[This essay was written in preparation for taking my PhD qualifying exams at the University of Florida in the fall of 1991.]
1. Historians are forever seeking a “central theme” of American history. Either explain your own choice of such an over-arching theme or argue convincingly that there is none.
I believe the “central theme” of American history, from the earliest days of settlement to the present, can be wrapped up in one phrase: “manifest destiny.” Although arising out of propaganda for the territorial expansion of the United States in the mid-19th century, the phrase “manifest destiny” can prove a strong cutting tool for analyzing the American character and the relationship of Americans with their environment, other peoples, and themselves. As I define it, “manifest destiny” is that self-confident belief among Americans that their way has been, is, and will forever be “the right way” and anybody who stands in their way be damned. Combining elements from a strong English heritage with a “frontier” land of abundance, many other historians from Crevecoeur to Tocqueville to Turner to William A. Williams, David Potter, Ray Billington, Robert Wiebe, and Winthrop Jordan have explored various aspects of this theme.
To identify a “central theme” of the history of a people, the historian could focus on the similarities between peoples. I myself believe that economic and demographic forces go far to explaining a basic “human nature” However, although the historian should always recognize common elements between peoples, this is much more applicable to writing a world history. The “natural” historical theme focuses on the character of the people, what makes them as a people different from other peoples.
Is there such a thing as an “American character”? Does a “central theme” have to deny the diversity of any society or culture? For defining a people, political divisions make easy divisions, but may not be as good as ethnic, cultural, racial, or linguistic divisions. Within the United States, there are many ethnic and racial lines which could be drawn to define different cultures or sub-cultures. Some would argue for two histories: male and female. The history of each of these peoples would focus on how these people are different from the other American peoples.
However, I believe that there is an essential American character, a character that most non-Americans would recognize as American. Certainly this is the overwhelming consensus of almost all contemporary observers from Douglass to Crevecoeur to Tocqueville to the present. Such a consensus can not be ignored. The characteristics identified are strikingly similar: independent, generous, tolerant, equalitarian, democratic, republican, practical yet idealistic, competitive, rebellious against tradition, wasteful, mobile, materialistic, optimistic, naively nationalistic, “ruggedly individualistic.” These characteristics indeed have become part of popular American mythology and seem as relevant today as two hundred years ago. Although foreigners might notice other less desirable characteristics and minority groups might take exception with some, most Americans accept these characteristics as essentially American.
I believe, like many other historians, that the unique combination of these characteristics arose out of the interaction of traditional English culture with the American frontier. Furthermore, I believe that these characteristics can be subsumed under the concept of “manifest destiny.” It was the sheer abundance of America along with the acquisitive, assimilationist nature of English culture, which gave Americans their self-confidence, their independence, their belief that they were God’s chosen people. In a world of such abundance, every man could get his own if he was willing to move to the frontier. In such a self-sufficient world, the American did not have to understand the rest of the world. Indeed the Americans never lost their insular British paranoid racism which allowed them to roll over Indians, Africans, Latin Americans, or another “foreign” people who stood in their way or in any way “threatened” them.
But just how different is American “manifest destiny?” I realize that all cultures are ethnocentric to some degree. Human nature is always defined in terms of one’s own culture. Other peoples are always somewhat less than human. Yet, the form this ethnocentrism takes is a function of each culture and affords an excellent insight into the essential character of the culture. American “manifest destiny” includes all American characteristics, “good” and “bad.”
My concept of “manifest destiny” is a hodgepodge of all of the 20th century historiographical schools: Progressive, Consensus, New Left, and New Social History, and even a good bit of the traditional 19th century school. My concept of “manifest destiny” is not Bancroft’s “inevitable movement of human affairs toward the goal of liberty under providential guidance” (Hofstadter 15). Rather, I would focus more on the tremendous popularity of Bancroft’s histories as an indication that Bancroft had struck a major chord in the American people (although I do not want to stake a claim for popular history as “true” history). I believe that Americans, past and present, consciously and unconsciously, believe they have a “manifest destiny.” Manifest destiny is incorporated in the American character from the very beginning, from the decision of emigrants to turn their back on their homelands to make a start in the New World.
My concept of “manifest destiny” is very similar to William Appleman Williams’s “strangely persuasive mirror image of Turner’s frontier thesis” (Unger 1246). “From the very outset, according to Williams, the United States has been an expansionist nation, preying on its weaker neighbors, whether the precivilized Indian tribes or the weaker national states and decrepit empires on its borders…Rather than a succession of new opportunities, each American frontier was a new evasion” (Unger 1246).
As much as “manifest destiny” has been used by New Left historians to explain “external” relations, relations with “others,” I believe the concept of “manifest destiny” helps explain much of American “domestic” relations, relations with themselves. If consensus around this central theme of “manifest destiny” can be accepted, then I believe that consensus can explain the American Revolution, the Civil War, and “the racial, ethnic, and religious conflict with which our history is saturated,” areas in which Hofstadter believes that consensus ultimately fails (459).
The Civil War was American “manifest destiny” turned on itself, the dog biting its own tail. The viciousness and intensity of the fighting and the relative peacefulness of the aftermath identify this war as unusual, not like other separatist wars. Hofstadter implies that consensus promotes peace. But two people who accept the duel as honorable can be in consensus and still fight each other to the death. Rather than see the Civil War as a breakdown in this universal acceptance of “manifest destiny,” I would say the exact opposite: it is the proof of “manifest destiny” as the central theme of American history, both North and South.
Like consensus historians, I would emphasize “the enduring uniformities of American life, the stability of institutions, the persistence of a national character” (Higham 613). I would focus, like Henry V. Jaffa, on the similarities between North and South: “that both sides read the same Bible, prayed to the same God, and considered themselves to be fighting for the same cause for which George Washington fought” (Hofstadter 461‑462). The Southern yeoman was as American as the Northern yeoman farmer. The greatest differences which have divided Americans have not been character differences as much as fraternal quarrels. But for a people as idealistic, competitive, and naively nationalistic as the Americans, these brotherly differences of opinion grew into the fratricidal Revolutionary War and Civil War. “Following the same values about virtue, vice, and their just rewards, about enterprise and growth, about the danger of outsiders to the true communnity, like‑minded people across the land turned a common culture on one another and fought savagely for truth, freedom, and opportunity as their culture defined those fundamental terms” (Wiebe 374). Unlike civil wars elsewhere in the world, though, which continue endlessly, these “English” civil wars reached definitive peaces once the intense fighting stopped. The families licked their wounds and life continued.
My concept of “manifest destiny” is also in agreement with such critics of consensus as J.R.Pole: “So far as the masses are concerned, what we call consensus is often little more than apathy” (Hofstadter 453). The great majority of Americans have been and continue to be apathetic to concepts of “manifest destiny.” Sociologists and political scientists are “acutely aware of the complex texture of apathy and irrationality that holds a political society together” (Hofstadter 453). I believe this apathy and irrationality were an intricate part of American society, past and present. As Robert Wiebe writes in The Opening of American Society: “In the hands of the new democracy, progress was an awesome two‑edged sword indeed. One side cut the way to an extraordinary vision of human potential: perfectionism. The other side hacked down the people who were obstructing that vision: genocide” (344). Southerners did not have to question the moral co‑existence of freedom and slavery, nor Northerners their own relationships with blacks. Americans did not have to question a foreign policy which promoted both “self‑determination” and “the American way.” This was all part of their manifest destiny. From the Indians and the Africans of the 17th century to modern third world nations, any lesser people is fair game to be used by these great people, the Americans, because it is their manifest destiny.
Only when aroused out of dormancy by the media or other propagandists and rabble rousers is the full wrath of “manifest destiny” expressed. The propagandists do not create “manifest destiny” so much as stimulate and focus it. Most Americans are simply too busy with their everyday life, manipulated here and there by the economic and demographic forces over which they have no control, to pay heed to such ideological issues. I believe, like Avery O. Craven, that the Southern fire eaters and the Northern abolitionists were propagandists who agitated the “manifest destiny” of their respective sections against each other. The two sections were already turning against each other because each section stood in the way of the aims of the other, but the propagandists focused a strong dissatisfaction into an intense paranoid, even racist, hatred. As Robert Wiebe so neatly summarizes: “Two incompatible, expansive forces met in unstructured competition at the dynamic edge of American opportunity, each certain of its inherent American right to grow and of a diabolical enemy’s determination to defeat it. Each enemy, in turn, acquired the standard characteristics of the conspirator: insatiably aggrandizing, hostile to the people’s rights, and nourished by its hidden, systematic use of power” (370). Was it a needless war? Does the dog have to bite its tail at least once to know how stupid it is? If once was enough, then we were lucky.
Every “central theme,” every historiographical tradition has, at base, some political agenda. “Manifest destiny” arose as a catch phrase for an expansionist political agenda in the mid‑19th century. What is my political agenda? Do I believe in “manifest destiny” as a justification of the present foreign policy of the United States? No, I believe I am of the George Kennan realist school of foreign policy. I believe that the only way to understand the complexity of the present is to examine the complexity of the past, in all of its shades of gray. Likewise, we should study other peoples to understand how they are different and yet, at the same time, similar to us. I agree with Carl N. Degler in “Remaking American History” that the primary purposes of history are “to expand our conception and understanding of what it means to be human, to understand how the past has become the present and how the present has shaped our conception of the past” (23).
If there is anything I would hope to accomplish as an historian, it is to persuade people that the past and the present are quite complex. Yet the historian, at the same time, has to simplify in order to communicate. There is a very nebulous area between complexity and simplicity in which the historian has to work. “Only if the past we depict conscientiously seeks to recapture and make sense out of the complexity and diversity of human experience will the history we write serve its purpose of helping us to understand our past and ourselves…For the test of good history is that it is persuasive with those who are not already convinced” (Degler 20). Finding a “central theme” of our history makes this understanding much easier, but we must realize that the theme is only an organizing tool. The central theme has more to do with the needs of the present than of the past. As Degler states, history is not absolute, “a jigsaw puzzle waiting to have missing pieces added.” No, the past is “being made over and over again and dependent for its meaning upon the values held in the present” (23).
There is not just one theme, but many, and to each many colors. But a “central theme” can help us focus, help us learn. I agree with Winthrop Jordan’s concept of a central theme, “that one of the advantages of knowing the past in the present is that ‘it impresses upon us those tendencies in human beings which have not changed and which accordingly are unlikely to at least in the immediate future” (Degler 20). My political agenda is merely to have the American people recognize this paranoid, racist “manifest destiny” quality about their past and their present. To realize the next time they hear a story about Vietnamese, Iranians, Libyans, or Nicaraguans, that these are not sub‑human creatures that we can make life‑or‑death decisions over with no thought about human life. Like most post‑World War II historians, I do not believe the world is getting better. But, at the same time, I am not pessimistic. Rather I take a dualistic balance between idealism and realism. The world may not be getting any better, but you can’t stop trying to make it better. Like the Consensus school, I am basically conservative and distrust indiscriminate change. But I am also willing to try new ideas to see if they might work better.