifest Destiny philosophy to extend its imperialism across a fast array of land. What began as European expansion into America has turned into a different creator. America spread like wildfire across North America. After North America was finished, we began buying other territories and states. We had a brief period where this philosophy helped shape a culture of ingenuity, invention, and education, but that time has gone. In the apathetic America we have today where science is demonized, we no longer use Manifest Destiny in a positive way. Manifest Destiny is not dead, but it has transformed back into its original form. Manifest Destiny is a justification to expand our power without having guilt.

Reference List

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