The Carnage of God’s Chosen Nations
BY THE TIME W.E.B. Du Bois set foot in Africa, the consequences of nineteenth-century hypernationalism were already marked across the globe. European nation-state consolidation had exploded in 1914 in a war more deliberately and devastatingly organized than any before it. As Du Bois journeyed through France in late 1923, the last of the millions of the war dead were still being dug out of the killing fields. Africa and southern Asia had been carved up virtually to the last acre by the imperial powers. The nations that emerged after 1919 with their empires intact rearranged the losers’ spoils, but the new “mandates” they authorized did not fundamentally change the character of an empire-dominated world.
Liberia, as Du Bois celebrated it, was an exception to the new imperial order: the sole black republic on the African continent. But at the same time, and in ways far deeper than Du Bois could bring himself to admit, Liberia, too, had been a pawn in the project of empire from its very beginning. Its African American settler colonists had imposed their land claims on the African native populations by force, justifying their right to rule the native populations, like imperialists everywhere, by their higher level of civilization and more fully developed benevolence. Though formally unrecognized by the U.S. government until the Civil War, Liberia by the early twentieth century had become for all practical purposes a U.S. overseas colony: an open field for Firestone Rubber and other American investments protected by the U.S. Navy.
The United States’ position in the global fields of power had changed radically over the same years as well. At the Liberia colony’s founding in 1820, the United States was still an Atlantic-facing nation; its center of population lay just 130 miles west of the national capital at Washington, DC. By the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial limits of the United States had not only reached the Pacific Ocean but were pressing into new locations overseas. Acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii had been secured; de facto protectorates over Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti were about to be put in place. The United States, far less scathed by World War I than the other combatants, came to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 as the strongest of the Great Powers, both economically and militarily. It was this accomplished geopolitical reality that made Woodrow Wilson confident that the United States could set the terms of the postwar world order. From a new nation still clinging to the Atlantic rim in 1776, the ascent to global power a century and a third later had been remarkable.
In explaining the dramatic expansion across space of American power in the nineteenth century, historians routinely point to the sense of mission injected into the nation’s consciousness by its early Puritan settlers, with Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” as its clearest articulation. One of the leading textbooks of the 1970s put the claim succinctly: “This sense of destiny, so eloquently expressed by Winthrop at the dawn of the New World’s history, infused and shaped the perception that Americans have ever since had of themselves and their role in the world, a perception apparent in Thomas Jefferson’s belief that Americans were the chosen people of a new Israel, in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase that the world must be made safe for democracy, and in John F. Kennedy’s alarm, sounded in 1961, that ‘a new generation of Americans’ must be prepared to fight the worldwide battle of ‘freedom versus tyranny.’ ” College students now find the same equation of American great-power ascent with the Puritan past in the widely used Major Problems in American Foreign Relations. Placing the “city upon a hill” passage from Winthrop’s Model as the very first of the historical documents their readers will encounter, the editors explain that students will find there “the American doctrine of mission and God-favored destiny that the Puritans had etched on American memory.”1
Other explanations for the dramatic expansion of global ambitions and power, to be sure, quickly supplement the theme of a destiny and mission inherited from the Puritan past. The rivalries for empire on the North American continent, the Southern slaveholders’ drive for new soil and territory, Northern industrialists’ quest for wider and wider markets, settler hunger for land and property, the racist assumptions that gave Anglo-Americans a sense of their “manifest” right to the continent, and the ideology of endlessly expanding liberty all propelled the expansion of power across space. In these accounts, the nature of the Puritan contribution is not always clear. Some American foreign relations experts take the Model’s call to act as a moral example to the world as sharply opposed to the impulse to subdue and civilize it; others, to the contrary, point to the cruel self-righteousness with which the Puritans waged war against their Native American enemies as a legacy that Americans would carry all the way into the wars of the present.2
None of these amendments, however, have fully displaced the sense that Winthrop’s text—whether literally present or not, whether through its words or its unspoken assumptions—somehow imbued a sense of God’s chosenness into the distinctive cultural DNA of imperially expansive America. From Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity,” to John L. O’Sullivan’s rhetoric of “manifest destiny,” to Albert J. Beveridge’s celebration of the Americans’ “divine mission” to bring civilization to the Philippines, to Woodrow Wilson’s profound sense of America’s righteous place in the world of global affairs—strung one after another like unalterable station stops on history’s rail line—the story proceeds.3 The Puritan sense of a nation endowed with a sacred calling, as Perry Anderson put it, helped ease the “seamless passage to an American imperialism.”4 What difference it might make to realize that almost none of the writers in this succession had read—or could have read—Winthrop’s Model, or that the analytical terms themselves—“etched on American memory,” “infused” into the self-perception of Americans, “afforded seamless passage”—are extremely difficult to pin down, is rarely explored.
In fact, the course of American expansion was carried far less by its distinctive texts than by circumstances. The colonial American settlements were, from the beginning, parts of an imperial project, born as projections of English power and linked by commerce to the engine of English economic growth. The first movements toward intracolonial solidarity in British North America took place during the Seven Years War, a decade before the first anticolonial protests, when a sense of their common Protestant Englishness, vis-à-vis the designs of the “papist” French and their “savage” Native American allies, drew the geographically scattered British colonists together. The first empire New England’s preachers celebrated was the British empire. The fall of Quebec and Montreal to English, Scots, and American soldiers in 1759–60 brought forth a spate of sermons praising the blessings of providence on “the British Israel”—“the wonder and envy of all the world.”5 Thomas Jefferson’s prediction of “an empire of liberty” unrolling across the continent was an appropriation of imperial sentiments already in circulation long before the Revolution itself.
To this, still more importantly, were added the dynamics of nationalism itself. There were a few nations in the nineteenth century that rested content within their borders, but most did not. Even as the loosely joined early modern empires gave way before the competition of more tightly organized nation-states, the expansive impulses continued. To press the nation’s power outward, to expand its political influence and territorial reach, was part of the very project of nationalism. The ambitions of nations that we think of now as small and tidy sprawled across space not long ago: the Dutch Republic (a global maritime force in the seventeenth century), Belgium (whose king claimed a thirteenth of the African land mass as his personal possession at the end of the nineteenth century), Denmark (with colonies and treaty ports across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean). Other nations were made by spatial aggrandizement, in the way that Prussia aggregated the German empire to itself in the last quarter of the nineteenth century or the role that Piedmont-Sardinia played in the construction of modern Italy. By war, treaty, and population displacement nations pushed across the boundaries of weaker neighbors. The English pressed into Ireland with particularly callous and bloody determination, the French pressed into Alsace, the Germans into Poland, and the Russians deeper into the Caucasus and central Asia. The new nations of the Americas locked each other in territorial wars. In Latin America as in the United States, frontiers between settlers and native peoples were sites of massive land expropriation, population displacement, and endemic violence, punctuated by revolt and campaigns of military “pacification.”6
The neat conceptual lines that analysts have tried to draw between expansion (the annexation of spatially contiguous territory) and empire (annexation across more distant, discontinuous space) all but dissolve under closer examination. In both, the pressure for territorial enlargement was foundational: to force open new territories for population, to acquire new economic resources, to bid for membership in the ranks of the great powers. Not all nations’ projects succeeded in this restless competition for space; there were inevitably more losers than winners. But ambitions for expansion ran hard through the nations of the nineteenth century.
In all this, the American case was no exception. The language with which we still explain the project of expansion—as a great westward “movement” of families, possessions, hopes, and institutions—disguises the forces principally at work. There were, indeed, massive population movements; the trains of Conestoga wagons on the trek west are not a historical fiction, nor were the westward-driven gangs of coffled slaves. But the underlying technologies of nationalist expansion mirrored those of nationalist expansion elsewhere: treaty, purchase, war and threatened war, population infiltration across contested borders, and violent subjection of the native populations. The same processes would have carried Americans into the Caribbean before the Civil War if Southern expansionists’ longings for Cuba had not been blocked by Northerners’ opposition to the addition of more territory for slavery.7
Over all these projects of expansion the voice of providence and “destiny” rang. Russian expansionists talked of their nation’s destiny in Asia. French expansionists celebrated their destiny in northern Africa. British writers heralded the “imperial destiny” that beckoned them to India, Africa, and beyond. Not interests or power, they claimed, but the manifest designs of history itself called them, irresistibly, to their new geographic destinies.
What distinguished the case of the United States was not the uniqueness of the expansionists’ sense of mission but the weakness of the resistance they faced. The older empires that might have precluded the Americans’ race across the continent ceded their claims with unexpectedly little cost to the upstart Americans. Facing slave rebellion and military defeat in France’s prize sugar colony in the Caribbean and beleaguered by renewed war with Britain, Napoleon undertook a strategic retreat from the North American continent leaving an initially perplexed President Thomas Jefferson and his openly hostile Federalist opponents with a huge, unexpected gift of western territory.8 After defeating American efforts to seize the St. Lawrence waterway in the War of 1812, the British were content to let the Americans turn their ambitions elsewhere. Severely weakened by internal revolts and seemingly irresolvable political strife, 1840s Mexico was no match for the U.S. expansionists; its claims to the sparsely populated territory north of the Rio Grande dissolved in decisive military defeat.
This retreat of powers capable of effectively mounting modern technological warfare against U.S. territorial ambitions effectively doomed the Native American peoples, their numbers and resources already massively thinned by the invasion of European diseases. Without the possibility of tactical alliance with one or another of the competing imperial powers, the “middle ground” of potential negotiation and compromise dissolved. Rebellion and resistance continued, but they could not hold off deeper and deeper invasion of Native America, all the more so as the military forces organized in the Civil War were redeployed to subdue the West. Not even the powerful Comanche military presence could stave off the ultimate dispossession of the native population, the expropriation of their land for Euro-American farming, ranching, and mining interests, and the forced relocation of those who resisted.9
Each of these campaigns faced resistance from Americans who feared that distance and dispersal would undermine the social basis on which the nation rested. None spoke more forcefully to that point in the first part of the nineteenth century than the New Englanders, where, if anywhere, the Puritan sense of destiny might have been assumed to run most strongly. But there was destiny enough in the system of cultural nationalism to make up for it.
By the time the territorial ambitions of American expansionists had turned to Asia and then back once more to the Caribbean and to Central America, the globe was much more crowded than before and the opportunities more limited. The last phase of imperial expansion, from the slicing up of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884 to the First World War, more closely resembled a zero-sum game than the phases before. But the very scarceness of opportunity now made possession of imperial territory an even more prized marker of power and status. If in the early and mid-nineteenth century American policy makers were acting on an impulse deep in a nationalist project that they shared with many others, by the turn of the century they were consciously playing catch-up: trying their best to put down stakes of their own on an imperial board game already teeming with players.
The proponents of American overseas empire were acutely aware of their latecomer’s status. “There are points of resemblance in our work to the work which is being done by the British in India and Egypt, by the French in Algiers, by the Dutch in Java, by the Russians in Turkestan, by the Japanese in Formosa,” Theodore Roosevelt candidly defended the United States’ administration of the Philippines in 1904. There were many reasons to stay in the Philippines, he told Congress, but “our chief reason for continuing to hold them must be that we ought in good faith to try to do our share of the world’s work, and this particular piece of work has been imposed upon us.” The mission of the United States was not unique; it was to shoulder the duty that a great and civilized power’s destiny demanded.10
There were distinctions within the practices of empire, to be sure, and there were differences in the terms by which imperial domination was justified. Not all imperial cultures were the same. French defenders of empire emphasized the universality of their mission civilisatrice to civilize the world. The Germans tended to talk more particularly of the special gifts of the German peoples for elevating and improving those they ruled. The blood of governance ran in their Teutonic veins and spirit, they reminded each other.11 American proponents of empire at the end of the nineteenth century borrowed from both, celebrating “the divine mission of America” for “the civilization of the world,” and at the same time the special capacities of “our race,” the “Teutonic” and “Anglo-Saxon” peoples “in whose blood resided the genius of administration.” “Behold” the work of the Dutch in Java, imperialism’s gifted orator Senator Albert Beveridge exhorted his countrymen during the great national debate over Philippine annexation in 1900. “Behold” the work of the Germans in the “fields of world-regeneration and administration.” Behold the English and “their work all around the world.” “Every progressive nation of Europe to-day is seeking lands to colonize and governments to administer,” he stressed. “The high ordinances of universal and racial morality” called the United States to that same end.12
American proponents of overseas empire, stitching their arguments together out of the rhetoric and rationalizations already in the air, insisted that they were, at no small cost to themselves, shouldering their moral duty to mankind: that they were bringing elevation, improvement, civilization, education, and religion to a world that no longer imagined that those gifts should only be the possession of the privileged few. To claim to be “the trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world,” to be called to “our saving, regenerating, and uplifting work,” as Beveridge put it, was to latch onto sentiments circulating through all the imperial cultures.13 To Americans coming late to the game of overseas empire, the rhetoric of imperial duty and obligation was a derivative discourse. All the talk of mission they needed, all the high reminders of destiny and providential responsibility, of their obligations to elevate and civilize their allotment of the world’s people for the world’s good, lay ready for the borrowing from the language of empire burgeoning around them.
The historian of American foreign relations Robert Schulzinger puts the comparative point acutely: “It is a mistake to think that ideas such as Manifest Destiny … [were] derived from seventeenth-century theologians like Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards. Instead it makes more sense to consider American messianism a form of nationalist exuberance which afflicted all of the great powers by the end of the nineteenth century.”14 In a context this saturated with nationalist mission, there was no need to reach for Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity.” Reworked into mobile metaphors of destiny, everything the empire makers might have wanted from it was already at hand.
Perhaps it was all but inevitable that nationalist sentiments screwed to so high a pitch and backed by the massive new organizational efficiencies of the early twentieth-century nation-states should have sheered into war. Perhaps the Great War’s origin lay, rather, in a series of catastrophic miscalculations as a chain reaction of alliances, threats, and military mobilizations combusted into war. No one anticipated the catastrophes of the First World War: the cascade of war declarations, the mobilization of armies and war materials and the scale of the battles into which they locked themselves, the melting away of hopes of quick victory into the mud-and-death-soaked hell of trench warfare. What remains most astonishing about the war is not the ability of the belligerent powers to rise to its massive organizational challenges. It is the willingness of the peoples to carry it on so long.
From every side the marshals of war patriotism brought to bear the cultural resources of nationalist righteousness. They were called not simply to their country’s defense, the war propagandists thundered, but to “holy war”—“the holiest war in history,” the voice of British political liberalism, the Manchester Guardian declared. “In August 1914, God called in a voice like thunder,” the British army chaplain and popular author Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy insisted: “He called to England.… ‘Come out! Come out! Come out from home and comfort. Come out to right the wrong. Come out to share my sorrow and help to save the world.’ ” German pulpits echoed the same call to their fellow countrymen to leave behind the ordinary affairs of the day, to set their petty differences aside, and together shoulder their “awesome duty to destroy every embodiment of evil.” The “cause of Germany and the cause of God are synonymous.” French war propagandists played the war as a stupendous conflict between “civilization” on the one hand and “savagery,” “barbarism,” and “beastliness” on the other.15
None of the nations at war described their cause in terms of narrow national interest. From every side, the war nations carried a sense of divine necessity into the battlefields. The British insisted that they were not defending themselves only but the rule of international law and rights of weaker nations. “I do not think any nation entered into a great conflict … with a stronger conviction that it is fighting not for aggression, not the maintenance of its own selfish ends, but in defense of principles, the maintenance of which is vital to the civilisation of the world,” Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith put it at the war’s eruption in August 1914. The French declared their obligation to join in a “sacred union” for civilization’s defense. The Germans insisted to the world that they had entered the war as a “sacred duty” in defense of Christianity and culture. Every German act was an act of “service” to God and to justice.16
It is not clear how deep these words of destiny penetrated the ranks of the soldiers, whose broken limbs and bodies so quickly piled up across what the poet Wilfred Owen would call a “Titan’s grave” a thousand miles long that “crossed all Europe like a mystic road.”17 The heavily laden soldiers who fought the war carried more immediate burdens of survival. But a sense of duty, mission, and destiny was not simply a mystification for home-front consumption. It played an inextricable part in the recruitment machinery that fed the war’s awesome appetite for soldiers and sustained the rationing and war material production that kept the conflict going so long.
In the midst of this world struggle, in 1916, Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” received its first pamphlet publication—indeed, its first full reprinting since 1840. Edited by the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, it came out as the 207th leaflet in Boston’s Old South Church series of historical documents, bound together with the New England Puritans’ “Humble Request” of 1630. Morison put the “Humble Request” first. A “little gem of Puritan literature,” he called it; it “breathes a spirit of sweetness and humility that was altogether too rare in the early history of Massachusetts.” Most of Winthrop’s Model, by contrast, was “rather dull reading.” But it was “the clearest statement we have of the principles that guided the Puritan leaders” in their venture. It showed their “emphasis on collectivism rather than individualism.” It “explains,” he cautioned, “much of the rigor and intolerance in the early history of New England.”18
It would be convenient to imagine that Woodrow Wilson read Winthrop’s Model in this form, but he did not. He had already passed over it with only an excerpted line about the Puritans’ intentions to establish “a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical” in his five-volume History of the American People in 1903. (John Fiske and Henry Cabot Lodge, two of the fiercest advocates of American cultural imperialism, had passed over it altogether in their own histories as well.)19 In an address to the New Jersey Historical Society in 1895, Wilson had criticized the historical profession as a whole for concentrating too much of its attention on the history of New England. Better to focus the history books on the westward population thrust across the Appalachian Mountains where Wilson, like Frederick Jackson Turner, thought the nation’s history had really begun.20 Wilson believed deeply in the historical destiny of the American nation. But neither Winthrop’s text nor Winthrop’s dream of finding a refuge from the world was the wellspring from which he drew it.
The hopeful, idealist presence that Wilson brought to the Peace Conference at the war’s end was a point of comment for all the more tired and more deeply war-scarred figures who convened there. The U.S. military forces had come into the war late and from a nation itself barely marked by the war’s brutality. They were stronger, younger, and much better fed than the veterans they joined. They were more optimistic, as was Wilson himself. “The eyes of all the world will be upon you,” Wilson instructed the first embarkment of U.S. troops in 1917, “because you are in some special sense the soldiers of freedom.” “The mere sight of our men,” he was later to say, the sight “of their vigor, of the confidence that showed itself in every movement of their stalwart figures and every turn of their swinging march,” made everyone know that “a great moral force had flung itself into the struggle.”21 He brought to the Peace Conference a conviction that the United States had entered the war on a basis unlike that of any of the other combatants, solely on behalf of “high disinterested purpose,” as a “servant” to the world in the cause of Christianity, civilization, and democracy, as “an instrument in the hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.”22
In fact, variations of the League of Nations idea into which Wilson would ultimately vest these hopes were already in circulation on both sides of the Atlantic well before 1919. Some looked to the formation of a League to Enforce Peace with arbitration of international disputes as its capstone—as Wilson’s rival in the 1912 election, William Howard Taft, did. Others, most articulately organized on the British left, proposed scrapping the secret treaty-making system that had helped precipitate the war for a broader international forum for foreign policy discussion and armaments controls. Wilson, who kept a file on all these emerging proposals, was not an original thinker on any of these matters, historian Thomas Knock notes. “League of Nations” was a British coinage. Refusing to be pinned down prematurely on the League’s details, Wilson left most of the original draft of its scope and organization to the British ministries’ making. His task was to help synthesize these initiatives and, in the end, to champion the result with striking intensity and stubbornness.23
The special place of the United States in the world’s escape from the barbarism of its war-strewn past was a fixed point in Wilson’s thinking. “I cannot be deprived of the hope that is in me,” he had told a campaign rally as early as 1912, “that we are chosen, and prominently chosen, to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.” He told a skeptical U.S. Senate in submitting the Treaty of Versailles to them in 1919 that the nation’s new responsibility in world affairs had come through the force of “destiny,” “by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God, who led us into this way.” In his cross-country speaking trip on the treaty’s behalf Wilson told the crowds who came to hear him, “It was America—never let anybody forget this—it was America that saved the world.” Now it was America’s task to save the peace as well, “to lead the world in the paths of liberty and justice and of right.” “For nothing less depends upon us, nothing less than the liberation and salvation of the world.”24
These were deeply held sentiments, but they fit almost seamlessly into the chosen people rhetoric that already floated above the trenches, the battlefields, and the recruitment rallies. “In the mysterious calling and election of God, Britain is the elect nation of the world to-day,” the British war publicist J. Patterson-Smith asserted. “We are God’s chosen people, his inheritance, the salt of the earth, His loved ones, His glory, the people He delights in,” a fellow writer for the English war cause urged. “Our German God” and “Gott mit uns!” were the capsule German phrases. Nothing was clearer in this war, the Berlin preacher, Otto Dibelius, declared, than that “the Lord God had given the German spirit a special and holy mission.”25
In this context of mass-produced nationalism, Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” was irrelevant. Declarations of holy sacrifice and chosenness were everywhere. They saturated the wartime air, productions of the same nationalist forces that were pumping out bombs, shells, and gas masks. They rained down on the battlefields over the dead and mangled and exhausted bodies.
Mary Borden was among the handful of Americans who threw herself into the war at its very outbreak. She poured her family’s Chicago-made wealth into the establishment of a field hospital just back of the battle lines in northern France, where she served both as nurse and director. Later, like others who attempted to put the unspeakable experiences of the war into words, she tried to do so in poetry. She began “Where Is Jehovah?” not with an assertion but the question that hung so heavily in the air:
Where is Jehovah, the God of Israel, with his Ark and his
Tabernacle and his Pillars of Fire?
He ought to be here—This place would suit him.
Here is a people pouring through a wilderness—
Here are armies camping in a desert—…
It’s all in the style of the God of Israel.…
What a chance for His prophets!
What a playground for miracles!
A host of men at the end of their strength, fighting death, fighting terror, with no one to worship—
He need but lift his finger—
Here are his pet properties ready to hand, the thunder, the lightning, the clouds and the fire—26
But he did not.
How could he when, if the cries and prayers and war appeals were right, he was on every battalion’s side? How could he act on behalf of any empire or nation when, in the formulas of nationalism that were on hand in the crisis, God had chosen them all?