153. Our Manifest Destiny: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Our Manifest Destiny 

Now the Aryans became the Anglo-Saxons. Endings in Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, 
and Germanic showed how these people had moved across the world, said another 
German researcher, Franz Bopp. By 1820, a Gothic vogue was afoot. Even the bare 
possibility that some of us were offspring of a powerful race out of prehistory inspired 
enthusiasm, giving credence to the old Puritan notion of "Election," that America had a 
divine destiny as a people. This incredible Aryan drama, like the notion of evolution a 
few decades later with which it should be seen in collegial relation, almost instantly 
began to embody itself in more practical affairs of life. 

To New York State University regent John O'Sullivan, Grimm's tale was the long- 
awaited scientific proof of an American destiny, a Manifest Destiny, as he and 
innumerable voices that followed were to call it: 

The right of our manifest destiny is to overspread and to possess the whole of the 
continent which Providence has given up for the great experiment. 

In 1851, as Moby-Dick was coming off the press with its parable of Ahab, a year after 
The Scarlet Letter had plumbed the secrets of Puritan society, regent O'Sullivan 
personally equipped a war vessel for an attack on Cuba. O'Sullivan's Cleopatra was 
seized in New York harbor as she weighed anchor, disgorging several hundred armed 
Hungarian and German cutthroats, "Kossuth sympathizers," as the press mistakenly 
called them. Indeed, the scheme to "liberate" Hungary, nominally under Hungarian 
aristocrat Lajos Kossuth, had been hatched by the same Zeitgeist and in the same place, 
New York City. Charged with violating the Neutrality Act of 1818, O'Sullivan beat the 
rap. Cuba was safe for another forty-seven years until the battleship Maine blew up 
mysteriously in Havana harbor. 

Buried in the indestructible heart of this imported Aryan linguistic romance was ample 
justification for a national charter of bold expansionism. In spite of the fact that much of 
the American nation was empty still, it provided an inspiration to empire, as O'Sullivan's 



abortive sortie demonstrated, a racial mandate to enlarge areas of American influence, 
just as Aryans once had conquered as far as ambition could carry them. Race was the font 
of our national greatness. But how to preserve the Great Race from miscegenation? It was 
a question asked long before Darwin lent the query the authority of official science. 

The Lost Tribes