Shadows Beyond the Light:
American Exceptionalism and the Stateside Protest
Poetry of the Vietnam War
MA Thesis American Studies Faculty of Humanities The University of Amsterdam
Table of Contents
Introduction
1
Chapter 1 – America’s Defining Rhetoric
7
Chapter 2 – Robert Bly: Projecting the Shadow
34
Chapter 3 – Allen Ginsberg: Mind of Darkness
50
Conclusion
61
Introduction
The way that America has narrated itself throughout its history as an exceptional nation is central to understanding the stateside protests of Vietnam War poets. The following study argues that these protest poets criticise the Vietnam War as part of a continuity of imperial conflict that has come to inform a self-justifying, yet historically distorted narrative of American exceptionalism. This has had destructive domestic and foreign ramifications for America, and the Vietnam War can be seen as the culmination of this history of violence and conflict against others. However, the function of American exceptionalism within this project firstly requires clarification.
American exceptionalism is a broad concept and has been loosely defined by Harold Koh as the “perception that the Unites States differs qualitatively from other developed nations, because of its unique origins, national credo, historical evolution, and distinctive political and religious institutions”.1 Furthermore, its “commitments to liberty, equality,
individualism, populism and laissez-faire exempt it from the historical forces that have led to the corruption of other societies”.2 The historical significance of exceptionalism is important
because America itself was informed out of exceptional circumstances. The predominant attraction of the New World when the first colonisers arrived was how it would be
distinguished from the corruption of the Old World of Great Britain and Europe. This original impetus would form a coherent strain in American history of exceptionality that began with the Puritan mission and would inform the entire discourse of America from the concept of Divine Providence, to liberty and democracy, isolationism, Manifest Destiny,
transcendentalism, internationalism, and market capitalism.
Deborah Madsen, in her book American Exceptionalism (2011), expresses a similar argument about the historical significance of America’s rhetoric of exceptionalism. Madsen defines American exceptionalism as a concept that is used frequently to describe “the development of American cultural identity from the Puritan origins to the present”.3
Madsen’s work tracks a coherent narrative of America’s exceptional destiny from the Puritans to the present within America’s literary tradition. Her focus on the early Puritans
1 Harold Hongju Koh, ‘America’s Jekyll-and-Hyde Exceptionalism’, in Michael Ignatieff (ed.) American
Exceptionalism and Human Rights. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) p. 112.
2 Ibid.
makes it highly relevant to this study because it contextualises the arguments of Vietnam War protest poets. Robert Bly for example, draws a relationship between the mind-set of the Puritans that led the expansion into the wilderness, and the mind-set of the US political establishment that then led the American military into the jungles of Vietnam.
A close study of the Puritan narrative reveals another dominant factor of American exceptionalism that informs the Vietnam War which is the belief that America is to be a leading example to the rest of the world. This will heavily inform the later conviction that the United States is charged with the exceptional responsibility of saving the world from the forces of oppression in the defence of liberty. Contradictions arise within this idea that are part of the criticisms of the protest poets of the Vietnam War who see that the
exceptionalist desire to provide freedom to the rest of the world is impaired by the
imperialist brutality with which this freedom is imposed. Yet it can be observed that the US political establishment from the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) to Vietnam has always been averse to labels of imperialism or colonialism. Conflict in general was written into the early American political outlook as something to be avoided, however the defence of freedom was the absolute exception. This was highly informed by America’s need to defend its own freedom from the tyranny of imperial Great Britain during the American War of Independence (1775–1783) and the War of 1812 (1812-1815) that would inform its
exceptional desire for isolationism and a general reluctance to enter into warfare with other nations. However what becomes clear when we look back through history is that America would become repeatedly criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of an imperial nation. Connections can be made within the rhetoric of exceptionalism where America’s imperial tendencies in Vietnam can be seen as being a repeat of previous conflicts like the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Philippine-Mexican-American War (1899-1902). The Vietnam War becomes placed as a continuity of these past conflicts that were similarly criticised as acts of imperialism and colonialism; characteristics of oppression that its exceptional mission was originally set against.
For Richard Slotkin, exceptionalism is sustained by the belief in the myths that it creates. In his work Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973) these myths create a false but credulously believable narrative where the American nation becomes the hero that achieves regeneration by destroying whatever evil opposes it. He too goes back to early Puritan literature to find that the massacre of Native American
populations became a construction of good against an evil that inhabited the wilderness. For him, America’s “mythogenesis” was not founded by the typical eighteenth-century founding fathers in Philadelphia, but rather by those who, paraphrasing Faulkner:
“tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness – the rogues, adventurers, and land-boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hard-ship and Indian warfare for the sake of the sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to the settlers, for whom they were the special demonic
personification of the American wilderness”.4
This highlights the disparity between the bright exceptional rhetoric of America’s destiny and the dark reality of violence and conflict which it shadows. Ultimately, exceptionalism
becomes a useful tool for self-perpetuating national values during challenging
circumstances, or as Michael Hunt puts it, exceptionalism functions to give Americans “order to their vision of the world and defining their place in it”.5 American intervention in Vietnam
is then couched in the need to validate national exceptional destiny, even if that validation impinges on the sovereignty and lives of another nation.
Allen Ginsberg and Robert Bly are two poets who also criticise the tradition of exceptionalism for providing the unjustified means for entering into war with Vietnam. The Vietnam War for them is a symptom of a sickness within the heart of the American nation both psychologically and spiritually. For them, the narrative of exceptionalism cannot be seen as a beacon of light for the nation, because of the hatred and darkness that the light seeks to cover. Robert Bly draws from the theories of the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung and applies them to the collective psyche of the nation to reveal a patient history of trauma and violence that stems from the Puritans who first massacred the Native Americans. This has been repressed in the mind of the nation, the consequences of which have led to the projection of this violence onto the Vietnamese. Allen Ginsberg takes a similar view by seeing a nation that has become engulfed by a spiritual deficiency of capitalism and greed. This has resulted in the nation losing its sense of identity that once rested in the positive exceptional spirit of America, but has become disrupted by an urge for rationality, conformity and conservatism that culminated in the Vietnam War.
4 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier. (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) p. 4
What can be revealed from these poets is the importance of war-time poetry to a more holistic understanding of war. Poetry offers a voice that is often lost amidst a more authoritative but clinically rational language of war. It offers a medium of expression that questions military and political myths put forward to justify their motives and adds a moral and ethical dimension to the debate over war itself. Poetry was an effective vehicle for succinctly but powerfully expressing the strong yet often repressed emotions that are experienced both of and in war. It plays an important role in condensing the feelings of protest and opposition that people felt against the government. It serves the purposes of expressing to the public stage a private and authentic protest. Yet Chattarji, writing in 2001, notes that unlike other cultural forms such as film and television “poetry does not occupy a dominant space in representation of the war experience”.6
By looking at the voices of stateside poets we are able to get a glimpse into how the narratives that construct American exceptionalism from within have been dismantled by an opposing language of protest. Because this study is concerned with how this narrative has been opposed within the same strain of America’s tradition of exceptionalism, it will not be concerned with the expression of Vietnamese anti-war poet’s, even though the voice of the Vietnamese is an important and only recent presence in the literature.7 The voices of
American Vietnam veteran poets will also not form a part of this study because although their points about the psychological effects of war are significant, this study is more concerned with how the tradition of American exceptionalism has been constructed up to the Vietnam War rather than after it. An inclusion of their voices would overstretch the focus of this study towards questions regarding how the war has been memorised within the American psyche after the Vietnam War, rather than how a history of conflict has been memorised before it.
One author who has been able to do both however, is Subarno Chattarji in his book
Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (2001). He makes a
comprehensive analysis of a number of different poets, from some of the most well-known protest poets such as Robert Bly and Allen Ginsberg, and veteran poets such as W.D Ehrhart
6 Subarno Chattarji, Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic responses to the Vietnam War. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) p. xii
7 Two notable examples of this inclusion’s of the voices of Vietnamese anti-war poets are firstly a chapter titled “The Other” in Subarno Chattarji’s Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (2001) and the collection of poems on the Vietnam War edited by Phillip Mahony From Both Sides Now: The
to a selection of pro-war poetry and Vietnamese anti-war poetry that makes his work particularly unique. Although facing criticism that his points sometimes multiply with each paragraph, detracting from the solidity of his overall argument, by placing the poetry of the Vietnam War in its historical and political context, his literary analysis is strong and therefore particularly valuable to this study.
James F. Mersmann was one of the first to write on the subject of anti-Vietnam War poetry just as the war was coming to an end. His book Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of
Poets and Poetry Against the Vietnam War (1974) is concerned with the intersection of
poetry and politics in the works of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan. Although the title implies an integrated range of poets, Mersmann presents each of these poets’ works in their own separate rights offering a close analysis of each in successive chapters. It is also a highly valuable study because he began the attempt to shed light on the issues of politics and poetry in the literature of the Vietnam War.
Because it is necessary to contextualise the history of American exceptionalism, the first chapter of this study will focus on the moments in American history where the nation has felt the need to provide a definition of its exceptional destiny. This will include religious sermons, poetry, presidential speeches, novels, and lithographs. It will track the
development of the narrative of exceptionalism as well as the development of a parallel narrative of protest to the concept. This will be important to contextualising the arguments of the Vietnam War protest poets who claim that the Vietnam War is a continuity of a tradition of conflict made on the pretext of exceptional destiny. The second chapter will focus on the poetry of Robert Bly from his earlier works to his more explicit Vietnam War collections because of the importance of the Vietnam War as an instance of disruption within his poetic imagination. The third chapter will focus on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg in a similar fashion. Whenever poetry is concerned throughout this study, a close-textual analysis will be employed in order to dissect the meaning of their war and anti-exceptionalist expression. This New-criticism style will be combined with a cultural
materialist approach in order to produce the most complete understanding of the voice of these poets within their historical context.
Chapter 1 – America’s Defining Rhetoric
The idea of America as an exceptional nation has permeated its rhetoric since its conception. It encapsulates the defining myth of America as a country invested with a unique set of characteristics that has set it apart from other countries. From Winthrop’s Puritan sermons in the seventeenth-century, to the Declaration of Independance in the eighteenth, Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth, and Pax Americana in the twentieth, this narrative of
exceptionalism has remained coherent.8 The central idea is that America is different because
it is superior, and this superiority justifies its role as an example to the world. Yet for every situation that has led America to invoke its myth of exceptionality, it has had to face opposition, from Antinomians, to transcendentalists and finally to War poets that too have played a significant role in the development of its narrative. This is mostly because of the contradictions that arise between the rhetoric of exceptionalism that is invoked, and the violence that seems to follow. The rhetoric of American exceptionalism then becomes tied to the violent events that it initiated throughout its expansion, including the subjugation of the Native Americans and the destruction of the wilderness. By tracking the evolution and fluctuations of American exceptional rhetoric at significant moments within its history, a picture can be built how the Vietnam War too became a part of this continuity.
In order to understand the ideological impulse towards War with Vietnam, it is necessary to understand the origins of exceptionalism. This ideological imperative can first be seen in the impetus of the first European settlers. In 1630, John Winthrop famously described the imperatives of the Puritan journey to the New World in his sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity”. “The eyes of all people are upon us”, he stated “we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill”.9 It was a grand image that weighted the redemption of mankind on the
shoulders of those soon-to-be colonists. Escaping from persecution in Great Britain, their journey towards religious freedom was to be a beacon to the rest of the world fulfilled from an ordained, messianic responsibility. To imply that they were carrying out God’s will gave them exceptional status above all others; a notion of ultimate uniqueness that would come
8 Sylvia Söderlind, ‘Introduction: The Shining of America’, in Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor (eds), American
Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011) p. 4
9 John Winthrop ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, in David Hollinger and Charles Capper (eds), The American
to define the concept of American exceptionalism throughout its history. But at the same time, to place their mission in such grand terms of exceptional destiny vested them with a great responsibility to succeed. Because the future of the Church was placed on these settlers, to fail in this mission would imply that the salvation of humankind was not possible. This was demonstrated in Peter Bulkeley’s sermon ‘The Gospel Covenant’ (circa 1639-40) whose language of exceptionalism is explicit:
And as for ourselves here, the people of New England, we should in a special manner labor to shine forth in holiness above other people […] The eyes of the world are upon us because we profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with god and therefore not only the Lord our God […] but heaven and earth, angels and men […] will cry shame upon us if we walk contrary to the covenant which we have professed and promised to walk in.10
Bulkeley presents that the mission of these Pilgrims is to be carefully scrutinised not only by God and the heavens, but by mankind. To fail in this mission will be to fail both the spiritual and the material worlds meaning that they will no longer “shine forth in holiness above other people”, but will instead elicit shame upon themselves. In this sermon Bulkeley follows what Perry Miller has described as part of a resounding theme in Puritan texts after 1660 of “declension and apostasy” which outline the numerous afflictions of God “to prove how abysmally they had deserted the covenant”.11 This covenant therefore forms the foundation
of the Puritan mission. It is only if the whole religious community remains committed to the covenant that binds them to one another and to their mission that they will succeed.
These calls for commitment to the Puritan cause in the New World became
increasingly repeated in the religious discourse of the time as settlements grew and collided with the wilderness. The first early settlers were faced with great challenges of physical hardship from famine, disease and attack from Native Americans. There was a recurring pattern across all of the settlements in that area of high mortality rates and in the case of Plymouth half of the Pilgrims had died before the end of their first winter.12 This was a
problem for the chosen Puritan settlers who had arrived to the New World on the premise that their mission was ordained by God. The extreme hardship felt began to challenge the
10 Peter Burkeley ‘The Gospel Covenant’, in Andrew Delbanco and Alan Heimert (eds), The Puritans in America:
A Narrative Anthology. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p. 120
11 Perry Miller, ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ , The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 10.1 (1953) p. 8 12 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. rev. ed. (Hill and Wang, 2003 [1985]) p. 36
commitment of these colonists to the cause that had brought them hundreds of miles across the ocean to a hostile land. Because of this, the religious discourse had to highlight that these challenges were not a sign that their holy mission was wrong or unfounded. What they instead professed was that this mission was so important to the fate of Christianity that God felt it necessary to test them, to ensure the strength of their commitment. This was
demonstrated by Thomas Tillam in his poem ‘Upon the First Sight of New England’ (1638) on his approach of the continent:
Come my deare little flocke, who for my sake Have lefte your country, dearest friends, and goods And hazarded your lives o’th raginge floods Posses this country; free from all anoye Heare I’le bee with you, heare you shall Injoye My Sabbaths, sacraments, my minestrye And ordinances in their puritye
But yet beware of Sathans wylye baites Hee lurkes amongs yow, Cunningly hee waits To Catch yow from mee; live not then secure But fight ‘gainst sinne, and let your lives be pure Prepare to heare your sentence thus expressed Come yee my servants of my father Blessed.13
For Tillam, Satan plays as much a role in their holy mission as God. As he ‘lurks’ amongst the settlers he would try to tempt them away from their mission and compromise their success by infiltrating the faithful commitment of the community. The only way to prevent failure is to maintain their belief in their mission in the New World by fighting Satan’s “cunning”. This poem was published soon after the Antinomian Controversy (1636) when the antinomians Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams were exiled for their views that went against the concept of exceptional destiny.14 They took issue with the way that the Bay Clergy drew
exceptional authority over the community when only Christ had the power to re-create a new church. They believed that the Puritan idea of exceptional destiny was at odds with its claim to universal purpose because they were pursuing the Promised Land as a selected few while attempting to fulfil a universal purpose of completing the redemption of all
Christianity. The beliefs of these antinomians threatened the authority of the Bay Clergy and can be seen as some of the first voices of dissent against the Puritan rhetoric of
13 Thomas Tillam, ‘Upon the First Sight of New England’, in Andrew Delbanco and Alan Heimert (eds), The
Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) pp. 126-7
exceptionalism. Satan in Tillam’s poem was therefore not an external actor but an internal one, making the purpose of the poem to draw attention to the “precariousness of their mission at a time when the purity of the errand appeared to be under threat from within”.15
It is by calling attention to the dangers of losing faith that the Puritans could justify the validity of their exceptional mission even in the face of great suffering and misfortune. As the ‘errand into the wilderness’ became realised, the evil that threatened the Puritan mission became increasingly focused on the Native American with whom they were coming into increasing contact and conflict. For the Bay clergy, who had authority over the Puritan settlers, the scripture foretold this errand and justified the acquisition of increasing tracts of Native American land. This errand, and its consequences, is then key to America’s exceptional destiny as shown in Samuel Danforth’s election sermon ‘A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness’ (1670):
But then the Lord calls upon them seriously and thoroughly to examine themselves, what it was that drew them into the wilderness, and to consider that it was not the expectation of ludicrous levity nor of courtly pomp and delicacy, but of the free and clear dispensation of the Gospel and kingdom of God.16
This sermon demonstrates how their mission was justified on the grounds of exceptional destiny. Coming from the word of God, the expansion into the wilderness was part of the settler’s ordained mission for the good of the kingdom of God, and therefore not for mere material gain. The way that they narrated their mission was analogous to the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, an exile from their home to an idolatrous land where they would be tested before being granted the Promised Land and a New Jerusalem.17 The Native Americans that
were encountered became a part of the idolatrous land that these settlers encroached upon. Puritans like the governor William Bradford were explicit in highlighting how the Native Americans had no claim to humanity or land, in the face of their exceptional destiny:
The place they [the settlers] had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil
15 Ibid.
16 Samuel Danforth, “A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness”, in Andrew Delbanco (ed.), Writing New England: An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) p. 13
17 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier. (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) p. 38
inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men, which range up and down, little otherwise then the wild beasts of the same.18
The natives were represented as being no more human than the landscape itself and as a result became equally subject to the taming of the wilderness. This dichotomy between the civilised Pilgrims and the “savage” Native American was made more extreme by the
American-Indian Wars that broke out in the seventeenth-century resulting in a greater need to strengthen the righteousness of the Puritan mission.19
The dehumanisation of the Native Americans became exaggerated by the literature of the time that constructed them as agents of Satan. This was made clear in Mary
Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) who narrated her capture by Native Americans in a way that followed a metaphor of spiritual redemption. The Native Americans in the story were represented as “ravenous beasts”, but it was only through her captivity, which had prevented her from observing the Sabbath, that she was able to realise “how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly I had walked in God's sight”.20 She interprets her capture, and subsequent release, as a
sign from God that she and the community must remain committed to the federal covenant and America’s unique mission. The Natives represented satanic agents through whom God warned and chastised his people in order to lead them back to the covenant.21 Where the
Puritan mission represented good, the Natives represented primitive evil and were
portrayed as such, “through the darkness the Indians flitted, like the secret enemy of Christ or like evil thoughts that plague the mind on the edge of consciousness”.22 The image of the
Native American as an object of fear in the minds of these Pilgrims became written into the religious discourse of New England as a tool for the perpetuation of their errand. By
demonising the Native Americans, the Puritans made them exempt from the universal Christian charity that was granted to all others.
Furthermore this captivity myth would then be written into a history of future American imperial conflicts. The construction of the Native Americans as evil agents who capture white women has created, as argued by Richard Slotkin in his work on the
18 William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation. ed. Charles Dean (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1856) p. 24 19 Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism, p. 11
20 Mary Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. (Minneapolis, MN: Filiquarian Publishing LLC, 2007) pp. 6, 9
21 Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism. p. 33 22 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, p. 77
mythology of the American frontier, a captivity myth that came to be used increasingly for imperial motives.23 Such conflicts as the wars of the southern plains 1867-69 were provoked
in order to justify expropriation of Native lands but hidden behind a rhetoric that white captives, especially women, had to be saved from the “brutal rapists of the plains”,24 a
sentiment that is also echoed in the redlining and lynching of black slaves.The Spanish-American War was presented as vengeance for the sinking of the Maine and the rescue of American and Cubans in Spanish concentration camps. What becomes constructed is the dichotomy of hero versus captor, where American invests itself with the role of a hero that must come to the rescue of a victim in need. However what Slotkin argues is that the result of this desire to be a saviour has formed part of a “myth of regeneration through violence” that has become “the structuring metaphor of the American experience”.25 The metaphor of
America as the saviour is a key part of its exceptional mythology but one that conceals and justifies a drive for dominance over the land: “the myth-hero embodies or defends the value of his culture in the struggle against the forces which threaten to destroy the people and lay waste the land”. 26 It strongly relates to the Puritan desire to justify their holy mission
through civilising the wilderness. The violence that then results becomes inextricably part of the mythology, the reality of which is veiled by a self-perpetuating myth. The continuity of this violence has been interpreted by Vietnam War poets as a sickness within the collective psyche of America. Robert Bly would later make the argument that the war against the Vietnamese was part of a projection of repressed violence in the psyche of America stemming from the massacre of the Native Americans.27
Although the tendency to justify this violence with a mythologizing narrative was effective in continuing expansion, some opponents were able to see between the myth of expansionism and the reality for the Natives. Roger Williams would demonstrate through poetry his opposition to the way that the Puritan religious rhetoric could inflict unnecessary subjugation of the Native Americans. He argued that the errand into the wilderness was unfounded because the Bible was a spiritual text that gave individual spiritual advice, rather
23 Ibid., p. 562 24 Ibid.
25 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, p. 5 26 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, p. 269
27 Robert Bly, ‘Comments at a poetry reading for The Resistance, 10 Apr. 1969’, Lawrence, Kansas, cited in James F. Mersmann, Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry Against the War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974) p. 123
than instructions for the future in the real world. To interpret God’s will as acting through a system of signs and historic parallelism was not justified as God’s will is unknowable and could not influence the everyday life of the colony in such a way.28 The Native Americans
should therefore not be seen as inferior, but equal, even superior, to the Europeans which he expressed through poetry in his study of Native American languages A Key Into the
Language of America (1643):
Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood; Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good.
Of one blood God made Him, and Thee and All, As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.
By nature wrath’s his portio, thine no more Till Grace his soul and thine in Christ restore Make sure thy second birth, else thou shalt see, Heaven open to Indians wild, but shut to thee.29
Williams criticises the arrogance of the Puritans for ordaining themselves as being by “birth and blood” above the Native Americans. By contrast, Williams argues for the universal equality that both groups share under God, proposing that they are of “one blood”. Far from being savage, the Native American is actually given even more right to enter Heaven than the Puritans who are betraying God’s word through their subjugation of the wilderness. To place the Native Americans on equal merits as the Pilgrims like this emphasised that no one group could have exceptional destiny over another. In this case it meant that the Puritans had no authority to take lands occupied by Native Americans, despite calls by John Cotton that “God’s people” had the right to “take the land by promise”. 30 Thus Williams and
Hutchinson were important in showing an early protest to the negative consequences of American exceptionalism through poetics.
The idea of an exceptional destiny would continue into the realm of politics with the forming of American political liberty. There was a change from the seventeenth-century into the eighteenth-century from a focus on Puritan religious freedom to political freedom solidified
28 Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism, p. 23
29 Roger Williams, A Key Into the Language of America. (London: Gregory Dexter, 1643) p.53 Available at:
https://archive.org/details/keyintolanguageo02will [accessed 2/05/2014]
30 Samuel Danforth, ‘A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness’ in Andrew Delbanco and Alan Heimert (eds), The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p. 77
in the framing of the Declaration of Independence. In its historical context, the ordained individual rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were set against the numerous repressive acts of the King of England that harboured Americans’ freedom.31 It was thus
constructed specifically for the freedom of oppressed Americans; yet implied a much
broader conception of liberty that would encompass all of mankind. The influence of religion is clear in the conception of universal freedom, as the Declaration argues, “all men are created equal”, whose rights are “endowed by their Creator”.32 What is also implied is a
mission of responsibility to support others who experience repression of their freedoms. The colonists criticise their “Brittish brethren” who have been “deaf to the voice of justice”, as they failed to defend the American cause despite pleas for assistance. This language anticipates what will later translate from America’s quest for freedom to America’s responsibility to the freedom of the world.
At the same time although the US held closely to this idea of responsibility it was often reluctant to get involved in European politics. Indeed, although constructed in the context of the American War of Independence, the Declaration was the final result of
sustained reluctance to engage. In response to the waging of war against the colonists by the King of Great Britain, they “petitioned for redress in the most humble terms”,33 signifying a
desire for peaceful reconciliation. Patrick Henry before this had already expressed that war with Britain was to be made as an absolute last resort to peace. In his 1775 speech in which he famously opined “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”, he sets out how all other avenues had been extinguished, “for the last ten years […] we have done everything that could be done, to avert the storm that is now coming”.34 Indeed, it is significant that the storm is
coming to them because it symbolises how the country feels it is acting in response to aggression and not initiating it, a key part of exceptional mythology and isolationism. At the point of the arrival of this storm, they are left with little choice but to react, and when they do, this is justified through them being bound to an exceptional destiny. This in itself is so important to the world, that war can be justified in the defence of universal freedom. It is
31 ‘Declaration of Independence’, July 4th 1776, National Archives. Available online at:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html [accessed 04/04/2014]. 32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Patrick Henry, ‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death! St. John’s Church, Richmond, Virginia March 23, 1775’.
Colonial Williamsburg. Politics in Colonial Virginia. http://www.history.org/Almanack/life/politics/giveme.cfm [Accessed 15/04/2014]
because of this that Patrick Henry expresses with such force his famous dictum “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” because of the ordained responsibility that they have to fight for their freedom, to “fulfil the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country”.35
This again echoes the Puritan’s belief in America being an example to the rest of the world. The preference for peace that became overwritten by the need to defend liberty was similarly played out in the run up to the War of 1812. James Madison would address the issue of war with Great Britain in similar terms; that all other peaceful options have been extinguished. The United States “has in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations” in their desire to remain peaceful and away from connections which might entangle it.36 This
isolationist stance is not broken by choice, but by threat to American peaceful liberty. It is the United States that has peaceful intentions, but with Great Britain they find intentions of war. The choice to defend their “national rights” through warfare is once again placed in exceptional terms as it shall be a “just cause [committed] into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events”.37 Henry Clay, arguing for involvement in the war in 1811 was also explicit
in stating that this was only a war of defence because they have essentially already been invaded, being “denied egress from our own waters”.38 The purpose of this warfare, for Clay,
should be supported in the short term in order to secure peace in the long term, stating that it “ought never to be resorted to but when it is clearly and justifiably necessary”. Indeed, the Committee on Foreign relations, concluded that this decision to go to war on the grounds of the defence of liberty will “prove to the enemy and to the world, that we have not only inherited that liberty which our fathers gave us, but also the will and power to maintain it”.39
The language of exceptionalism is once again clear, and further manifests itself as
exceptional through the country’s desire to be an example for the defence of world freedom. Up to this point the United States had only had to deal with defending itself from outside imperial forces. However, as it expanded, its own actions began to replicate the very imperial acts of warfare that it had previously been the victim of. When America went to war with Mexico from 1846-1848, President James Polk would justify engagement on the basis
35 Ibid.
36 James Madison, ‘Special Message to Congress on the Foreign Policy Crisis – War Message, June 1, 1812’ The
Miller Center. Presidential Speech Archive. http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3614 [Accessed 15/04/2014].
37 Ibid.,
38 Annals of Congress, 12th Cong., 1st session, p. 601.
that the Mexican Government had, much like the British before them, “invaded our territory and shed the blood of our fellow citizens on our own soil”.40 President Polk justified military
action against Mexico by constructing the United States as the peaceful victim with the honourable intention to rightly protect its national interest. The US was again presented as having a “strong desire to establish peace with Mexico on liberal and honourable terms” and to resolve the matter through diplomacy. Yet in the view that American rights and territories are under threat, it was on the basis of duty and patriotism that Polk requests the
immediate appearance “in arms of a large and overpowering force” to bring the conflict to a “speedy and successful termination”.41
However, where Polk saw this war as analogous to the War of 1812 by constructing the Mexican Government as the aggressor, opponents to the war argued to the contrary. For such opponents as Henry Clay, it was not the United States that was in need of defending itself for Mexico was the one “defending her fire-sides, her castles and her altars, not we”.42
Instead, the US was guilty of the very “offensive aggression” that characterised Britain as imperialist during the War of 1812. Indeed, Clay argued that America was becoming much like other conquering nations of the past such as those of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.43 The war with Mexico, he argued, would fail to bring more liberty to America
because it would follow the course of those imperial nations that not only failed in achieving any sort of freedom, but ended up trampling on their people’s liberties in the process.That being said, federalists believed that the exceptional political structure of the United States protected it from committing the same tyranny of the Roman and British empires. This line of thinking followed an interpretation of the Constitution that assured freedom for any peoples entering the “temple of freedom” that was the Union, but apparently not for the large slave population in the southern US.44 By granting the control of such local affairs to
the state and foreign affairs to the central government, the freedom of each state’s rights would be preserved even as the country grew larger, thus restricting the possibility of federal
40 James K. Polk ‘Special Message to Congress on Mexican Relations, May 11, 1846’, The American Presidency
Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=67907 [accessed 02/05/2014]
41 Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 12th Cong., 1st session, Vol. 8 p. 397 42 Henry Clay, ‘Speech on the Mexican-American War, 1847’, Teaching American History. Expansion Era.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-on-the-mexican-american-war/ [accessed 02/05/2014].
43 Ibid.
44 Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) p. 26
government becoming a central tyranny. For these proponents the geographical expansion across the continent was the opposite of imperialism. Instead they were spreading the American institution of freedom for the benefit, not hindrance of their neighbours.
Ironically, one of the main criticisms of the war with Mexico was that it was a means of expanding the institution of slavery, as slaveholders sought to push it westwards.45 Even
though the Constitution denied the right of congress to forbid slavery to the states on the grounds of state’s freedom, the central contradiction was that freedom would still not be granted to protect one of the largest group of oppressed people’s within America. Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience focused on the contradiction of slavery within a democratic system. For Thoreau, it was morally impossible to be
associated with an American government that permitted slavery as he notes “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organisation as my government which is the slave’s
government also”.46 Slavery made the idealism of America’s divine destiny and democracy
absurd to its opponents and to the slaves themselves, eventually culminating in the outbreak of the American Civil War. Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987) showed how it is impossible to use justify the perfection of American national identity on the basis of a history of exceptionalism when slavery was such a clear indictment of it. For her,
exceptionalism seemed to negate the importance of race in the narrative of exceptionalism brushing over the history of African Americans, and poor whites. This was demonstrated at the very end of the novel where the character Beloved becomes forgotten “like an
unpleasant dream”, as is the story of African-Americans in general. As a result “it was not a story to pass on”; yet by passing this story on through her novel Morrison shows what American exceptionalism would rather forget.47
As the nineteenth-century progressed, it was the argument for expansion that informed the concept of Manifest Destiny. Henry Clay’s claim that America was acting as an imperial nation came at a time of massive territorial expansion of the United States across the whole of the continent.48 At the point of the Annexation of Texas that triggered the War
with Mexico, John O’ Sullivan would use the term Manifest Destiny to justify the righteous expansion of the United States in an article published in the Democratic Review (1839):
45 Ibid., p. 166
46 Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. [e-book] available at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm. P. 4 [accessed 24/06/2014] 47 Toni Morrison, Beloved. International edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2004) p. 324 48 Ibid., p. 5
The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High -- the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere -- its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens.49
Set heavily in the language of exceptionalism, it reiterated a religious divinity that had come to inform both the Puritan errand into the wilderness and the City upon a Hill, in this case defined as “noblest temple”. To Sullivan, America could not be restricted by the physical boundaries of earth, because its mission exceeded the corporeal realm and reached to the heavens. Once again however, this myth was shadowed by the huge economic opportunity that became available after such landmark deals such as the Louisiana Purchase (1803). What symbolised the exploitation of the wilderness at this time was the destruction of the bison population, a resource that was also relied upon by the Native Americans.50
Accompanied by the Jefferson’s Homestead Act of 1862 and the increasing demand of exploding populations in Eastern cities, more and more people began to head West and take advantage of the incredible abundance of bison herds. Indeed, it was estimated that in 1800 there were between thirty and sixty million buffalo, but by 1895 there were less than one thousand.51 This turned out to be catastrophic for the Native Americans who depended on
them, and after decades of conflict sealed their futures to the reservations. What Manifest Destiny legitimated through the language of exceptionalism was the destruction and exploitation of the wilderness and all that inhabited it.
It is possible to capture how Manifest Destiny was invoked to encourage American expansion by looking at its visual representations. One of the most important of these illustrations is a painting by John Gast titled American Progress (1873) (see Figure 1). This illustration depicts the advance of American civilisation westwards lead by the allegorical female figure often referred to as Columbia. She is the embodiment of Manifest Destiny, wearing the “Star of empire” on her forehead andinstilling American progress with positive connotations of charm, grace and beauty. 52 To the right-side of the illustration there are 49 John O’ Sullivan, ‘The Great Nation of Futurity’, The United States Democratic Review, 6.23 (1839), p. 427 50 Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism, p. 92.
51 Ray Mears, How the Wild West Was Won with Ray Mears. (2014). ‘Episode 2: The Great Plains’, BBC4, 29 May. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b044md9y [accessed 15/06/2014]
52 George A. Crofutt cited in Peter J. Conn, Literature in America: An Illustrated History. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1989) p.236
trains, wagons and horses carrying the pioneers with confidence over the wilderness, driving out the bison and Native Americans from the left-side border. The right-hand side of
civilisation is also considerably lighter than the left, enhancing the sense of Divine Providence over the dark and untamed wilderness. The opportunity for material
aggrandisement is demonstrated by the how the long prairie grass gives way to ploughed fields. This also readies the land for the establishment of the institution of America as Crofutt writes in the accompanying text to the painting, that to the right there are “schools and churches, over which beams of light are streaming and filling the air”.53 The civilising
force of religion is present in this illustration as well as throughout the narrative of American exceptionalism which becomes the beacon of light that illuminates the path for the conquest of untamed darkness.
Figure 1. George A. Crofutt, American Progress, (1873); chromolithograph 37.6 x 49 cm Library of Congress. Available at: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b49232/
[accessed 24/06/2014]
One group that was highly opposed to what they saw as a material conquest of nature were the Transcendentalists. Beginning in the 1830s, the beliefs of this group could be defined by a metaphysical position “that placed God within the world and within each
person rather than outside humankind’s experience and knowledge”.54 Influenced by the
Romantic Movement, nature was seen as containing a truth and knowledge that could be attained through individual perception. Where the Puritan’s spiritual guidance came from without, spiritual guidance for the transcendentalists came from within, something that came to characterise the quintessential concept of American Individuality.55 What became
important for these thinkers was an appreciation for intuitive thought and emotion which surpassed the rational logic that had characterised the Enlightenment. This belief was especially characterised by Ralph Waldo Emerson who was at the forefront of this movement. This was expressed in his essays ‘Nature’ and ‘The American Scholar’ that outlines how nature was strongly connected with the soul and as a result had a deep spiritual value. The problem for him however, was that people were losing their connection to nature and as a result leaning with imbalance towards a life of materialism.56 What the
untamed wilderness of American contained was a form of purity and simplicity that contrasted with the sophistication of the Old World. This was demonstrated in his poem “Blight” in which he presented the opposition between the “truths” of nature formed by man’s relationship to it, and the superficial attempts by science to quantify it: “these young scholars who invade our hills, / bold and the engineer who fells the wood”. This superficial attitude only perceives the material value of nature and as such will lead to a blindness towards true spirituality, “we thieves / and pirates of the universe, shut out / daily to a more thin and outward rind”.57 Exceptional destiny for Emerson was about returning to the
primitive or original order of society, away from the material influences of Europe. Yet the transcendentalists were not the only, nor indeed the first literary figures to worry about western expansion. James Fennimore Cooper was a Romantic who also shared this view of nature but would be more explicit in how this destruction of the wilderness related to the destruction of the Native American. His novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826) was written at a time of rapid expansion westwards into lands untouched by European
54 Joel Myerson, ‘Introduction’, in Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls (eds), The
Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) p. xxiv.
55 Ibid.,
56 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’ in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 9. (New York: Houghton, Mifflin & co, 1904) [e-book] available at: http://www.bartleby.com/90/0101.html [accessed 15/04/2014]
57 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson’, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Vol. 9. (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904) available at Bartleby.com online books:
hands.58 It dealt specifically with how the primitive values of the Native American, were
being overlooked by the materialism of a nation that saw the land in purely commercial terms. For Cooper, by civilising the wilderness of the land, the colonists were destroying all hope of spiritual renewal. Even worse, by impressing sophistication and order onto the primitive land, they were replicating the very corruption of the Old World that America had fundamentally distinguished itself against.59 This created a narrative that ran counter to the
Puritan errand because it emphasised that nature had the power to teach men about God, not the other way around. As one Native American scout would explain to the Calvinist character of David Gamut:
I have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God. I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlement, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among traders and priests. If any such there be, and he will follow me from sun to sun, through the windings of the forest, he shall see enough to teach him that he is a fool, and that the greatest of his folly lies in striving to rise to the level of One he can never equal, be it in goodness, or be it in power.60
In this passage the wilderness is not represented as evil or corrupted as was typical of Winthrop and O’ Sullivan, but as being a great spiritual resource that can lead to greater knowledge and truth. To state that man’s folly is in his attempt to rise to an unattainable greatness above himself, is an explicit criticism of America’s whole exceptional mission. This includes both the folly of the “priests” that “strive” towards the religious covenant of
“goodness” of the Puritan mission to the folly of the “traders” that “strive” to their Manifest Destiny and the growing commercial “power” that was facilitated through expansion. It is the combination of these two impulses: Manifest destiny and nature as a teacher that came to form Frederick Turner’s Frontier thesis, connecting the frontier with development of American democracy.
Soon however, as the Frontier came to a halt at the Pacific Ocean, American expansion within the country would overflow onto the foreign stage. This brought with it criticism of imperial motives especially provoked by the controversial Spanish-American War (1898) and consequently the Phillipine-American War (1899-1902). Key to this war in the
58 Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism, p. 75 59 Deborah Madsen, American Exceptionalism, p. 77
60 James Fennimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. Vol. II Author’s revised edition (New York: George Putnam, 1850) p. 148
Philippines was the idea that America was a bringer of liberty to an oppressed nation; in this case granting freedom for the Philippine people from the oppression of Spain. Similar to the Mexican-American war and the War with Britain before it, the proponents of the Philippine-American War emphasised the reluctance of the United States to enter into warfare with another country. The President at the time, William McKinley, stated in 1898 that this war was an “unwelcome necessity”;61 unwelcome because the US would ideally want to
complete peaceful negotiations and necessary because they had a responsibility to the cause of liberty. The notion of responsibility demonstrated that the country was motivated by duty to a moral order rather than designs for “aggrandisement” or “ambition of
conquest”. This notion of responsibility was shown most explicitly in McKinley’s language in a speech given at Chicago in October 1898 “the war has put upon the nation grave
responsibilities […] Accepting war for humanity’s sake, we must accept all obligations which the war in duty and honour imposed on us”.62 By framing it in this way, McKinley emphasises
that the decision to go to war was not initiated or planned by the United States. On the contrary it was essentially a passive actor, where the impetus to respond was being forced upon it by the situation in the Philippines. America had an exceptional duty to be an
example of liberty to the world which bound this liberator inextricably to its mission. It was in this humanitarian language that McKinley argued to congress the need to “put an end to the barbarities, bloodshed, starvation and horrible miseries now existing there”.63 The
Filipinos then became a part of the narrative of American freedom in which the United States becomes unconditionally and exceptionally bound to these victims of oppression.
However, although the proponents of engagement with the Philippines did not see themselves as imperialists their actions spoke to the contrary. One of the main criticisms centred on how the freedom that was determined for the Filipinos was limited. What was presented to the Filipino people was a ‘Bill of Rights’ that did not include how the country was going to rule itself but instead envisioned to retain sovereignty and to curtail indigenous political rights, including political independence.64 It follows what Isaiah Berlin has defined as
61 President William McKinley, U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1898, pp. 904-908. 62 William McKinley, Speech at Chicago cited in Robert P. Saldin, War, The American State, and Politics Since
1898. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) p. 45.
63 William McKinley, ‘Message to Congress, April 11, 1898’ in James D. Richardson (ed.) A Compilation of the
Messages and Papers of the Presidents. (1902) [e-book] Project Gutenburg. Available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13893/13893-h/13893-h.htm [accessed 17/05/2014]
64 Fabian Hilfrich, Debating American Exceptionalism: Empire and Democracy in the Wake of the
“negative liberty”which is based on individual freedom, whereas the political freedom to rule oneself is defined as “positive liberty”.65 As McKinley stated in his “benevolent
assimilation” proclamation of December 21, 1898 “we come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect…the inhabitants of the Phillipines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties”.66 Although McKinley had
constructed the United States as a liberator, by establishing sovereignty and government over the Filipinos they were disregarding their calls for independence; substituting positive liberty for negative liberty and independence for dependence. Indeed, William James, who was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, expressed what he saw as the true imperialist tendencies that were informing America’s involvement in the Philippines. He stated that “we are destroying the soul of a people who never did us an atom of harm in their lives”,
criticising the belief that “we must sow our ideals plant our order, impose our god”.67 It was
along these lines that the “imperialists” and “anti-imperialists” were split, with the latter in favour of positive liberty, because they saw the division between the rhetoric of liberty, and the reality.68
McKinley was also accused by anti-imperialists of illegally acquiring the Philippines. By engaging with a sovereign nation without declaring war, the executive was abusing congressional war powers and the system of “checks and balances” that the United States Constitution rested on. By undermining this balance, they predicted that it was the first step to setting the nation on a course towards despotism and thus away from the exception of the US.69 Adding to the criticism of imperialism, it would be speculated after the attack that
McKinley’s proclamation of “benevolent assimilation” was a deliberate effort to provoke Filipino attack and create a fait accompli which forced Congress to ratify the 1898 Treaty.70
When war did spark with the Filipino people, McKinley simply denounced them as
“insurgents”, emphasising in his 1899 speech at Fargo his astonishment that they should be so ungrateful of American liberty:
65 Isiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Isiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) pp. 129-156
66 William McKinley, ‘McKinley’s Benevolent Assimilation Proclomation’. Executive Mansion, December 21, 1898. Available at: http://www.msc.edu.ph/centennial/benevolent.html [accessed 19/05/2014]
67 William James ‘The Philippine Tangle’, Boston Evening Transcript (March 1, 1899) 68 Fabian Hilfrich, Debating American Exceptionalism, p. 14
69 Ibid., pp. 115-6 70 Ibid., pp. 116
We never dreamed that the little body of insurgents whom we had just emancipated from oppression […] would turn upon the flag that had sheltered them against Spain […] our flag stands for liberty wherever it floats; and we propose to put sixty-five thousand men behind that flag in Luzon, to maintain the authority of the United States and uphold the sovereignty of the republic in the interest of civilisation and humanity.71
What this demonstrated was the irony that although America saw itself as a noble liberator, it was still reluctant to grant the full freedom of political sovereignty. McKinley repeatedly clarified that the war was not for conquest but for the liberty of humanity, but the resultant actions that led the United States into the conflict made it appear highly imperialist. It was as if this imperialism that the United States was so heavily criticised for is an accidental by-product of attempting to pursue trade and provide liberty. What resulted from this was the construction of a colony that was to be dependent on American rule.
Significantly the actions of the United States in the Philippines bore great similarity to its actions in the Vietnam War. Both times the political establishment found itself bound to the role of liberator to a country that it had not directly acquired, and both times it executed a form of negative liberty that rendered these states dependant on American sovereignty. Both the Philippines and Vietnam were inherited from the European countries of Spain and France respectively, which meant that both times, the US was unintentionally responsible for the liberty of an oppressed nation. Yet the similarities of imperialism include the abuses of presidential powers of both McKinley and President Lyndon B. Johnson. President Johnson managed to secure full support for military engagement with the country without a
declaration of war. This was done by deliberately deceiving congress about an attack on the American forces off the coast of North Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.72 It was
this that resulted in both presidents being personally identified with the wars they began: “McKinley’s war” for the Philippines and “Johnson’s war” for Vietnam.73
Similarities between these two wars would also become highlighted through literature. Mark Twain was one writer who stood in opposition to the Philippine-American War seeing it also an act of aggressive imperialism. Indeed, he became a member of The American Anti-Imperialist League that opposed the war on the belief that the country was
71 William McKinley, ‘Speech at Fargo, North Dakota, October 13, 1899’, Speeches and Address of William
McKinley From March 1, 1987 to May 30, 1900. (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1900) pp. 280-281
72 Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency. (Boston, MA: Lightning Source, 2004) p. 179 73 Fabian Hilfrich, Debating American Exceptionalism, pp. 115
being unfaithful to its traditions of “peace, non-intervention, and anti-colonialism”.74 One of
Twain’s most anti-imperialist pieces was entitled The War Prayer first published in 1923 after being rejected by his publishers between 1904 and 1905. It is a short story about an angel that reveals the damage that would really be done to the American soldiers in the
Philippines to a pro-war congregation.75 For Twain, the war was less about freedom than
about subjugating the Filipino people, “we have gone there to conquer not to redeem”.76
Significantly, his comments about the war resound strikingly with the main thread of opposition to the Vietnam War fifty years later. It’s relevance to this modern conflict is shown by the fact that The War Prayer story was reprinted in the 1960s in pamphlets by activists against the Vietnam War, who themselves saw great similarities between their message and his.
Joel Oppenheimer, a Vietnam War protest poet, would also see the similarities of imperialism between these two American military engagements in his poem ‘17-18 April, 1961’:
The problem in your soul is that 63 years after mr mckinley we are still fucking around with dreams of empire, we still cannot bear to let people work out their own destiny, we still cannot believe in keeping our hands off, we have forgotten we once carried a flag into battle that read don’t tread on me, we think we have the right to step anywhere, we are free, and therefor ever other man is beneath us to be trod upon, i will not do it.77
The issue for Oppenheimer is that the nation has still not learnt from its mistakes of the past and the actions of “mr mckinley”. The propensity to intervene in the independence of other nations such as the Philippines is explicitly denounced as part of a propensity towards imperialism that has continued into the Vietnam War. What is also denounced is the exceptional belief that because America is free, it is superior to others and can therefore
74 Murray Polner, We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (New York: Basic Books, 2008) p. xii
75 Mark Twain, The War Prayer. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1984).
76 Mark Twain cited in Frederick Anderson, ed., A Pen Warmed Up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest. (New York: Harper publishers, 1972) p. 5.
77 Joel Oppenheimer, ’17-18 April, 1961’, in Diana di Prima (ed.), War Poems (New York: The Poets Press, 1968) p. 68.
place the rest of the world into submission of its “flag”. The hypocrisy that Oppenheimer finds in this logic concerns how the ideals that led America into the battles for its own independence in the past were fundamentally based on resistance to the very imperial oppression that they now impose on others.
The Spanish-American War would be significant in marking a change in American foreign policy towards increased interventionism in the run up to the First World War. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American had been a strong advocate of isolationism. This was demonstrated in 1796 by George Washington in his Farewell Address in which he outlined how America’s interaction with the world should be purely based on commercial terms and avoiding “permanent alliances” which could corrupt American with European political struggles.78 This would then be reinforced by Thomas Jefferson in his 1801
First Inaugural Address in which he outlined the desire for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”.79 However as America’s leaders
started to advocate a larger role for the United States in the twentieth-century, tensions grew between isolationists and interventionists and peaked during the League of Nations debate. Woodrow Wilson was in favour of intervention, seeing the League of Nations as the perfect opportunity for the United States to spread its values of liberty and to fulfil its exceptionalist heritage.80 For Wilson, intervention was essential to securing peace
throughout the world, because “wrapped up in the liberty of the world is the continuous protection of that liberty by the concerted powers of all civilised people”. Building on the idea that America was bound to its principles and in the aftermath of the biggest threat to world liberty so far, it became justifiable to make active efforts in the perpetuation of liberty rather than waiting for it to arrive on their doorstep. Ultimately Wilson would be defeated by domestic opposition in the form of Henry Cabot Lodge and his Senate allies who were reluctant to his interventionism.81
Yet despite his defeat, Wilson’s interventionism would return in great strength after World War II and came to dominate the presidential rhetoric of America’s role in the world
78 George Washington, ‘Farewell Address, September 19th, 1796’, The Miller Center. Presidential Speech Archive.
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3462 (Accessed 15/05/2014).
79 Thomas Jefferson, ‘First Inaugural Address, March 4th, 1801’, The Miller Center. Presidential Speech Archive.
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3469 (Accessed 15/05/2014).
80 Jason A. Edwards, Navigating the Post-Cold War World: President Clinton's Foreign Policy Rhetoric. (New York: Lexington Books, 2008) p. 9
into the Cold War.82 Harry Truman saw World War II as proof of America’s responsibility to
the protection of the peace and liberty of the world, especially in light of the rise of communism. This would be expressed explicitly in his Truman Doctrine address: “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this Nation”.83 The duty to defend freedom speaks directly to the nation’s role as
the leader against communism and the Soviet Union. What this implies is the importance of fulfilling its duty to protect world liberty abroad in order to secure the borders of the
country domestically.
As the Cold War and the then Indo-China War progressed into the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy would further emphasise this interventionist duty. In his First Inaugural Address he stated America’s absolute commitment to its responsibility to securing world liberty: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”.84 Grounded in exceptional language Kennedy firmly
states that the success of liberty is America’s primary mission for the world, an argument that is uniquely American. What was seen as entangling engagement with the rest of the world before is now embraced as a necessary duty through intervention. The enemy is once again portrayed as those who oppose these American ideals of freedom, something that is to be acted upon with the same temerity that America showed against its imperial
oppressors, Native Americans and the physical landscape. Indeed, Kennedy’s “The New Frontier” speech given during his Democratic National Convention Nomination Acceptance Address in 1960 highlights this very continuation. He invokes the symbolism of the pioneers as being the driven to “make the new world strong and free” who were “an example to the world, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from within and without”. 85 For Kennedy this example that rests so heavily in Puritan
rhetoric must be continued beyond the borders of the continent in a revitalised but
82 Ibid.
83 Harry S. Truman, ‘Truman Doctrine, March 12th, 1947’, The Miller Center. Presidential Speech Archive.
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3343 (Accessed 28/05/2014).
84 John F. Kennedy, ‘Inaugural Address, January 20th, 1961’ The Miller Center. Presidential Speech Archive.
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3365 (Accessed 28/05/2014).
85 John F. Kennedy, ‘Acceptance of the Democratic Party Nomination, July 15th, 1960’, The Miller Center. Presidential Speech Archive. http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3362 (Accessed 29/05/2014).
