It's Evening in America: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

Part 2 of 8

Can I tell you something more?

As Americans we like to think of ourselves as a constitutional democracy and a nation, as opposed to an empire. But the truth is our 250-year history looks awfully darn empire-ish.

Starting out as a loosely-tied collection of 13 colonies occupied by pilgrims – the dignified term we use for what were a bunch of religious nutjobs fleeing England because everyone there thought they were nuts – the United States came into being as a country after we declared independence from King George III for acting like a total despot, and a ragtag army under George Washington defeated the British in 1783.

The U.S. Constitution was ratified seven years later, establishing a republic of individual states unified under a strong federal structure, and it remains the longest surviving written charter of government in the world. Although probably not for much longer.

When founding father turned real estate tycoon Tom Jefferson snookered the French and in 1803 got the Louisiana Territory for a $15 million song, thereby more than doubling the size of our backyard, it occurred to people that maybe we were special and somehow deserved to have not just a country but an entire continent.

This notion of American Exceptionalism was the first indication we were on our way to becoming an empire.

Drunk with pride and possibility, our leaders at the time, as well as most ordinary citizens, felt that the United States possessed a moral virtue which was unique, and our divine destiny was to spread this cool new republican form of government throughout the world. We were to be the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ Not coincidentally, such hubris is exactly what the leaders of every single empire in recorded history felt as well.

Over the next several years this imperialistic impulse became an idée fixe and part of our national gestalt. And a populist rallying cry and political force. Certain it was our karmic kismet, it was referred to as Manifest Destiny, in part I imagine because Divine Destiny sounds like a porn name, but also because it somehow made aggressive territorial expansion seem like we were merely executing a clause in our lease agreement.

Whatever you want to call it, we had definitely caught the empire bug, and the next century was spent fighting wars to claim more land, making deals with indigenous people to buy more land, then breaking those deals so we could just steal it.

Early in the 19th Century the stated plan of our nascent empire was to buy land from the natives with their consent, and for a time we pretty much did exactly that but only because we were busy with other conflicts. Like invading Canada.

When the War of 1812 – was that the best name they could come up with? – didn’t go well at first, we renounced the Northwest Territory, gave it to Britain, and it looked as though we were losing the empire game. But after a thrilling second-half comeback we reclaimed it with the 1814 Treaty of Ghent.

In 1819 we strong-armed Spain into ceding us Florida so we’d have a warm, sunny place for retirees and theme parks, then drew a southern border with a black Sharpie all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And the Monroe Doctrine, first published in 1823, made it official U.S. foreign policy to oppose any additional European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere – essentially yelling across the Atlantic, “Hey, you! Stay out of my yard!”

Satisfied that we’d bullied Europe enough for the time being, we got serious about claiming huge swaths of unsettled territory on our own continent.

Which required we unsettle a whole lot of indigenous people who had been settled there for centuries. For starters, the 1830 Indian Removal Act – later voted worst name ever for an act of Congress – forced native Americans east of the Mississippi to move west, allowing for white settlement of the Southeast and creating the infamous Trail of Tears.

What followed was a systematic and perfidious persecution of tribes everywhere, and those huge swaths I mentioned were claimed as U.S. territory by applying social, economic, and political pressure. And when that didn’t work, they called in the cavalry.

The Indian Appropriations Act – this time they came up with a better albeit wholly misleading name – passed in 1851 created ‘reservations’ where the tribes were herded but ostensibly kept the right to govern themselves. Not surprisingly, the act was amended in 1871 to strip them of that right.

Meanwhile, in 1844, James K. Polk, protégé of Andrew Jackson and a raging Manifest Destiny enthusiast, campaigned for president on the hot-button issue to seize a huge chunk of western Canada as our own. His catchy rallying cry of “Fifty-four forty, or fight!”, which implied we were ready to shed blood so we could have all of British Columbia up to Alaska at 54º 40’ latitude, won him the election, but as is so often the case with campaign promises it was just hot air. After the Oregon Border Dispute ended in 1846, the line between Canada and the U.S. was drawn at the 49th parallel and we settled for what became Washington State.

Sore about missing the opportunity to add to our burgeoning empire, and losing all those beaver pelts, Polk turned our attention south to mess with Texas. He immediately started a war with Mexico – cleverly named the Mexican-American War – which lasted two years until 1848 when all the territory north of the Rio Grande was annexed as a slave state.

Polk and Jackson and their coterie in the South were still big on slavery at that point, and many of them argued the U.S. shouldn’t stop there but add all of Mexico and Central America as slave states. However, to the free states and the relatively sane people who lived there that didn’t feel like our destiny – manifest, divine, or otherwise.

Filling out the map, the Homestead Act passed in 1862 guaranteed land to anyone who lived on it for five years and, well, homesteaded.

Nobody knew what that meant exactly, but over the next few years no less than 600,000 families migrated west, many of them inspired by the famous saying attributed to Horace Greeley, “Go west, young man.” And a lot of them evidently had the foresight to bring along a young woman, because the population of the United States west of the Mississippi swelled considerably and the country’s claim to the land was secured.

In 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, and because we were now the proud owners of a vast territory occupied mostly by bears, seals, and salmon, it was known as Seward’s Folly. But the sheer bulk of the place certainly made the empire, sorry the country, look much bigger.

And finally, one last war of colonial expansion with Spain in 1898 dubbed – you guessed it – the Spanish-American War, gave us control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, which finally qualified us for platinum level empire status and priority seating in Colonial Class.

Then wiping our brow from all that destined manifesting, we went about the business of isolating ourselves from the rest of the planet and trying to keep foreigners out of our shiny new empire.

But that’s not all I wanted to tell you.

To be continued next week…