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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