Manifest Destiny is the defunct doctrine that underscores our immigration difficulties today.

[image: John O'Sullivan]

Does Jeb Bush Support Manifest Destiny-ism?

I rarely pray, but I do thank Providence occasionally for sparing me of some things. One of the things I am grateful about is that it never entered into my head to run for public office. In particular, I never contemplated—not even whimsically—to aspire to occupy the office of President of the United States. But if I had, and if I had said something stupid that showed how ill-prepared I was for that office, I think I would have had the good sense to correct myself instantly. It’s a caution I carry with me for many other reasons today.

Jeb Bush is making such a run, but with a different sense of history. And he said something stupid about it. But he is not taking it back, nor is he modifying it. He said he admires Pres. James K. Polk. That’s it. Don’t get me wrong. Jeb or anyone else is entitled to like Polk. After all, dead men tell no tales. But Polk was among the worst Presidents of all time. I am not a student of history, but I am careful about my accusations. What was so wrong about Polk? you may be asking. Let me count the ways.

First, Polk believed in Manifest Destiny, the inane term that asserted white Americans were ordained by Providence to own, occupy, control and to frolic in all the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific generally defined by today’s boundaries circumscribed by Mexico on the south and Canada on the north. This belief was first espoused in 1845 by a little known journalist, John O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan and others ignored the legitimacy of any and all others who happened to occupy that very same land, legally, by international law, or by squatters rights going back 40,000 years or more. In particular, they ignored the rights of Native Americans who were generally believed by the same white group to be heathens or savages. Most of that same land from Texas to California, back to Nevada, Utah, and Colorado was legally a part of Mexico. Polk had ideas of owning all that land, expanding slavery into every nook and cranny of it, while exploiting it for fun and profit in ways that only the "superior" white Americans who had entered the country by way of Europe knew how to do. That is the perspective of the times (1845-1865) that I inferred many years ago in my readings and in my travels. Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, and Thoreau all shared this view.

For perspective, the same idea was later espoused by Adolf Hitler in his barely readable comic book, Mein Kampf. He called his concept, Lebensraum—the notion that white Germanic occupiers of Germany were entitled to all the land east of Germany all the way across Asia to the Pacific. Lebensraum means “living space,” a right in Hitler’s mind at least that was the just due of the superiority of the German people. He called its occupiers in the 1920s “Slavs,” low-class people inferior in every way to Germans. He envisioned the day when Germans would take that land and remake it via "Germania" into his view of Utopia. .

Second, Polk also believed in taking things that were not his. That is generally known as stealing. In the case of Texas, it was called “annexation,” a term that would set better with historians. But to be more accurate, it was an invasion. At the time Texas was part of Mexico, and the Mexicans had not given, sold, nor gifted it to Polk or to anyone else.

Polk was a grand thief. He served only one term, from 1845 to 1849. But in that short time period he showed the world in general, and Adolf Hitler in particular, how to steal land on a grand scale. More details of how he did it are in the history books. The short version is that he sent troops to engage Mexican troops who were totally against this concept of annexing Texas away from Mexico and into the folds of the United States. The Mexicans fought valiantly, but superior U.S. forces beat them back after two years of combat. With the Mexicans cornered at Hidalgo, they signed away Texas to the U.S. Then came the coup de grâce,

With their backs against the wall, the United States, in a moment that lives in infamy, offered the defeated Mexicans $15 million for New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, and a portion of Wyoming. I wasn’t there. But with just a little imagination I can see rifles pointed at the heads of Mexicans as they agreed to give up land equal to one-third of the entire United States for a pittance. To merely assert that the U.S. bought that land from Mexico is at least an understatement. It is more accurate to say James K. Polk had written his own version of Lebensraum long before Hitler ever came onto the scene.

Some will misinterpret me later, so let me be clear: James Polk was Adolf Hitler’s mentor. He gave Hitler the blueprint for how to take land on a grand scale, with superior armed forces, without merit, and guided only by the flimsiest banner. That pathetic little banner was called Manifest Destiny. It had no weight of law, no legitimacy in moral behavior, and it’s only precedence was in how the U.S. had stolen nearly all of the other land mass at the time from Native Americans.

That huge territory was occupied then by Mexicans. Today, there is still a very large population of Americans of Mexican ancestry living in those states. They are the great great grand children of those earlier Mexicans. They are as decent and as honorable as any other subset of Americans. The difference is that many of them still have relatives living in the smaller version of Mexico today. They are the children of those Mexicans that James Polk thought were so inferior. They are the children that many white Americans today want to erect a fence between us and them, to keep them out of the very country that Polk took from them. But in contradistinction to Polk’s behavior, in all those intervening years, Mexicans on both sides of the border have stood with the United States, first in defeating the French and preventing France from supplying the South with arms during the Civil War. Read about it in the history of Cinco de Mayo. They fought alongside the United States in WWI, in WWII, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in every smaller conflict. When compared to any other subset of our culture, the Mexican people are more even of temperament, more civil in their dealings, and more law abiding than white Americans, no matter how that latter term is defined.

Epilogue. Today, many citizens know little or nothing of that history spanning a mere 180 years. Many know only that Mexicans are people to be hated, to be kept out of the same land that was taken from their great grand parents. Most of those who cross the borders today in search of work already have a long history of relatives living here. Are some of them drug dealers and rapists? Probably. But this much we know for certain: Their crime rate for all crimes is much lower than is the crime rate for U.S. citizens. Did they help to build America as we know it? Definitely. Have they fought in her defense with valor? Definitely. Have they contributed to our culture in a thousand other ways? Definitely. Is there any other nation or people with whom we have such a long standing, close relationship? Absolutely not. Are they worthy of and deserving of special consideration for a rapid and unique path to citizenship? Definitely yes. You might ask “What are Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado worth today?” That is the area Polk took, yet it is still encloses a huge Mexican-American population.

I am at a loss to understand the elevated status that Jeb Bush casts upon James Polk, the person most responsible for giving life to those dark pages of U.S. history, and the architect of today’s immigration conflict with Mexico. A double quandary arises in that Jeb married a Mexican lady, the daughter of a migrant worker from León, Guanajuato, Mexico.

Maybe he will take back or modify his James Polk comment somewhere along the way. But I doubt it. He apparently admires “annexation,” Texas style, much the same as Polk did. Let us hope and pray that the Presidency does not become subsumed within the racist doctrine of Manifest Destiny by wealthy or poor families that show signs of a similar propensity.