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

 

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.