REGINALD HORSMAN WRITES IN Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism that Whites in the New World believed “that they were acting as Englishmen—Englishmen contending for principles of popular government, freedom and liberty introduced into England more than a thousand years before by the high-minded, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons from the woods of Germany.”42 American colonists studied Samuel Squire’s An Enquiry into the Foundation of the English Constitution and learned “the ideas of Tacitus [and] the invincible love of liberty” that existed amidst the democratic Teutons.43 One of the favorite sayings in Colonial America quoted Bishop Berkeley, the eighteenth-century philosopher:
Westward the course of empire takes its way
The first four acts already past
A fifth shall close the drama with the day
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.44
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, was the “most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America.”45 (It was Montesquieu who recommended the separation of powers now so central to the U.S. government.) Tacitus was one of Montesquieu’s favorite authors, and the Frenchman was inspired by “that beautiful system having been devised in the woods.”46
While visiting Colonial America, another European observed: “An idea, strange as it is visionary, has entered into the minds of the generality of mankind, that empire is traveling westward; and everyone is looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give law to the rest of the world.”47
He was not alone. Thomas Jefferson—who persuaded the trustees of the University of Virginia to offer the nation’s first course in the Anglo-Saxon language—justified Colonial America’s breaking its ties with Mother England as a return to a better time when his Aryan ancestors had lived in liberty. In 1774, he wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a series of complaints against King George, which foreshadowed by two years his 1776 Declaration of Independence. Jefferson refers to “God” twice, but invokes England’s “Saxon ancestors” six times. In calling for a freer hand from the king, Jefferson writes of their shared “Saxon ancestors [who] had… left their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe, had [taken] the island of Britain… and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country.” Jefferson argued that since the original Saxons were ruled by “no superior and were [not] subject to feudal conditions,” the king should lighten his hold on his American colonies.48
Two years later, in 1776, Jefferson wrote that he envisioned a new country warmed by the Aryan sun: “Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century?”49
On the original Fourth of July—July 4, 1776—the Continental Congress tasked Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson with suggestions for the design of the Great Seal of the United States. (For centuries nations had used seals to authenticate treaties and official documents.) Franklin suggested the image of Moses extending his hand over the sea with heavenly rays illuminating his path. Adams preferred young Hercules choosing between the easy downhill path of Vice and the rugged, uphill path of Virtue. Jefferson suggested the two Teuton brothers who had founded the Anglo-Saxon race. Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that Jefferson had proposed “Hengst and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”50 (Congress rejected all three recommendations, and committees eventually worked out the present Great Seal of the United States.)
Meanwhile, the laws of the new nation followed the path of White supremacy. The legislation defining who could become an American citizen, the Naturalization Act of 1790, begins: “All free white persons…” While Congress debated whether Jews or Catholics could become citizens, “no member publicly questioned the idea of limiting citizenship to only ‘free white persons.’ ”51
Many Americans concluded that if the course of empire was westward and the United States the westernmost home of the Aryan, they were a chosen people with a continental, hemispheric, and global racial destiny. Even when the United States was a young country hugging the Atlantic, many envisioned the day the American Aryan would arrive on the Pacific coast. From there he would leap across the Pacific and fight his way through Asia, until he reached the original home of his Aryan parents in the Caucasus and a White band of civilization would bring peace to the world. Senator Thomas Hart Benton—a powerful early-nineteenth-century Washington figure who served on the Senate’s Military and Foreign Affairs committees—wrote of that happy time:
All obey the same impulse—that of going to the West; which, from the beginning of time has been the course of heavenly bodies, of the human race, and of science, civilization, and national power following in their train. In a few years the Rocky Mountains will be passed, and the children of Adam will have completed the circumambulation of the globe, by marching to the west until they arrive at the Pacific Ocean, in sight of the eastern shore of that Asia in which their first parents were originally planted.52
Such sentiments were reinforced throughout popular culture. Jedidah Morse wrote the most popular geography books in the early 1800s, proclaiming: “It is well known that empire has been traveling from east to west. Probably her last and broadest seat will be America… the largest empire that ever existed…. The AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.”53 Walt Whitman’s most enduring work, Leaves of Grass, includes the poem “Facing West from California’s Shores,” with the lines: “Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous… round the earth having wander’d… Facing west from California’s shores… towards the house of maternity… the circle almost circled.”54 In his groundbreaking The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote, “All other series of events—as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome—only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to… the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the west.”55
The great transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson was also under the Aryan spell:
It is race, is it not? That puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the Negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus ‘On the Manners of the Germans,’ not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.56
Emerson was far from alone in such sentiments. Most scholarly American intellectuals of his time followed the sun. The 1800s saw the emergence of “social sciences” in America. Not surprisingly, they validated Aryan supremacy. One after another, White Christian males in America’s finest universities “discovered” that the Aryan was God’s highest creation, that the Negro was designed for servitude, and that the Indian was doomed to extinction. The author Thomas Gossett, in his thoughtful book Race: The History of an Idea in America, writes, “One does not have to read very far in the writings of nineteenth-century social scientists to discover the immense influence of race theories among them. In studying human societies, they generally assumed that they were also studying innate racial character.”57
One of the social sciences popular in Amer
ica for much of the nineteenth century was phrenology, the study of skulls. White Christian phrenologists observed that the Caucasian skull was the most symmetrical, and “since the circle was the most beautiful shape in nature, it followed that this cranium was the original type created by God.”58 Samuel Morton of Philadelphia, America’s leading phrenologist, amassed the world’s largest skull collection. To calculate brain size he sealed all but one of a skull’s openings and filled it with mustard seed, then weighed the seed. He then correlated the amount of mustard seed with intelligence, morality, cultural development, and national character. Morton’s experiments proved that “eighty-four cubic inches of Indian brain had to compete against, and would eventually succumb before, ninety-six cubic inches of Teuton brain [which] comforted many Americans, for now they could find God’s hand and not their own directing the extinction of the Indian.”59 In fact, the White skulls Morton examined “nearly all belonged to white men who had been hanged as felons. It would have been just as logical to conclude that a large head indicated criminal tendencies.”60 (Morton replied that the skulls of noncriminal Whites would be even larger.)
One of the “bibles” of American scientific thought in the nineteenth century was the best-selling book Types of Mankind. Published to acclaim in 1854, it went through twelve printings and was used as a standard text into the twentieth century. Types of Mankind held that only the White race was civilized and that “wherever in the history of the world the inferior races have been conquered and mixed in with the Caucasians, the latter have sunk into barbarism.”61 The resulting barbaric races “never can again rise until the present races are exterminated and the Caucasian substituted.”62 Describing Native Americans, the book stated:
He can no more be civilized than a leopard can change his spots. His race is run, and probably he has performed his earthly mission. He is now gradually disappearing, to give place to a higher order of beings. The order of nature must have its course…. Some are born to rule, and others to be ruled. No two distinctly marked races can dwell together on equal terms. Some races, moreover, appear destined to live and prosper for a time, until the destroying race comes, which is to exterminate and supplant them.63
This best-selling science textbook argued that exterminating the Indian was philanthropic: “A great aim of philanthropy should be to keep the ruling races of the world as pure and wise as possible, for it is only through them that the others can be made prosperous and happy.”64
Such beliefs ruled America. As the California governor, Peter Burnett, put it in his 1851 Governor’s Message, “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected…. The inevitable destiny of the [White] race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert.”65 Lewis Morgan, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the founder of anthropology in the United States, observed, “The Aryan family represents the central stream of progress, because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming control of the earth.”66
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BIG BILL’S SAN FRANCISCO audiences were proud to be descendants of history’s master race. The crowds that greeted Taft were far from alone in this conceit: the myth was embedded in children’s books, tomes of science and literature, sermons from the pulpit, speeches in the halls of Congress, and in everyday conversations at the kitchen table.
And how could the idea be creditably challenged? The White British had the largest seagoing empire, and the Russians—a White race—controlled the world’s most extensive land empire. Europe’s “scramble for Africa” had made Black Africans subjects to the White man. And the president of the United States firmly believed the myth to be an essential truth, a law of nature no less universal than gravity. During the Roosevelt administration, the center of world commerce and power was shifting from one Anglo-Saxon city—London—to another—New York. Westward went the sun indeed.
On its way from Washington, D.C., to California, Alice’s train had rumbled across a continent that had recently heard the thunder of buffalo hooves. The Indian survivors of the American race–cleansing were locked up as noncitizen, nonvoting prisoners in squalid reservations. And while Lincoln had technically freed the slaves, by 1905 disenfranchisement and restrictive Jim Crow laws invisibly reshackled the American Black man, and the local lynching tree had plenty of branches left.
IN HIS YOUTH AND later in college, Theodore Roosevelt had imbibed the Aryan myth. As a famous author he explained American history as part of the Aryan/Teuton/Anglo-Saxon flow of westering civilization. Then he fashioned a winning political persona as a White male brave enough to vanquish lesser races. Roosevelt, with impressive public-relations acumen, had publicly embraced the manly strenuous life. He was photographed more than any other president up to his day, and if you visit the many historical touchstones of his life or peruse the numerous biographies, you will see many images depicting him with a rifle in hand or on horseback. Though President Teddy installed the first White House tennis court and frequently played, he allowed no photographs of himself dressed in his custom tennis whites, fearful that such images might undermine efforts to portray him as utterly masculine.
Theodore Roosevelt, 1905. Long before Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush used their ranches for photo shoots, Theodore Roosevelt set the manly standard. As Roosevelt wrote, “You never saw a photograph of me playing tennis. I’m careful about that. Photographs on horseback, yes. Tennis, no.” (National Park Service)
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THEODORE ROOSEVELT JR. WAS born in a New York City mansion on October 27, 1858, among the seventh generation of Roosevelts to be born on Manhattan island. His father, Theodore Sr., was a wealthy New York aristocrat.
The first Roosevelt—Klaes Martenszen von Rosenvolt—had immigrated to New Amsterdam (later New York City) from Holland in 1649.67 Klaes and his descendants acquired vast tracts of land in the Hudson River valley north of Manhattan, which was worked by slaves. By the time of Teddy’s birth two hundred years later, the Roosevelt financial empire included vast holdings of stock, real estate, insurance, banking, and mining. Roosevelts had been elected as congressmen and appointed as judges. The family’s time and money helped create such storied New York institutions as Chemical National Bank, Roosevelt Hospital, Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Children’s Aid Society.
Theodore Roosevelt Sr. He prescribed the Bible for his sons’ minds and barbells for their bodies.
The Roosevelts were true aristocrats. Uniformed servants padded quietly about the family mansion, made beds, laid out their masters’ clothes, cleaned, and cooked. Teddy ate from fine china emblazoned with the family crest. The Roosevelts dressed for dinner, and finger bowls were only a tinkle of the server’s bell away.
Yet noble Theodore Sr. worried that his well-born sons might be doomed by this life of luxury, threatened by something called “overcivilization.” The theory was that the Aryan race evolved in successive stages, just as people grew from childhood to old age. The first stage was the savage. The savage was disorganized, and useless chaos reigned. The second stage was the barbarian. The barbarian made a valuable contribution to civilization because it was in this Genghis Khan–like stage that the “barbarian virtues” were formed. Barbarian virtues were the fighting qualities by which a race advanced and protected its flank. In 1899 governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York wrote to psychologist G. Stanley Hill: “Over-sentimentality, over-softness… and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”68 The third and most desired stage was the civilized man, who loved peace but when provoked could manifest his barbarian virtues. The fourth evolutionary stage was a step over the cliff: overcivilization.
Overcivilization existed when the barbarian
virtues were replaced by the easy life, and many believed that modern American life was getting “soft.” Instead of chopping wood, wrestling a heavy plow, and hunting for dinner, the modern American Aryan warmed himself with coal, worked at a desk, and ate hearty meals in cushy restaurants.
To combat this threatening condition, Theodore Sr. preached “muscular Christianity” that stressed “healthiness, manliness, athletic ability and courage in battle.”69 Young Teddy learned from his father that Christ himself was not gentle, saintly, and long-suffering, but a soldier of vigor and righteousness. (During this era, muscular Christians founded the Young Men’s Christian Association [YMCA] and composed the virile religious anthem “Onward Christian Soldiers.”) Theodore Sr. dispensed his Christian duty by lecturing lower-class boys at the Children’s Aid Society and the Newsboys’ Lodging House, as well as teaching Sunday school. Teddy often tagged along, listening as his tall, bearded father prescribed Bibles for the boys’ minds and barbells for their bodies.
Theodore Roosevelt, age eleven. “The older races of the city made the mould into which the newer ones were poured,” wrote Manhattanite Teddy at the age of thirty-three in 1891.
Muscular Christianity was one solution to the bane of overcivilization. The other was “the nature cure”—romps in the woods that would make a boy manlier and therefore purer. Theodore Sr. took his children to the great outdoors for exercise and helped the Children’s Aid Society export ninety thousand pauper children to the Midwest countryside. Such efforts not only circumscribed Teddy’s childhood but would define his broader sense of the world.
The Imperial Cruise Page 3