Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation, with a New Foreword by John Mack Faragher

by Frederick Merk and Lois Bannister Merk

Book Overview

Before this book first appeared in 1963, most historians wrote as if the continental expansion of the United States were inevitable. "What is most impressive," Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris declared in 1956, "is the ease, the simplicity, and seeming inevitability of the whole process." The notion of inevitability, however, is perhaps only a secular variation on the theme of the expansionist editor John L. O'Sullivan, who in 1845 coined...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674548051
• ISBN13: 9780674548053
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 278 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Did he take all factors into consideration?

The words "Manifest destiny" are associated, in the popular mind, with the whole conquering outburst that, in less than a century, managed to expand the area of white English-speaking settlement in what are now the United States of America from a group of thinly settled communities on the East Coast to a continent-wide nation numbering in the hundreds of millions. It associates this conquering outburst with the taint of nationalistic and bellicose arrogance, of chauvinism and brutality; and may therefore be said to taint even further the already inevitably bloody business of conquest and settlement.At the height of American self-confidence and belief, at the beginning of the sixties, Frederick Merk set out to disprove this popular image; and showed, with a wealth of documentary evidence, that the actual jingoistic "Manifest Destiny" episode was nothing more than a short-lived craze, such as the US are seized with from time to time, peaking, but also falling apart, with the notorious 1848 war against Mexico. Merk observes that, while in the light of events the superiority of the USA over Mexico seems obvious, it was by no means so clear to contemporaries: the military establishment of Mexico was considerably larger than the peacetime US army, and the Mexicans would be fighting on their own soil. Yet the American army, thanks largely to a stiffening of the officer corps with civilians trained in the numerous American military academies and recalled to arms, proved the more efficient and effectively conquered Mexico. At that point, the vociferous "Manifest destiny" lobby, which had supported President Polk's cold and deliberate move towards war, was faced, not with the opportunity to spout about unifying (in some remote future visible only to rhetoricians and fools) a whole continent, but with the real choice: was an American Union of twenty million largely Protestant English speakers to absorb the indigestible morsel of a Mexico of eight million Spanish-speaking Catholics, spread over an enormous territory, naturally tumultuous, and separated from the main areas of Anglo settlement by prairies, mountains and deserts? Faced with this choice, the Manifest Destiny lobby fell silent; and that, argues Merk, was by and at large the end of it. He can trace no direct influence of any sort from the copious pamphleteering of the early forties on later American debate and politics; the Manifest Destiny craze, as crazes do, had died out.The objection to this picture is fairly obvious. There is one absolutely silent partner at Merk's party - one of which, indeed, he never makes mention, who does not even appear in the Index: the Indians. At all times, before, during, and after the Manifest Destiny craze, the Western frontier was rolling inexorably forwards, plowing under its farmsteads and its cattle all the earlier inhabitants of the land. Does this not fall under the tag of brutality and arrogance of Manifest Destiny? Well, no. Manifest Destiny, as

wonderful book even for people who think history boring

I love this book. I first read it as an undergraduate who thought history was boring. This book and my diplomatic history professor completely changed my mind about history almost 20 years ago. The book is very readable and the focus, which tries to look at whether average americans really believed in Manifest Destiny before, during, and after the Mexican-American War, gives the book a social history flavor that one certainly did not see in Diplomatic History back in the early 80's when I first read this book. I highly recommend the book!