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.
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