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Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire
Praise for the earlier edition― "A fascinating, thought-provoking book.... [Hietala] shows that it was not destiny but design and aggression that enabled the United States to control Texas, New Mexico, and California."―Historian "[Hietala] has examined an impressive array of primary and secondary materials.... [H]is handling of the relationship between the domestic and foreign policies of the [decade] shatters some myths about America's so-called manifest destiny and deserves the attention of all scholars and serious students of the period."―Western Historical Quarterly Since 1845, the phrase "manifest destiny" has offered a simple and appealing explanation of the dramatic expansionism of the United States. In this incisive book, Thomas R. Hietala reassesses the complex factors behind American policymaking during the late Jacksonian era. Hietala argues that the quest for territorial and commercial gains was based more on a desire for increased national stability than on any response to demands by individual pioneers or threats from abroad.
312 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 30, 2008
This revised edition of Thomas Hietala’s 1985 work Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America provides a concise diplomatic and military history of the Taylor and Polk administrations. Hietala, a professor of history at Grinnell College, emphasizes the role of policymakers over pioneers in “Manifest Destiny.” He views the westward expansion of America during the 1840s and the Mexican War as premeditated. Covetous politicians rallied around the national fervor of Manifest Destiny to endorse their land grab. Hietala notes that “Presidents Tyler and Polk and their advisers employed many tactics—open diplomacy, intrigue by secret agents, economic leverage, intimidation, and offensive war” to take land in the south and west (ix). America’s new acquisitions, including Texas, Oregon and California, provided “cheap security and domestic harmony through territorial and commercial growth” (xiii). In short, Manifest Destiny remained the call that validated America’s actions for pioneers, but political leaders had a less than divine design to acquire these vast tracts of land.
Hietala explicitly hopes that his examination will shake up the historiography of nineteenth century U.S. Foreign Relations. He finds the Cold War consensus view that American foreign policy lay mostly benign until the Spanish American War of 1898 misguided. Manifest Design argues that imperial machinations in the Philippians and Hawai’i still receive disproportionately more scrutiny than the annexation of Texas. Also, he argues that American expansionism has been running rampant since the 1840s, making these two eras ripe for comparison. Each witnessed a “recurring domestic malaise that found expression in American aggrandizement” and that during both decades American policymakers favored war over “structural changes in American economics and politics” (270). Statistically, Hietala’s argument makes sense: It took only three years to double the size of the Union through warfare and expansion, a far greater land grab than in the Pacific some fifty years later.
One of Hietala’s more compelling arguments suggests that a neo-Jeffersonian vision influenced American expansionism. He contends that Jefferson’s ideal recipient of popular democracy—the yeoman farmer—had little room for realization during the 1840s. Industrialization combined with population growth and crowded urban areas. Politicians of Jacksonian America worried about these evils of urban modernization and sought to relieve pressure from crowded cities by expanding land holdings. More land would mean more possibilities for free farmers and American pioneers, characters that Hietala sees as idealistic representations of American possibility. At the same time, more land in the south and the west could increase commercial expansion via new ports and trading routes. Hietala never reconciles these two prongs of political economy, and the relationships between expanding land for yeoman farmers as well as supposedly urban commercial interests seem to contradict themselves. Also, more cultural analysis of the evolving urban landscape—such as Karen Haltunen did with Confidence Men and Painted Women—would have bolstered this intriguing argument.
While Hietala primarily focuses on political rationales for new land, he also incorporates racial analysis into his work. His chapter “Continentalism and the Color Line” argues for racism’s primacy in endorsing 1840s expansionism. Hietala’s introductory examples show that American warmongers and soldiers alike embraced a rampant racism, one that depicted Mexicans as almost sub-human. For example, one quartermaster in Taylor’s Army commented that “the best of them [Mexicans] are robbers and murderers;” and with regards to Mexican women, they were “without exception the most revolting, forbidding, disgusting creatures in the world, not even excepting our own Indians” (xi). These racial stereotypes helped Americans reinforce and justify the Mexican War. These examples reveal not a desire to spread a uniquely American Democracy but instead racial hatred. In other words, race became a cold-blooded validation for land grabbing.
There are many areas where Hietala’s work falls short, but its most glaring omission is his truncated quips about slavery, an issue that really should receive more attention in his race analysis. Today’s historians are redoubling their previous consensus ideas that the Civil War was brought about because of divisions between state and national power. Many are reclaiming slavery’s primary place in tensions leading up to the Civil War; Edward Ayers and Ira Berlin are two notable examples. Hietala argues that American politicians North and South desired Texas for slavery. Those in the South wanted Texas as a slave state, while Northerners endorsed its annexation to relieve slave pressures from the region. Yet most American history textbooks cite Northern politicians as decidedly opposed to Texas becoming a slave state. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with Hietala making new and controversial arguments of this nature, but he really should include more of these previous historical arguments for context.
Not surprisingly, reviews of Manifest Design are mixed; they seem to say more about the reviewer than the book itself. One response in the June 1987 of The American Historical Reivew from Indiana University professor David M. Pletcher accuses Hietala for being too selective with his sources. Pletcher suggests that Hietala lacks the “finesse” to compare U.S. foreign policy of the 1840s to other periods. He concludes by stating that if readers are to find anything useful (i.e. Hietala’s review of John C. Calhoun’s anti-imperialism) they will have to read Manifest Design “with a grain of salt” (743). University of Wisconsin Eau Claire historian Ronald Satz is more forgiving. In a 1987 Western Historical Quarterly review, Satz kindly calls Manifest Design “impressive” and applauds the author for having “examined an impressive array of primary and secondary sources” (63).
Most critiques of Hietala’s book are likely prompted by his final chapter. While it’s not quite a polemic on Cold War historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, it comes close. Hietala’s comparisons with the rampant expansionism of the 1840s and beyond with Cold War proxy wars is sure to provoke many readers. Calling the U.S. a nation with long standing imperial impulses may disrupt the national mythology, but it might also just be correct. A Journal of Southern History review by UW-Milwaukee’s John H. Schroeder leaves perhaps the most balanced comments on Hietala’s book. He states that Manifest Design should be read in concert with the works of Pletcher and Reginald Horsman, but recommends that Hietala’s would have “done well to restrict his generalizations” regarding current policy concerns (628). Readers will have to decide this last point for themselves.
Hietala explicitly hopes that his examination will shake up the historiography of nineteenth century U.S. Foreign Relations. He finds the Cold War consensus view that American foreign policy lay mostly benign until the Spanish American War of 1898 misguided. Manifest Design argues that imperial machinations in the Philippians and Hawai’i still receive disproportionately more scrutiny than the annexation of Texas. Also, he argues that American expansionism has been running rampant since the 1840s, making these two eras ripe for comparison. Each witnessed a “recurring domestic malaise that found expression in American aggrandizement” and that during both decades American policymakers favored war over “structural changes in American economics and politics” (270). Statistically, Hietala’s argument makes sense: It took only three years to double the size of the Union through warfare and expansion, a far greater land grab than in the Pacific some fifty years later.
One of Hietala’s more compelling arguments suggests that a neo-Jeffersonian vision influenced American expansionism. He contends that Jefferson’s ideal recipient of popular democracy—the yeoman farmer—had little room for realization during the 1840s. Industrialization combined with population growth and crowded urban areas. Politicians of Jacksonian America worried about these evils of urban modernization and sought to relieve pressure from crowded cities by expanding land holdings. More land would mean more possibilities for free farmers and American pioneers, characters that Hietala sees as idealistic representations of American possibility. At the same time, more land in the south and the west could increase commercial expansion via new ports and trading routes. Hietala never reconciles these two prongs of political economy, and the relationships between expanding land for yeoman farmers as well as supposedly urban commercial interests seem to contradict themselves. Also, more cultural analysis of the evolving urban landscape—such as Karen Haltunen did with Confidence Men and Painted Women—would have bolstered this intriguing argument.
While Hietala primarily focuses on political rationales for new land, he also incorporates racial analysis into his work. His chapter “Continentalism and the Color Line” argues for racism’s primacy in endorsing 1840s expansionism. Hietala’s introductory examples show that American warmongers and soldiers alike embraced a rampant racism, one that depicted Mexicans as almost sub-human. For example, one quartermaster in Taylor’s Army commented that “the best of them [Mexicans] are robbers and murderers;” and with regards to Mexican women, they were “without exception the most revolting, forbidding, disgusting creatures in the world, not even excepting our own Indians” (xi). These racial stereotypes helped Americans reinforce and justify the Mexican War. These examples reveal not a desire to spread a uniquely American Democracy but instead racial hatred. In other words, race became a cold-blooded validation for land grabbing.
There are many areas where Hietala’s work falls short, but its most glaring omission is his truncated quips about slavery, an issue that really should receive more attention in his race analysis. Today’s historians are redoubling their previous consensus ideas that the Civil War was brought about because of divisions between state and national power. Many are reclaiming slavery’s primary place in tensions leading up to the Civil War; Edward Ayers and Ira Berlin are two notable examples. Hietala argues that American politicians North and South desired Texas for slavery. Those in the South wanted Texas as a slave state, while Northerners endorsed its annexation to relieve slave pressures from the region. Yet most American history textbooks cite Northern politicians as decidedly opposed to Texas becoming a slave state. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with Hietala making new and controversial arguments of this nature, but he really should include more of these previous historical arguments for context.
Not surprisingly, reviews of Manifest Design are mixed; they seem to say more about the reviewer than the book itself. One response in the June 1987 of The American Historical Reivew from Indiana University professor David M. Pletcher accuses Hietala for being too selective with his sources. Pletcher suggests that Hietala lacks the “finesse” to compare U.S. foreign policy of the 1840s to other periods. He concludes by stating that if readers are to find anything useful (i.e. Hietala’s review of John C. Calhoun’s anti-imperialism) they will have to read Manifest Design “with a grain of salt” (743). University of Wisconsin Eau Claire historian Ronald Satz is more forgiving. In a 1987 Western Historical Quarterly review, Satz kindly calls Manifest Design “impressive” and applauds the author for having “examined an impressive array of primary and secondary sources” (63).
Most critiques of Hietala’s book are likely prompted by his final chapter. While it’s not quite a polemic on Cold War historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, it comes close. Hietala’s comparisons with the rampant expansionism of the 1840s and beyond with Cold War proxy wars is sure to provoke many readers. Calling the U.S. a nation with long standing imperial impulses may disrupt the national mythology, but it might also just be correct. A Journal of Southern History review by UW-Milwaukee’s John H. Schroeder leaves perhaps the most balanced comments on Hietala’s book. He states that Manifest Design should be read in concert with the works of Pletcher and Reginald Horsman, but recommends that Hietala’s would have “done well to restrict his generalizations” regarding current policy concerns (628). Readers will have to decide this last point for themselves.
December 16, 2008
this b00k has too many pages!
September 23, 2018
Excellent political history of the 1840s. Thomas Hietala reveals how the Democrats who wanted to annex Texas believed it could be used to absorb the U.S.'s free and enslaved African American populations, allowing slavery to expand while reducing racial tensions in the Eastern U.S. The political machinations of James K. Polk, Robert Walker, and other pro-slavery Democrats in this period are devious. Hietala touches on the growing sectional disputes between regions of the U.S., while showing that these disputes were based on competing interpretations of slavery. Overall, this book shows how expansionist Democrats, along with the Whigs allied with President John Tyler, believed that growing the U.S. territory and acquiring foreign markets would ensure American prosperity. What the expansionists didn't expect was that more land would worsen, not reduce, the slavery debate. Hietala is particularly skilled at showing how racism inspired the expansionists' ideas, as well as those of the "Free Soilers" calling for no slavery in California and New Mexico. This book would make a good pair with Amy Greenberg's "A Wicked War," since Greenberg focuses on the Mexican-American War and Hietala shows the broader imperialist context.
October 3, 2014
This is a decent book about a period in American history that is rarely covered in history classes. It's a good overview of what was going on in the United States during the expansion in the 1800s. I liked it a lot until the conclusion. Of course racism played into the policies of the day, but that's not the only thing! I also was not a fan of Hietala's conclusion that as Americans we're all basically evil. Other than that, pretty good book.
September 14, 2010
Enjoyed reading about America's quick expansion in the 1840s and especially the administration of James K Polk - perhaps the least appreciated consequential president.
November 7, 2011
good topic, way too slow and dull. couldn't keep my eyes open reading it.
August 17, 2015
As the title suggest, looking at time of 1840s, the annexation of Texas, Northern Mexico takeover, and Oregon territories, we realize that it was more administration political maneuver than destiny.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews