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of German romanticism, wrote a scientific study of Sanskrit which maintained that the languages
of India, Persia, Greece, Germany, Italy, and England were connected by common descent from
an extinct tongue. Schlegel proposed the name Indo-Germanic for the vanished dialect. We are
forced, he said, to believe all these widely separate nations are descendants of a single primitive
people’s influence. Oddly enough, Schlegel learned Sanskrit himself at the hands of Alexander
Hamilton, his close friend and a close friend to the Prussian government. Schlegel was highly
esteemed by both Hamilton and the Prussia regime.
To put yourself in touch with this exciting moment in recent history requires only a visit to a
neighborhood library. The language and customs of this ancient Aryan people are caught in Vedic
literature—the story of an invading people who forced themselves on the Indian subcontinent. As
Americans had forced themselves on North American natives, a resonant parallel. Aryan literature
was exclusively a literature of battle and unyielding hostility, the Vedas stirring hymns of a people
surrounded by strangers alien in race and religion.
There could be no peace with such strangers; their destruction was a duty owed to God. Full of
vigor, the Vedas breathe the attitudes of an invading race bent on conquest, a cultural prescription
with which to meet the challenges of modern times. If only a way could be found to link this
warrior people with the elites of England and America.
In 1816, the brilliant young Danish scholar Rasmus Rask not only accepted the relationship of
Germanic, Hellenic, Italic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian, but went further and found the missing
connection. Rask had seen something no one else had noticed: between some Germanic streams
of language and the others a regular sound-shift had occurred transforming the sounds of B, D,
and G into those of P, T, and K. It meant an absolute identification could be established between
England and ancient Germania. Rask wasn’t prominent enough to promote this theory very far,
but the man who stole it from him was—Jacob Grimm of fairy-tale fame. In the second edition of
Deutsche Grammatik (1822), Grimm claimed the sound shift discovery which to this day is called
"Grimm’s Law." Salons on both sides of the Atlantic buzzed with the exciting news.
Our Manifest Destiny
Now the Aryans became the Anglo-Saxons. Endings in Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and
Germanic showed how these people had moved across the world, said another German
researcher, Franz Bopp. By 1820, a Gothic vogue was afoot. Even the bare possibility that some
of us were offspring of a powerful race out of prehistory inspired enthusiasm, giving credence to
the old Puritan notion of "Election," that America had a divine destiny as a people. This incredible
Aryan drama, like the notion of evolution a few decades later with which it should be seen in
collegial relation, almost instantly began to embody itself in more practical affairs of life.
To New York State University regent John O’Sullivan, Grimm’s tale was the long-awaited
scientific proof of an American destiny, a Manifest Destiny, as he and innumerable voices that
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