In the 1840s, Manifest Destiny was the cry of the citizenry. 1845 saw John K. O’Sullivan, a magazine editor, write that no nation on earth should be allowed to interfere with America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions,” echoing in popular sentiment the subtle but powerful Monroe Doctrine of two decades earlier.
It has been a prevailing axiom that as a tool of God, that which benefits America benefits the world and mankind. This had become an awesome and awe-inspiring prescription that begat results that were nothing short of miraculous reminiscent of divine intervention and divine right.
Belief was not hard to come by. Forensic evidence literally sprang from the soil, some of the best on the planet. Vast woods replete with wildlife, game, fowl and all forms of sustaining nutrients are prolific and inviting. Oceans and rivers overflow with fish, and what immortal hand or eye could give such to a land that eclipsed Great Lakes in the Midwest as well as Northwest and Florida Peninsula, but the one that has endowed our land with ours? Mountains burst with coal and iron ore, oil lay in abundance beneath our feet, and gold and silver and other precious metals for show or for industry abound from the earth. This could be nothing less than a chosen land for a chosen people.
And the people came – and still do – for the bounty this land offers, and for the freedom its people demand.
The people, who came here first, over the land bridge, showed early European settlers how to plant and harvest strange new crops. This altruism and cooperation was short-lived as the historical timeline goes…but it was essential to the progress and survival of all peoples and the Idea. Immigration caused an ebb and flow of cooperation and conflict, as some people came with their fortunes to be made, while others came in shackles and manacles. But they came, and brought with them their language, celebrations, dance, music, art, industry, politics and culinary habits, as well as their religions. Together, as they built a nation and held dominion over a continent, they played, worked, and learned hand in hand. And they married each other as Americans, not former rivals in foreign countries.
This hodgepodge of individuals with spectrum-wide skills, interests and perspectives wrought miracles from this land and the Idea it fomented – and credit for this success belongs to everyone, and each one.
No single event, person, concept, justice or injustice elucidates the reason for why such apposite fortune fell to this land and its people, but a significant encouragement in these last 250 years has been our form of government. A government, which itself engenders those thousands of years prior to its inception – of the people, by the people, and for the people; a model which strikes a balance between the governed who accede none of their rights to the government and a government that exists at the pleasure of these people.
Should we Americans continue to hold to the Idea that everyone has equal rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and that the single purpose of the government is to protect those rights of Americans everywhere, then “American” will rightly refer to those peoples who have throughout history and spanning continents have striven for and craved that which this promised land has delivered. And we will justify the spirit on which Lady Liberty stands, whose first stones of her foundation were set by the migrants forty thousand years ago following their food to a land of milk and honey, so shall her plinth encourage those within and without her borders to follow their hearts as free men have done for millennia to this land we call the Land of the Free and the Home of an Idea called America.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Kristofer Cowles has written 301 articles on this blog.
Nicely phrased and well-thought. I am always humbled by reading your writings and encouraged by your passion.
Nicely phrased and well-thought. I am always humbled by reading your writings and encouraged by your passion.