“manifest destiny”

MANIFEST DESTINY

Coined by New York journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845, the term “manifest destiny” played an important, conten-1038 Manifest Destinytious role in American territorial expansion during the nineteenth century, and has had a lasting but equally fractious impact on American self-understanding in years since. Components of the idea of manifest destiny have a long and influential history in the United States, appearing in the guises of religious and political discourse, as well as in both elite and popular culture before and after their constellation within O’Sullivan’s editorial work supporting American annexation of Texas and Oregon. In its various usages, the term encompasses nature, geography and race as key determiners of American values and institutions. For its proponents, it has typically served to attribute a sacred quality to American lands, one achieved through the work of subduing both raw nature and “inferior” peoples.

The oldest, and perhaps most crucial, component to the idea of manifest destiny is millennial. Early European colonists, most consistently the Puritans of New England, drew frequently on the Bible’s millennial traditions in order to frame both their own colonizing agendas, and their view of the new world landscape to which they had migrated. As a sacred enterprise, their establishment of Massachusetts settlements was an analogue of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt to the land of milk and honey. The New Canaan, to which God led English Puritans as his newly chosen people, was an appropriation of widely embraced English Protestant ideas correlating the Israelite and English monarchies. Thus the Puritans did not so much coin the analogy as they deprived England’s establishment of the analogy’s “proper” use. But while Church of England expositors had to make biblical language of the wilderness and the heathen tribes metaphors for papal power, the New England Puritans were able to carve out a Christian beachhead in real wilderness, “full of wilde beasts and wilde men,” as the Plymouth colony’s first governor William Bradford put it. Just as the establishment of Israel was necessary for the history of redemption culminating in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, New Englanders came to see their own wilderness enterprise as crucial to redemption’s second phase. In a kind of divine balance of history, since – as theologian Jonathan Edwards calculated – the “other continent hath slain Christ, and has from age to age shed the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus,” it was reasonable to conclude that God would use the newly settled one to bring history to its glorious end (in Cherry 1971: 56).

In the meantime, New Englanders transformed their physical surroundings, guided by the biblical injunctions of Genesis 1:26, and the Arcadian vision of a subdued and bountiful nature subject to human enterprise. At times, as in judge Samuel Sewall’s 1697 musings on New England’s millennial role, this vision of New World abundance stressed a notable harmony between humans, nature, and divine intention: “as long as nature shall not grow old and dote, but shall constantly remember to give the rows of Indian corn their education by pairs: so long shall Christians be born there, and being first made meet, shall from thence be translated . . .” (in Miller 1956: 215). By contrast, the wilderness itself was often cast as a satanic realm where the divine aim was subverted.

Following the revolution, America’s millennial role of playing host to the divine work expanded from providing the example of right religion practiced in the testing ground of the wilderness, to encompass the development of divinely approved political and cultural institutions as well. When earlier Puritans drew on the Mosaic covenant to speak about God’s blessing of New England with abundance, that blessing was dependent upon their maintenance of right religious doctrine. In his 1795 Thanksgiving sermon, preacher Thomas Barnard – with little of the Puritan’s ground for self-doubt – could simply assert that “we (Americans) are a people peculiarly favoured of Heaven.” Such “favour” was most visible in the many “publick blessings” of prosperity obtained from still-fertile lands along the Atlantic seaboard (in Tuveson 1968: 31). The agricultural, industrial and technological achievement of the early republic over nature – for millennialists such as theologian Samuel Taylor Hopkins – was evidence of America’s unique place in the economy of salvation. Americans, he urged, should expect such divinely sponsored advance that in the days to come a very little spot will then produce more of the necessities and comforts of life, then [sic] large tracks do now. And in this way, the curse which has hitherto been upon the ground, for the rebellion of man, will be in a great measure removed (in Tuveson 1968: 61–2).

For Congregational minister Joseph Emerson (cousin of famed Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson), in 1818 the future promised such an easy marriage of human technology and divine intent in ensuring agricultural advancement that the chemist might little think “how much his labors conduce to bring on that happy state of things, that shall distinguish the Millennial period” (in Tuveson 1968: 68).

As Americans turned their territorial gaze across the Appalachians, they augmented biblical millennialism with Enlightenment ideas. Nature as the product of a rational deity justified their interest in the Mississippi River and its terminus in the Gulf of Mexico, in the peninsula of Florida, and even in Canada. As Samuel Adams put it in 1778: “We shall never be upon a solid Footing till Britain cedes to us what Nature designs we should have, or till we wrest it from her” (in Weinberg 1958: 22). Nature’s intent for human beings, which Thomas Jefferson in the “Declaration of Independence” (1776) had framed as individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, could be expanded upon at the national level to include Manifest Destiny 1039independence and security from the harmful plotting of other nations, such as France and Spain. For residents of Kentucky this meant “the natural right of the inhabitants of this country to navigate the Mississippi” and to develop the region’s agricultural potential in accordance “with the immense designs of the Deity” (in Weinberg 1958: 25–6), and for Jefferson himself, natural right offered a sufficiently elastic basis for delimiting expansion. When nature intended Americans use of the Mississippi, it must also have intended them a port, he said, since “the right to use a thing, comprehends a right to the means necessary to its use” (in Weinberg 1958: 27). Such elastic rights, to some, suggested the reduction to absurdity of arguments based on natural design. Nevertheless, they enabled Americans to envision themselves within the first few decades of the nineteenth century as a continental power, and – as geographic knowledge replaced myths of the “Great American Desert” – to brush aside the constraints of western mountain ranges and arid lands. Thus the idea that nations were created within natural limits found little to recommend it until Americans had stretched themselves “from sea to shining sea,” as a patriotic hymn put it later in the century.

Publisher John O’Sullivan’s phrase, “manifest destiny,” coined in his mid-1840s Democratic Review editorials favoring annexation of Texas and Oregon, quickly gained great rhetorical power as a wide range of politicians, religious leaders, land speculators and others took it up.

Opponents of the notion were themselves divided about America’s course. Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing considered the original Texas revolt of 1836 “an act of criminality” in itself, but also a precedent, he wrote to Senate leader Henry Clay, since “we cannot seize upon or join to ourselves that territory, without manifesting and strengthening the purpose of setting no limits to our empire” (in Graebner 1968: 48). A decade later, diplomat Albert Gallatin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and a number of Eastern liberals opposed war with Mexico, but most were slow to term manifest destiny simply “political clap-trap,” or to deny its underlying view of Providence, as did the National Intelligencer (in Graebner 1968: 239). Congressional opponents, such as Representative Charles Goodyear, who in 1846 spoke of manifest destiny being a “robber’s title,” were basically intent on averting war with England, and softening U.S. claims to western Canada above the 49th parallel.

Ralph Waldo Emerson himself celebrated the energies expended in continent spanning, seeing “a sublime and friendly Destiny” guiding the human race across America, the future “home of man” (in Graebner 1968: 11). The construction of national railroads, binding people of one region with another, Emerson said, “introduced a multitude of picturesque traits into our pastoral scenery. The tunneling of mountains, the bridging of streams . . . the blowing of rocks, explosions all day . . .” were signs of national promise and potential, making it possible for the race to tap the vastness of the land, which would be “physic and food for our mind, as well as our body” (in Graebner 1968: 6–7). Even Henry David Thoreau, opposed to so many of his fellow-citizens’ endeavors, felt “Nature’s magnetism” pulling him along the same continental trajectory. “Eastward I go only by force,” he famously acknowledged, “but westward I go free” (Thoreau 1975: 667–8).

The biblical arguments remained effective political justifications throughout the period – and seemed by many expansionists to have been thought sufficient to make England abandon its own interest in Oregon. Former president John Quincy Adams argued in Congress that since England was a Christian nation, it was bound to respect the relevance of Genesis 1:26–28 as the surest foundation of title. Whereas England only wanted Oregon for its Hudson Bay Company trappers, Americans claimed Oregon, Adams concluded, in order to “make the wilderness blossom as the rose, to establish laws, to increase, multiply and subdue the Earth, which we are commanded to do by the first behest of God Almighty” (in Graebner 1968: 109). But even those expansionists who did not draw upon biblical or Transcendentalist mandates spoke of America’s continental destiny with religious, ecstatic, fervor.

William Gilpin, first territorial governor of Colorado, was perhaps foremost – certainly most energetic – among expansion’s intellectual advocates. Gilpin’s writings, dependent upon the theories of the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, melded his scientific postulating about the “isothermal zodiac” – the global climactic belt within which empires had developed and moved ever-westward – with enthused descriptions of the American continent and the “pioneer army” he saw pushing across the Rocky Mountains in search of gold and fertile soil. The pioneer, for Gilpin, spearheads the vital portion of the “human current,” which bears with it the immortal fire of civilization revealed to man. This central current has reached the Plateau of America, up which it will ascend to plant the sacred fires over its expanse and shine upon the world with renewed effulgence. Such is the resplendent era and the gorgeous promise unveiled to humanity. The arrival of this is now announced by the indefinite gold production and pastoral power of the interior, domestic region of our continent and country (Gilpin 1974: 53).

Manifest destiny’s advocates could only go so far in making religious or scientific appeals, however. If the English and the Americans might be expected to establish consensual readings of scripture, ponder the isothermal lesson, or merely to submit to diplomatic resolution of the 1040 Manifest DestinyOregon dispute – which President Polk achieved in 1846 despite Democrats’ desire to war with England – this possibility was less expected of others who stood in the way of American expansion. In American dealings with Mexico, native tribes, and later with both Cuba and the Philippines, race thus became the key factor in determining the direction of achieving manifest destiny, and violence its often justified means.

As early as the 1820s, when Americans pushed into Cherokee and Choctaw lands, Christian land use seemed a practice that only Anglo-Saxons were capable of employing. Confronted by arguments that Indians were mere occupiers of the soil, and hence lacking any legal title to it, Cherokees and other southern tribes vigorously embraced the agricultural lifestyle and religion of encroaching Americans, and were then sued by the gold-hungry Georgians who wanted their lands – for violating treaty terms. As Governor Troup noted to the Georgia legislature during the debates leading up to passage of the 1830 federal Indian Removal Bill – which eventually solved the problem to the Georgians’ satisfaction – “by changing the mode of life of the aboriginals upon the soil of Georgia,” by causing “her lands to be separately appropriated for the purpose of tillage,” and by promoting “every encouragement to fixed habits of agriculture,” the federal government and the Cherokees “violated the treaties in letter and spirit, and did wrong to Georgia” (in Weinberg 1958: 87).

Efforts to “civilize” tribes were thus violations of “the laws of nature,” as one Georgia legislator put it, which “have fixed an insuperable barrier between the moral condition of the savage and the Christian” (in Weinberg 1958: 88). The belief in Anglo-Saxon moral superiority gained ground as it was deployed not only in the taking of tribal lands, but also in conflicts with Mexico. Some supporters of the 1846 invasion of Mexico and the conquest of California envisioned Mexican citizens greeting American forces as liberators, and perhaps melding into the American population as their lands experienced the regenerative rule of republican institutions and the development of mineral and agricultural resources. The more prominent tendency after the war, as Florida’s Senator Westcott complained in 1848, was to reject the idea that the U.S. should receive not merely the white citizens of California and New Mexico, but the peons, negroes, and Indians of all sorts, the wild tribes of Camanches [sic], the bug-and-lizard-eating “Diggers” and other halfmonkey savages in those countries as equal citizens of the United States (in Horsman 1981: 276).

By the end of the nineteenth century, carving out national boundaries and dispossessing tribes from their lands ceased to figure in forward-looking American imaginations. The wilderness-transforming energy that white Americans attributed to their Anglo-Saxon roots – and which historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and President Theodore Roosevelt’s Winning of the West (1907) claimed was defining of national character – seemed to have reached a terminus. However, AngloSaxon manifest destiny continued to shape American life. The push to open trade with Asia – key to Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s imperial vision as early as the 1820s – and even to acquire Asian colonies, spread widely. By the century’s end the vision was commonly accompanied by a racial justification of U.S. dominance in the Pacific.

America’s 1898–1901 war in the Philippines against first Spain, and then insurgent Filipino nationalists, was cast by its supporters in the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations as a repetition of the frontier struggle. For Roosevelt, Filipinos were “Apaches,” playing the same role in thwarting national destiny as Geronimo (in Slotkin 1992: 121). For Senator Albert J. Beveridge, opponents of U.S. military operations in the Philippines – arguing that whites could not successfully live in tropical environments – erred in concluding that the Anglo-Saxon race therefore had no obligations there. On the contrary, he told the Republican National Convention in 1900, “the general welfare of the world” demanded American rule, otherwise this land, rich in all that civilized man requires, and these people needing the very blessings they ignorantly repel, should be remanded to savagery and wilderness. If you say this, you say that barbarism and undeveloped resources are better than civilization and the Earth’s resources developed (in Cherry 1971: 142).

The need to subdue nature, in the course of the twentieth century, lost some of its focus as a theme in American discussions of national aims. Manifest destiny, however, did continue to be invoked, as in the arguments of President Woodrow Wilson for American participation in the First World War, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the Second. These weighings of America’s unique responsibility had less to do with the conquest of nature, though, and more with what Wilson framed as the moral mission of American democracy. Nevertheless, America’s mobilization in both wars was also nature’s, since the country’s abundant natural resources provided American factories with the material necessary to achieve victory. Although twentieth-century Americans did at times contest the implications of natural abundance, as in the conservation movement’s debates about “finite” resources during the Gifford Pinchot era and then again in the 1970s, very few seriously advocated an overturning of the economic order that had been built on the basis of manifest destiny.

Which is to say that Beveridge’s 1900 challenge to antiimperialists – that consistency would require them to give “Australia back to its Bushmen, and the United States to its Manifest Destiny 1041Indians” – has rarely been accepted, other than by tribal advocates themselves (in Cherry 1971: 148). But if subduing nature became a given in the twentieth century, popular culture has provided an enduring context in which the task can be reappropriated, its urgency rekindled and its achievements often commemorated.

The American landscape is full of memorials to manifest destiny, none more striking than Colorado’s Mount of the Holy Cross, which journalist Samuel Bowles was first to proclaim as a divine seal of approval upon American enterprise in The Switzerland of America: A Summer Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado (1869), and which Yellowstone explorer and artist William Henry Jackson first photographed in 1873. Made a national monument in 1929, the mountain’s deep snow-filled couloirs offered several generations of pilgrims confirmation that nature itself spoke the gospel in America. Although its remoteness kept visitation at such low levels that the federal government removed it from the list of national monuments in 1955, and the permanent snowfields have subsequently melted in part, reproductions of the Jackson photograph and numerous paintings of the mountain circulated widely for long afterwards, and Climbers for Christ offered cyberspace images of the mountain at their website.

The remembered past, embodied in works of art and architecture, or in numerous historical and recreational sites, also preserves the vision of manifest destiny. Emmanuel Leutze’s gigantic mural “Across the Continent, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (1864) hangs in the U.S. Capitol. Mass circulation prints of Fanny Palmer’s “Emigrants Crossing the Plains” (1868), or John Gast’s “Westward Ho” (1872) linked technology, American determination and divine inspiration – in Gast’s case by means of a gigantic, gauzy-gowned Goddess of Liberty floating above westward-moving citizens, telegraph wire and law book in her hands. The homes of westwardpushing or western-raised heroes such as Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln, battle sites such as Wounded Knee, the Little Bighorn, and the Alamo; monuments such as the Jefferson Arch and Mount Rushmore; and consumer theme parks such as Disneyland; are all centers at which tourists absorb the spirit of manifest destiny. Innumerable annual “Pioneer Day” celebrations – such as the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Days” in DeSmet, South Dakota – offer small-town and big-city residents the chance to connect heroic ancestral deeds with their communities’ needs of the present and hope for the future.

The preeminent icon of manifest destiny in the twentieth century was Hollywood’s archetypal American hero and most popular actor, John Wayne, who built much of his career reenacting the drama of manifest destiny. A brief consideration of his films shows the link between nature and national mission in twentieth-century guise. In Wayne’s westerns and war films, manifest destiny is represented as the just and overarching aim of the American people, while Wayne serves as its closed-mouth and hard fighting but morally virtuous agent. The Wayne persona is most at home on horseback, passing confidently across the land, or nestled rifle-at-the-ready, against rock, tree or sand – though as Gary Wills (1997) points out, he also fills the frame of the interior shots in Stagecoach (1939) with the ease of a man of nature. He has enough experience with indigenous people to be on speaking terms with them, and to know their habits and aims, but generally avoids familiarity, and even when preventing imperial violence – as in Rio Grande (1950) – he upholds the aim of civilizing the savage and making the land into a secure home for Americans. As a heroic figure he rarely approves of run-of-the-mill religious expression, telling the whore in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) – with whom he drinks but doesn’t sleep – “Don’t get religion on me” when she offers to pray for him, and ridiculing the preaching of Ward Bond in The Searchers (1958). Nevertheless, he embodies the muscular Christianity advocated by Theodore Roosevelt for urban Americans growing soft in the aftermath of frontier conquest. He casually refers to God as “Sir” in Rio Grande, and “the man upstairs” in Sands of Iwo Jima.

At the center of his character is duty, and rarely does it lead him into conflict with official American power. His most conventional religious gesture is his performance of perfunctory but heartfelt funeral services, in which he returns to the Earth either unfortunate subordinates or enemies fallen in his conflicts over soil.

Though Wayne worked with several directors, and played a variety of heroic roles, these portraits cohere in ways that consistently underscore the centrality of manifest destiny to his persona and to an understanding of America as an ideal. Consider, for example, the thematic overlap between Red River (1948) for Howard Hawks, his Rio Grande trilogy for John Ford (1948–50), his selfproduced The Alamo (1960), and such war films as Flying Tigers (1942), The Fighting Seebees (1944), They Were Expendable (1945), and The Sands of Iwo Jima. The westerns emphasize the righteousness of Wayne’s violence against Indians and Mexicans; the Pacific-based war films present racially uncomplicated portraits of the American fight against Japanese aggressors. But Wayne and his directors erase the historical gap between western conquest and Pacific war by a spatial assimilation; Texas, Arizona, a Pacific island, these separate pieces of Earth are the same under the sweep of Wayne’s gun. Overwhelmingly, Wayne’s violence – even that which is clearly brutal – fulfills a fundamentally religious function, providing what Richard Slotkin (1992) calls “regeneration.” In They Were Expendable – the story of U.S. Navy patrol torpedo boats in the opening days of World War II – the western and war story mix to provide a historical, or mythical, gloss on American possession of the Philippines. In one scene, when American defeat before the Japanese invasion 1042 Manifest Destinyappears certain, Wayne’s Lt. Rusty Ryan talks with Dad Knowland, an old boat-builder who refuses to flee. He sits on the front step of his tropical homestead, rifle and whiskey bottle in hand, and tells Ryan: “I worked forty years for this, son. If I leave it they’ll have to carry me out,” while the background music provides a chorus of “Red River Valley” – a folk-song from the end of the nineteenth century that helped romanticize the American annexation of Texas lands south of the Red River. Music also underscores the righteousness of the American cause in the final scene, as the Civil War’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” helps reconcile viewers to a shot of Wayne’s boatless crew marching ragtag off to sacrifice themselves in the jungle. The familiar hymn enables viewer consent to the extension of America’s redemptive role in the Pacific, as the land appropriated by one generation of manifest destiny advocates, and defended by another, is made meaningful through connection with the most important example of regenerative violence in American history – the chastened killing and massive dying that Lincoln declared “hallowed” at Gettysburg.

Howard Hawks’ Red River connects the Western adventure with the biblical account of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, a point which Hawks’ screenwriter, novelist William Faulkner, emphasized obliquely to a journalist in 1955 during the filming of Land of the Pharaohs.

According to Faulkner “It’s ‘Red River’ all over again. The Pharaoh is the cattle baron, his jewels are the cattle, and the Nile is the Red River” (in Hillier and Wollen 1996: 2). In “Red River,” Wayne, playing the historic cattleman Tom Dunson, blazer of the Chisholm Trail, establishes his claim to land below the river by shooting without clear provocation or much explanation a Mexican vaquero, who challenges Dunson’s presence on land his boss had received as a grant from the King of Spain. Justification comes from sidekick Walter Brennan (Groot), who remarks “That’s too much land for one man. Why it ain’t decent.

Here’s all this land aching to be used and never has been. I tell you, it ain’t decent.” The perfunctory killing, the vaquero’s brief burial, over which Dunson presides, and the branding of their small stock of cattle are sufficient to mark the land as home for the forward-looking Dunson, who plans to raise the largest herd in Texas and satisfy the American family needs for an abundance of beef.

In both films, American land, wherever it is, is home to American enterprise, violence establishes or maintains its original – and contextless – Anglo-Saxon appropriation, and American identity is framed as relentless, forwardlooking and violence-bestowing determination to hold this land in the face of threats from non-Anglos. These twin themes of appropriation and defense of the land overshadow almost any other in Wayne’s films, to the extent that his muscular Christian hero rarely appears as a mere worker of the land. And in an age where manifest destiny is already an accomplished fact, his hero is out of step, harkening back to the time when nature’s abundance was not yet assured, or still threatened by the nation’s demonic foes.

Wayne’s normative nostalgia often served to revive American ideals in challenging times, especially in films produced in the midst of the Second World War, or under the cloud of Cold War uncertainty, as were so many of his westerns. Their frequent reliance upon manifest destiny to establish the meaning of America’s mission in the past and its role in the present ran up against the wall of defeat in Vietnam, however, a war which Wayne sought to reinvigorate in familiar terms with The Green Berets (1968). But the nature presented by southeast Asian jungles offered little that Wayne could depict as home for American enterprise. Sacrifice for soil comes through more successfully, however, as the Special Forces unit Wayne commands fights off a massive Vietcong siege of their central highlands compound, reversing the outcome of Mexican General Santa Ana’s famous 1836 siege of the Alamo. Soil, sacrifice and the example of history mattered as well to President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan whose grandfather may have died at the Alamo, and to whom Wayne wrote in 1965 in support of Johnson’s deployment of U.S. troops. For Wayne, the causes were the same, enabling him to use the justification his “Alamo” character, Davy Crockett, offered. “We don’t want people like Kosygin, Mao Tse-tung, or the like” Wayne told Johnson, “ ‘gorin’ our oxes’ ” (in Wills 1997: 228).

In the decades since, American popular culture has apparently abandoned Wayne’s faith in manifest destiny and America’s overcoming of geography through violence, though he remains Hollywood’s most popular figure. Certainly the western saga, as a story of righteous conquest or personal and social redemption achieved through Anglo-Saxon subduing the land, has ceased to animate culture producers. Likewise, Anglo-Saxon racialism has lost its resonance as a public justification for resource extraction. Since Vietnam, Hollywood cameras have often captured war itself through a cynical lens. But the taming of the American landscape – the domestication of nature – that western expansionists first envisioned as the divinely commissioned destiny of the American people is reaffirmed through their endless journeying – moving, working, vacationing – over the country’s vast transportation network, and their absorption of natural resources into the needs and designs of their daily lives. Bound by duty to wield a gun in defense of American enterprise, Wayne’s characters rarely had time to share in the absorption of nature which this enterprise enables.

Perhaps this absorption has been secularized. However the forthright James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1983, certainly viewed America’s consumption of nature within a decidedly traditional religious framework. In telling Congress that “my responsibility is to follow the Scriptures, Manifest Destiny 1043which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns,” he brought back into public life the millennial assumptions regarding the American land and the American mission that had so shaped the idea of manifest destiny to begin with (Klein 1981: 22). By the century’s end that orientation had not lessened among the general public, though it was anathema to left-leaning journalists and environmental activists. In addition, the equation of moral purpose and political power that has guided America’s role on the twentieth-century international frontier was still leading early twenty-first century American policymakers to sound biblical echoes, as it led Albert J. Beveridge in 1900, to wonder “When nations shall war no more without the consent of the American Republic: what American heart thrills not with pride at that prospect?” (in Cherry 1971: 153). Matthew Glass Further Reading Cherry, Conrad, ed. God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Bibliography

Gilpin, William. Mission of the North American People: Geographical, Social and Political. New York: Da Capo, 1974 (1873).

Graebner, Norman A., ed. Manifest Destiny. New York: Bobs-Merrill, 1968.

Hillier, Jim and Peter Wollen, eds. Howard Hawks: American Artist. London: British Film Institute: 1996.

Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Klein, Jeffrey. “Man Apart: James Watt and the Making of God’s Green Acres.” Mother Jones 6:6 (August 1981), 20–7.

Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry. New York: Anchor, 1956.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Thoreau, Henry David. Selected Works of Henry David Thoreau. Walter Harding, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study in Nationalist Expansion in American History. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1958 (1935).

Wills, Gary. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. See also: Book of Nature; Disney Worlds at War; Emerson,

Ralph Waldo; Holy Land in Native North America; Indigenous Environmental Network; Native American Languages; Nature Religion in the United States; Thoreau, Henry David P.

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