gat

followed were to call it:
The right of our manifest destiny is to overspread and to possess the whole of
the continent which Providence has given up for the great experiment.
In 1851, as Moby-Dick was coming off the press with its parable of Ahab, a year after The Scarlet
Letter had plumbed the secrets of Puritan society, regent O’Sullivan personally equipped a war
vessel for an attack on Cuba. O’Sullivan’s Cleopatra was seized in New York harbor as she
weighed anchor, disgorging several hundred armed Hungarian and German cutthroats, "Kossuth
sympathizers," as the press mistakenly called them. Indeed, the scheme to "liberate" Hungary,
nominally under Hungarian aristocrat Lajos Kossuth, had been hatched by the same zeitgeist and
in the same place, New York City. Charged with violating the Neutrality Act of 1818, O’Sullivan
beat the rap. Cuba was safe for another forty-seven years until the battleship Maine blew up
mysteriously in Havana harbor.
Buried in the indestructible heart of this imported Aryan linguistic romance was ample
justification for a national charter of bold expansionism. In spite of the fact that much of the
American nation was empty still, it provided an inspiration to empire, as O’Sullivan’s abortive
sortie demonstrated, a racial mandate to enlarge areas of American influence, just as Aryans once
had conquered as far as ambition could carry them. Race was the font of our national greatness.
But how to preserve the Great Race from miscegenation? It was a question asked long before
Darwin lent the query the authority of official science.
The Lost Tribes
As the exciting intelligence from Germany traveled through America, it encountered resistance,
for America was a region where class lines were still elastic, based on accomplishment and
worldly success, not upon guarantees cemented in blood. Yet the tide was running toward a
different form of reckoning. Horace Bushnell, famous Congregationalist pastor of Hartford
(where the city park is named for him) thundered from his pulpit in 1837 that noble Anglo-Saxon
blood must be preserved against pollution. By 1843, the big book in Unitarian Boston was The
Goths in New- England. German schooling seemed right for us because we were Germans!
Germany held answers for the grandchildren of Englishmen, who had been Germans long ago.
In 1848, at the height of the Irish Catholic menace, The American Whig Review published "The
Anglo-Saxon Race." That same year The North American Review responded with "The
Anglo-Saxon Race." Now the Whig Review stirred the pot with its own spoon, "The
Anglo-Saxons and the Americans." Interest in the topic wouldn’t quit, perhaps because The
Origin of Species finally placed consideration of racial matters in public attention. Racial fervor
was still at white heat in 1875 when a popular book, The Anglo-Saxon Race: Its History,
Character and Destiny, traveled with Chautauqua to every corner of the nation.
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