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 Entertainment | Books | September 2007 
Book Review: 'Seizing Destiny' : Expansion of U.S. Detailed in Journalist Richard Kluger's Account of a 'Grasping People' – The Americans
 David M. Kinchen - Huntington News
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| Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea
(Knopf, 649 pages, bibliography, 10 maps, notes, index, $35) |
Avant la lettre – before it had a name – "Manifest Destiny" was an integral part of the American ethos, argues Richard Kluger in "Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea."
The phrase "Manifest Destiny" was coined in 1845 by newspaperman John L. O'Sullivan, advocating annexation of Texas - from 1836 to 1845 an independent republic wrested from Mexico - as well as securing the Oregon Territory from traditional enemy England. He wrote that it was America's "… 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."
The phrase was so popular, Kluger points out, that the Russians used the wording during the 1867 negotiations for the sale to America of Russian America, later renamed Alaska. The Russians preferred to sell their territory – all 570,374 square miles of it – to the Americans since they had maintained good relations with the U.S. during the Civil War, while England had favored the Confederacy, cheering on the breaking up of their former colonies, Kluger writes.
Kluger, who won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1997 for his book examining the tobacco industry, "Ashes to Ashes," uses his journalism background (Wall Street Journal, New York Post, New York Herald-Tribune) well to engagingly tell the story of how America grew from a quite large (895,415 square miles) collection of 13 colonies on the Eastern Seaboard of North America to today's 3,540,305 square mile empire, stretching from the Northern Marianas in the Pacific to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. There's a useful chart in the appendix charting the growth.
Despite the assertion in Paris by Robert R. Livingston during the negotiations for Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase that Americans were "not a grasping people" (Page 264, part of a 14-page legal brief prepared by New York lawyer and wealthy landowner Livingston), Kluger effectively describes the erstwhile colonists as just that, a very land hungry "grasping" populace indeed.
Even before the American Revolution, settlers clamored for land in the trans-Appalachian regions – including present-day West Virginia – despite a British ban on settlements there. The British were attempting to emulate the French, who had much better relations with Native American tribes, but the "grasping" colonists wanted more and better land.
Very much in the manner of Howard Zinn's populist -oriented "People's History of the United States" – cited in the very comprehensive bibliography - Kluger pulls few punches in describing the racism of Americans, evidenced in the writings of Jefferson, who didn't think much of blacks or Indians, or of Andrew Jackson, who practiced "ethnic cleansing" – avant la lettre, again – in the Trail of Tears removal of Indians from the Southeast and his invasions of Spanish-held Florida.
After negotiating the purchase of 909,308 square miles – the largest land purchase the U.S. made - Livingston four years later financed and assisted in the development of the pioneering steamboat of Robert Fulton, whom he had met in Paris. The inventor was trying to interest Napoleon in submarines! Fulton's paddle-wheel vessel was named the Clermont in honor of Livingston's estate. Five years later, in 1812, the first steamboat came down the Mississippi to New Orleans. There's a symmetry here, since the original intent of the Louisiana Purchase was to secure the port of New Orleans for Americans on the western edge of the U.S., where the Mississippi River was the western boundary.
Napoleon and his foreign minister Talleyrand were so eager to secure funds to suppress the revolt in Haiti that they threw in the rest of the territory, not just the parts that the Americans originally sought! Of course they were selling land that didn't belong to them, since the Indians living there weren't consulted.
Much of the drive for acquiring land was at first centered in the Democratic Party – the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and yes, journalist O'Sullivan, in 1845 an influential advocate for the Democratic party, the party of what Kluger calls the "slavocracy."
The "slavocracy" didn't practice sound agricultural practices with the mono-crop of King Cotton, so they were always seeking new lands suitable for cotton to replace their worn-out soil.
The great acquisitor in Kluger's account was one-term president James Knox Polk, who was elected in 1844, inaugurated in 1845 and served until March of 1849. Democrat Polk pursued the Oregon Territory, which included the future states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho and the annexation of Texas, which led to the Mexican War, a war the overmatched Mexicans call the American War, just as the Vietnamese call the Vietnam War the American War.
Born in North Carolina in 1795, Polk died a few months after leaving office in 1849, but he had accomplished the goal of making the U.S. extend from "sea to shining sea" with the acquisition of California, legalized with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. When the war was over, Mexico lost 40 percent of its territory, the entire northern half of the nation.
The Mexican province of Coahuila-Texas was ideal for cotton, so it attracted Americans like Moses Austin, his son Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett and others who secured a foothold in the province. It was a big mistake on the part of the Mexicans, allowing these land-hungry Southerners into their country. The problem with Texas was that Mexico had abolished slavery when it became independent of Spain in the early 1820s, so the Americans with slaves sought independence from and eventual annexation to the U.S.
There was also confusion over where Texas began – the Mexicans considered the Nueces River the southern boundary, while the Americans in the province thought the Rio Grande more than 100 miles south was the ideal southern border.
While Democrats were the greatest proponents of Manifest Destiny before the Civil War, after the war Republicans like William Seward - Lincoln's and Andrew Johnson's secretary of state - were the driving force behind territorial acquisition. Alaska was called "Seward's Folly" and was opposed by many, Kluger writes. What clinched the deal was the creation of Canada in 1867 with the British North America Act. Americans realized that Canadians could practice their own form of manifest destiny and acquire the Russian territory, so we got there fustest with the mostest (money).
The independent kingdom of Hawaii, the Philippines and Puerto Rico were all acquired during GOP administrations, Kluger points out. He also compares the current war in Iraq with the Philippine Insurrection that followed the Spanish American War (Page 575). We didn't acquire Cuba, but we secured a military base that's still in the news at Guantanamo on the island's southern coast and we intervened several times in Cuba's internal affairs, just as we did with Colombia and its breakaway province of Panama.
Kluger makes history come alive with "Seizing Destiny." It's not always a pretty story – in fact most of the time it's a sordid one – but it presents the kind of history we probably didn't learn in school, even if we were paying attention. I recommend it without reservation and put "Seizing Destiny" in the front rank of books to be nominated for and perhaps win a major prize next year.
Publisher's web site: www.aaknopf.com |
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