Since the beginning, U.S. international rela-
tions have had the intensity of a crusade. To ex-
plain this, one must explore the set of beliefs
generally shared by the nation’s leaders and the
foreign policy establishment about the nature of
the United States of America. These beliefs
operate like myths: they enhance the impor-
tance of the nation’s actions and justify them by
reference to a larger philosophical and moral
framework.
Even at its birth the leaders of the United
States understood that their experiment was a
profound break with the political philosophy
and principles of the European monarchies. For
white males with property the guarantees of life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the op-
portunity for self-government offered a new be-
ginning. “We have the power,” said Thomas
Paine, “to begin the world again.” 3 Those prin-
ciples have inspired other Americans as well as
people throughout the world to demand their
universal application.
From the earliest days, this country’s leaders
saw it as a unique society, an example to the rest
of the world. John Winthrop of the Massachu-
setts Bay Colony described it with characteristic
hyperbole: ” Men shall say of succeeding planta-
clones: the Lord make it like that of New Eng-
land: for we must Consider that we shall be as a
City upon the Hill, the eies of all people upon
us.’, 4
Americans had, the story goes, not only an
exceptional moral character but also special in-
sight into the mysteries of self-government. “I
presume that there are not to be found five men
in Europe who understand the nature of liberty
and the theory of government as they are under-
stood by five hundred men in America,” said
Joel Barlow, a New England chaplain, lawyer
and entrepreneur in 1788.5 With that under-
standing came a mission to enlighten the rest of
the world. Two centuries later, President
Reagan sounded a characteristic note: “We are
freer than any other people. We have achieved
3
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eD/noN
31
5″2NALA Rmnort
more than any other people… [AJll of those
representatives from all over the world… here
to look at our election to learn how they could
spread the word about that kind of freedom in
their own countries.” 6
This cherished belief in moral superiority has,
at critical moments, absolved U.S. leaders from
serious moral reflection about the consequences
of their actions. Our own history speaks mourn-
fully to that double standard. “It is our manifest
destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of
the continent which Providence has given us for
the development of the great experiment of lib-
erty and federative self-government entrusted to
us.” 7 Filling the continent from coast to coast,
White European Americans drove Red Ameri-
cans before them, enslaved African Americans
to tend their plantations, forced Spanish Ameri-
cans to surrender their land, imported Oriental
Americans to construct their railroads and ex-
ploited Irish, German, Italian and Polish Amer-
icans to build their factories.
In his novel White Jacket, Herman Melville
wrote, “We Americans are the peculiar, the
chosen people-the Israel of our time; we bear
the ark of the liberties of the world. God has pre-
destined.., the rest of the nations must be in our
rear.” 8 Thomas Jefferson, indeed, proposed
that the Seal of the United States should bear the
image of the Children of Israel being led by a
shaft of light. 9
Such beliefs imbued U.S. leaders with the
zeal of missionaries. Spreading the good news
meant territorial expansion, and evenJefferson,
who ardently professed the virtues of smallness,
recognized that the nation’s ultimate aspirations
were imperial: “I am persuaded,” he wrote in
1809, “that no constitution was ever before as
well-calculated as ours for extensive empire and
self-government.” 1 0
As the young nation prospered, imperial in-
tentions grew more explicit: “[Our system] will
fit a larger empire than ever yet existed, and I
have long believed that such an empire will rise
in America, and give quiet to the world,” de-
dared Matthew Lyon, a congressman from
Vermont and Kentucky, in 1816.11
Give quiet to the world…Quite rapidly,
America’s expansion became a mission civilitrice.
As early as 1816, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay
was looking beyond the continental United
States: “It is in our power to create a system of
which we shall be in the center and in which all
South America will act with us.”12 There was at
least a refreshing frankness to imperial rhetoric
in the 19th century:
“Those who are not for us are against us.”
-Sen. Henry Stuart Foote, 1851.13
“Our form of government is adapted to civil-
ized man everywhere… Let us, then, while
perfecting our institutions, not refuse to expand
our boundaries.”
-Ignatius Donnelly, 1868.14
“If nobody can lick us, we need not be afraid
to play the just and generous big brother among
the nations.”
-Henry Demarest Lloyd, c. 1885.15
“The world is to be Christianized and civil-
ized.” -Josiah Story, 1885.16
“I am an exporter. I want the world.”
-Charles L. Lovering,
textile manufacturer, 1890.17
The Class Will Please Come to Order-Somebody?
William H. Crawford, New York Times, December 22, 1963
By the infant years of the new century, the
United States had become a first-rank industrial
power with a modern navy and the ability to
realize its territorial ambitions. This was the era
of the famous Roosevelt Corollary, asserting the
32 NACLA ReportNov/Dec 1983
WHY NOT GET THE BREEDING GROUND?
HOLLAND, CHICACO TRIBUNE
U.S. right to police the Western Hemisphere.
Soon after, in the face of revolution in Mexico
and Russia, Woodrow Wilson declared that
such disorders needlessly disrupted civilized
society. To his secretary of state, William Jen-
nings Bryan, the goals of U.S. foreign policy
were “to prevent revolutions, promote education
and advance stable and just governments.”‘ 8
Wilson would express the quintessence of
America’s mission-self-importance and cru-
sading zeal, all supremely mindful of the mate-
rial basis for America’s prosperity:
“Our industries have expanded to such a
point that they will burst theirjackets if they can-
not find a free outlet to the markets of the world
… Who shall say where it shall end?”‘9
“I am going to teach the South American
republics to elect good men.” 2 0
“The world must be made safe for democ-
racy.” 2 ‘
By 1961, John F. Kennedy could say without
fear of exaggeration, “Our frontiers today are
on every continent.” 2 2
U.S. leaders have repeatedly justified expan-
sionism as being opposed to some Evil Other–
be it the Red Indian, German Kaiserism or
Mexican revolutionaries. Today of course, it is
the Soviet Union. U.S. policy in Central Amer-
ica is a tragic reflection of that obsession with the
Evil Other-tragic and ironic, because it be-
trays our own origins. The American Revolu-
tion and the formation of the United States of
America stood for a new principle in the history
of nation-states: the right of a people to self-
determination. Men and women “were endowed
by their creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness… Whenever any form of govern-
ment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter and abolish it and to
institute new government . . When a long train
of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same object, evinces a design to reduce them
under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is
their duty, to throw off such government and to
provide new guards for their future security.”
How total the commitment of the Declaration
of Independence: “it is their duty.” And yet, as
William Appleman Williams argues in his book
America Confronts a Revolutionary World,
1776-1976, the quest for empire has over-
whelmed this fundamental principle. Of the
post-war world, he observes: “My citizen’s soul
is weary under the burden of my knowledge of
my country dishonoring its once noble commit-
ment to the right of self-determination. I leave it
to others to… retell and embellish the grisly
truth about Iran and Guatemala, Indonesia and
Santo Domingo, Italy and Cuba, Vietnam and
Watergate. And Chile. Perhaps most of all
Chile. For there we purposely destroyed a man
who was dedicated to making a peaceful transi-
tion to the Future. Jefferson trembled for his
country. In deep and quiet anger I weep for
mine.”2 3
Professor Williams continues, “Our rulers
-are unable to disengage from even the most ob-
vious mistakes in foreign policy with any intelli-
gence and morality, or grace and dignity, and
they continue to pout and whine about (and in-
tervene in the affairs of) most of the people with
whom we share the globe.” The control of our
foreign policy by a small and essentially unac-
countable elite, which also controls our domestic
political economy, survives, he complains,
“through inertia and even more because no vital
alternative has been proposed and agitated.”” 2 4
Central America again reminds us of how we
have yet to find alternatives to the worldview of
this elite, its designation of who are our friends
and who our enemies. Their myths have be-
come our myths, their vision our vision. The
time is long overdue for us to make our own
decisions, find our own myths, create our own
vision of America.
VISIONS OF AMERICA
1. FromJefferson’s first inaugural address. Quoted in
William Appleman Williams, America Confronts a Revolu-
tionary World: 1776-1976, (New York: William Morrow and
Company, 1976), p. 33.
2. Quoted in William Appleman Williams, America
Confronts a Revolutionary World: 1776-1976, p. 108.
3. Ibid., p. 30.
4. Ibid., p. 25.
5. Ibid., p. 44.
6. The New York Times, November 11, 1982.
7. John L. O’ Sullivan in the New York Morning News,
December 27, 1845, quoted in William Appleman Wil-
liams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World: 1776-1976,
p. 35.
8. Quoted in William Appleman Williams, America
Confronts a Revolutionary World: 1776-1976, p. 36.
9. Ibid., p. 34.
10. Ibid., p. 25.
11. Ibid., p. 59.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 92.
14. Ibid., p. 125.
15. Ibid., p. 120.
16. Ibid., p. 123.
17. Ibid., p. 120.
18. Ibid., p. 144.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 139.
21. Ibid.
22. Quoted in William Appleman Williams, Empire as a
Way of Life, (New York & Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980), p. 193.
23. William Appleman Williams, America Confronts a
Revolutionary World: 1776-1976, p. 178.
24. Ibid., p. 193.
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