Trump, Manifest Destiny, and the Epstein Files.

[Image: "American Progress" by John Gast, 1872]

The term "Manifest Destiny" describes the belief of many 19th century Americans that they were destined to rule the North American continent; that they had a "divine right" to dominate the lands between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The idea, if not the term, was unabashedly imperialist but even today, many political commentators seem to shy away from calling US expansion "imperialist." Donald Trump is a firm believer in Manifest Destiny, even if he knows little if anything about its history.

The phrase "Manifest Destiny" came into use after 1845, when newspaper editor and expansionist advocate John O'Sullivan used it. The timing was not coincidental. The US was in the process of annexing Texas, which had gained independence from Mexico in 1836. The US would soon be at war with Mexico, a war that was driven by expansionist ambitions. 

The plunder included what are now the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Some expansionists, including Jane Cazneau, who used the term "manifest destiny" before O'Sullivan, advocated the annexation of the rest of Mexico. 

That never happened, mainly because Manifest Destiny was a thoroughly racist ideology. It envisioned an American empire made up of white Europeans (plus their African slaves). Mexico was inhabited by large numbers of Native Americans (AKA "Indians") and people of mixed race who could not be part of the divine American mission.

The same thinking operates today. Trump has never spoken of annexing Mexico, because it is full of the sort of "criminal" and "inferior" people he claims are threatening the US. He has, however, repeatedly spoken of a US annexation of Canada, a predominately European white country. 

Advocates of manifest destiny also viewed Canada as a an area ripe for US expansion. Some expansionists demanded that Great Britain cede all of the Northwest Oregon Territory up to the border of Alaska. |Their cry was "54-40 or Fight". War threatened in 1846 but was avoided when the two countries agreed to a border on the 49th parallel. The peaceful resolution was partly due to the fact that the US was about to embark on the war against Mexico. To fight the British Empire at the same time would have been foolhardy. Of course, no one consulted the Native Americans who lived in the region.

Although the term "Manifest Destiny" emerged during the 1840s, the idea was expressed much earlier in American history, indeed at the very birth of the nation. It was annunciated clearly by William Henry Drayton of South Carolina in 1776. In that year, Cherokee bands attacked European settlers encroaching on their lands in the upcountry of the Carolinas and Virginia. The war that followed ended in a crushing defeat for the Cherokee. Many of their towns were destroyed, and they lost much of their historic land.

Drayton, a fervent advocate of American independence, viewed the war as an opportunity. At the time, he was serving as the Chief Justice of the newly independent state South Carolina. Drayton proposed that the defeated Cherokee be "extirpated" as a nation, that their lands "become the property of the American public," and that captives "become the property of the taker."

Drayton declared that the new nation had a divine mission. God had chosen the "American Empire" as his tool to advance the cause of liberty. The Lord had previously chosen Britain for this mission, but the British government had violated divine intentions by "trying to enslave the American people." Like other "Patriot" slaveholders, Drayton failed to see the irony in his political rhetoric. 

In his role as Chief Justice, Drayton also recommended the suspension of due process. A state court charged fourteen "Tories" with treason and sentenced them to death. Their "crime" had been fighting with the Cherokee against the new independent states. Drayton commented that he would have hanged them without a trial, thus advocating what soon became known as "lynching." The sitting "President" of South Carolina, John Rutledge, pardoned them. 

During the War for Independence, partisans on both sides employed lynchings. Nowhere was it more common than the backcountry of South Carolina. Among those lynched were blacks who supported the British, something Rutledge did support. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, blacks became the main victims of lynchings. 

Drayton may not have used the term "manifest destiny" but his statements and actions show that the idea a divine mission was present from the infancy of the American Republic. The popularity of his ideas and methods was an unfortunate omen for the new nation. 

Like Trump, Drayton employed populist rhetoric to convey his ideas of a divine mission to the public. Trump may not use the term "manifest destiny" either, but he is echoing it when he says that Greenland and Canada should belong to the US. It is also noteworthy that Trump has not threatened to annex Mexico, because it is supposedly inhabited by the sort of "bad people," he has sworn to deport from the USA. 

That may change. In his latest buccaneering ventures, Trump has threatened to annex or destroy various countries, including Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. His motive in these cases seems to be to distract people from his numerous appearances in the Epstein Files. But appealing to a "divine mission" of the USA helps him with his gullible base.

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The Man Who Drew Alice: Sir John Tenniel

Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) was one of the most popular British cartoonists of the 19th century. Victorians regularly viewed and loved his illustrations. For decades he was the chief political cartoonist for the most successful satirical magazine of the day, Punch. 

Tenniel also illustrated two of the most popular and enduring books of the 19th century: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). 

Tenniel created 42 images in the Alice books, fixing them forever in our minds. Here are just a few. In order: The Cheshire Cat, The Caterpillar, The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty. 

Tenniel and Carroll did not get along, and Tenniel never agreed to work for Carroll again. Both were perfectionists with different ideas of perfection. But working together, they created works of endless fascination. 

Tenniel joined Punch in 1850 as joint cartoonist with John Leech, and became principal cartoonist after Leech died in 1864. Tenniel produced more than 2000 cartoons for the magazine. They often reflected public opinion, which in that day was generally liberal and reformist at home but tended towards imperialism and racism abroad. How far they reflected Tenniel's views is moot, but they certainly matched the outlook of his editors at Punch.

Tenniel often attacked Irish nationalists, who sometimes resorted to terrorist tactics, including bombings and assassinations.  His cartoons of Irish Fenians depicted them as knuckle-dragging ape-like creatures or monsters. Two examples:

In 1893, Queen Victoria knighted Tenniel. He was the first cartoonist to be so honoured. In 1878, another famous caricaturist, "Spy" drew the image of Tenniel below for the magazine Vanity Fair. He died aged 96 in 1914, just before the First World War. 

One wonders what he would made of that.

 

Soap, Imperialism, and Racism

Soap: an innocent item of everyday life, one would think. The Victorians proclaimed "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." Soap and water were the keys to cleanliness. Today, most of the world's people are fortunate enough to have access to them. That hasn't always been the case. During the Victorian Age, water was increasingly supplied to houses in the industrializing West, and people could buy manufactured soap. Keeping clean became easier for much of the population. Western cleanliness, however, had a dark side. It became a sign or symbol of racial and imperial superiority.

During this time, western states were not only industrializing and urbanizing. They were also colonizing less developed regions of the globe. Imperialists justified their territorial acquisitions as a civilizing mission, or the "White Man's Burden," the title of Rudyard Kipling's popular poem of 1899. The British company that began making Pears' Soap in 1807 seems to have been the first to exploit that idea. The company promoted its product as possessing a "civilizing influence." Soap and civilization, Pears' ads declared, marched hand in hand. 

Soap lightened the White Man's Burden, by "brightening the dark corners of the earth." That translated here as cleaning up the dirty natives. The ads also complimented the advanced (white) civilizations for using soap. In the Pears' ad below, American Admiral Dewey, victor of the Battle of Manila Bay (1898), is pictured using the "ideal soap" while civilizers are bringing it to the people sitting in darkness.

Advertising in newspapers, magazines, and billboards boomed as never before in the late 19th century. Ads became larger and colorized, making them hard to miss. Soap companies, like many other businesses, were quick to take advantage of the latest in advertising technology and styles. Many soap ads were innocent enough, such as this undeniably cute one:

But even apparently innocent ads often emphasized how the soap helped preserve one's "white and beautiful" complexion.

Intentionally or not, they encouraged the idea that skin that deviated from pure whiteness was inferior. 

Many soap ads were overtly racist. Besides claiming that dark skin was less desirable than white skin, they implied that it was unclean. The ads promoted the "whitening" quality of the soap by showing it being used to wash the color off black or brown skin. 

The intention of such ads was not to claim that the soap really could turn dark skin white but to highlight the pure complexion it could ensure for white folk, as in this thoroughly racist one for Cook's "Lightning" Soap. 

The ad below illustrates the same intention in another way. The immaculate white child asks the ragged, dirty little black girl "Why Doesn't Your Mamma Wash You With Fairy Soap?"

Below is an ad that seems at first to imply that blacks might benefit by using Pears' Soap. In fact, it ridicules black people. The key is the contrast between the testimonial of Sambo with that of Adelina Patti in the upper right corner. Patti was a famous late 19th century opera singer. Sambo was a common derogatory term for a black man.

Ads sometimes juxtaposed white and black folk in more "realistic" situations that emphasized the "whitening" quality of the soap. In this American ad, the speech pattern of the porter, "chocolate custard" Sam (short for "Sambo"?) reinforces the white-black gulf. The very name of the soap, "Ivory," highlights its "white purity."

The history of soap highlights how even ordinary items of daily life can take on a broader and sometimes sinister connotation.