. . . this is a line from Bob Dylan's song "As I went out one morning" (to breathe the air around Tom Paine)
Wonder Woman and Supergirl take a break from saving the world . . .
How would Thomas Paine have regarded the emergence of the kind of "American exceptionalism" at the heart of the climate change denial machine, and captured in slogans like Trump's "Make America Great Again"?
r/hottiesfortrump
"As I Went Out One Morning"
This song was written by Bob Dylan, released on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding.
The lyrics tell of how the narrator/singer offers a hand to a woman in chains, but realizes that she wants more than he is offering, and that "she meant to do [him] harm."
A character identified as Tom Paine then appears and "command[s] her to yield," and then apologizes to the narrator for the woman's actions. While many possible interpretations of this song remain, and Tom Paine as a figure may represent common sense or civil liberties, which the historical Tom Paine championed. The Wikipedia article points to the likelihood that this song references the prestigious Tom Paine Award that Dylan received in 1963 from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Dylan delivered an acceptance speech, but was booed and rushed from the stage when he claimed to have empathy for some of the feelings of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man assumed to have assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Re:LODE Radio considers that the "lovely girl" that Tom Paine apologises for, saying that he is "sorry for what she’s done", is a female in chains, a constrained personification of America, as in Columbia.
Columbia features in this painting by John Gast, a representation of what came to be understood as "Manifest Destiny", the belief, and ideological conviction, that it was a "natural" and "God given destiny", that the United States should expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
John Gast painted this allegorical scene of people moving west in 1872. Intended to capture the sentiment of many Americans at the time, and titled "Spirit of the Frontier", the image was widely distributed as an engraving. The painting portrays settlers moving west, guided and protected by Columbia, who represents America, and dressed in a Roman toga to represent classical republicanism.
Columbia is aided by specific technologies, the railways and the electric telegraph, driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity.
Columbia is shown bringing the "light" from the eastern side of both the painting and the continent, as she travels towards a "darkening" west.
Darkening indeed . . .
"I am sorry for what she's done"
Manifest destiny, according to the Wikipedia article, was a widely held cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:
Historian Frederick Merk says this concept was born out of "a sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example ... generated by the potentialities of a new earth for building a new heaven".
- The special virtues of the American people and their institutions
- The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America
- An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
Manifest Destiny has been condemned as an ideology that was used to justify genocide against Indigenous Americans.
Historians have emphasized that "manifest destiny" was a contested concept—Democrats endorsed the idea but many prominent Americans, such as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and most Whigs, rejected it. Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes, "American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity ... Whigs saw America's moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest."
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848 (2007) pp. 705-06.
Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan is generally credited with coining the term manifest destiny in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset, which has a distinct rhetorical tone; however, the unsigned editorial titled "Annexation" in which it first appeared was arguably written by journalist and annexation advocate Jane Cazneau. The term was used by Democrats in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico and it was also used to negotiate the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain. However, manifest destiny always limped along because of its internal limitations and the issue of slavery, says Merk. It never became a national priority. By 1843, former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, originally a major supporter of the concept underlying manifest destiny, had changed his mind and repudiated expansionism because it meant the expansion of slavery in Texas.
There was never a set of principles defining manifest destiny, therefore it was always a general idea rather than a specific policy made with a motto. Ill-defined but keenly felt, manifest destiny was an expression of conviction in the morality and value of expansionism that complemented other popular ideas of the era, including American exceptionalism and Romantic nationalism.
Owing in part to the lack of a definitive narrative outlining its rationale, proponents offered divergent or seemingly conflicting viewpoints. While many writers focused primarily upon American expansionism, be it into Mexico or across the continent to the Pacific, others saw the term as a call to exemplify exceptional American qualities. Without an agreed upon interpretation, much less an elaborated political philosophy, these conflicting views of America's destiny were never resolved. This variety of possible meanings was summed up by Ernest Lee Tuveson: "A vast complex of ideas, policies, and actions is comprehended under the phrase "Manifest Destiny". They are not, as we should expect, all compatible, nor do they come from any one source."
Historian William E. Weeks has noted that three key themes were usually touched upon by advocates of manifest destiny:
- the virtue of the American people and their institutions;
- the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the United States;
- the destiny under God to do this work.
The origin of the first theme, later known as American exceptionalism, was often traced to America's Puritan heritage, particularly John Winthrop's famous "City upon a Hill" sermon of 1630, in which he called for the establishment of a virtuous community that would be a shining example to the Old World. In his influential 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine echoed this notion, arguing that the American Revolution provided an opportunity to create a new, better society:
We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand ...Many Americans agreed with Paine, and came to believe that the United States' virtue was a result of its special experiment in freedom and democracy. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Monroe, wrote, "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent."
To Americans in the decades that followed their proclaimed freedom for mankind, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, could only be described as the inauguration of "a new time scale" because the world would look back and define history as events that took place before, and after, the Declaration of Independence. It followed that Americans owed to the world an obligation to expand and preserve these beliefs.
The second theme's origination is less precise. A popular expression of America's mission was elaborated by President Abraham Lincoln's description in his December 1, 1862, message to Congress. He described the United States as "the last, best hope of Earth". The "mission" of the United States was further elaborated during Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in which he interpreted the American Civil War as a struggle to determine if any nation with democratic ideals could survive; this has been called by historian Robert Johannsen "the most enduring statement of America's Manifest Destiny and mission".
The third theme can be viewed as a natural outgrowth of the belief that God had a direct influence in the foundation and further actions of the United States. Clinton Rossiter, a scholar, described this view as summing "that God, at the proper stage in the march of history, called forth certain hardy souls from the old and privilege-ridden nations ... and that in bestowing his grace He also bestowed a peculiar responsibility". Americans presupposed that they were not only divinely elected to maintain the North American continent, but also to "spread abroad the fundamental principles stated in the Bill of Rights".
John Mack Faragher's analysis of the political polarization between the Democratic Party and the Whig party is that:
Most Democrats were wholehearted supporters of expansion, whereas many Whigs (especially in the North) were opposed. Whigs welcomed most of the changes wrought by industrialization but advocated strong government policies that would guide growth and development within the country's existing boundaries; they feared (correctly) that expansion raised a contentious issue;
the extension of slavery to the territories.
On the other hand, many Democrats feared industrialization the Whigs welcomed... For many Democrats, the answer to the nation's social ills was to continue to follow Thomas Jefferson's vision of establishing agriculture in the new territories to counterbalance industrialization.
Another possible influence is racial predominance, namely the idea that the American Anglo-Saxon race was "separate, innately superior" and "destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity and Christianity to the American continents and the world". This view also held that "inferior races were doomed to subordinate status or extinction." This was used to justify "the enslavement of the blacks and the expulsion and possible extermination of the Indians".
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, Adolf Hitler's Lebensraum was the "Manifest Destiny" for Germany's romanticization and imperial conquest of Eastern Europe. Hitler compared Nazi expansion to American expansion westward, saying, “there's only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”
An end to co-existence?
In this detail from a 1855–56 fresco by Constantino Brumidi in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., we can see how two early symbols of America, Columbia and an indigenous "princess", co-existed as symbolic personifications of North America.
Come One! Come All! Free and Equal!
This 1869 Thomas Nast cartoon of an early rendition of Uncle Sam, hosting a Thanksgiving dinner with a diverse group of immigrants, appeared in the Harper's Weekly, A Journal of Civilization, a political magazine based in New York City. Published by Harper & Brothers from 1857 until 1916, it featured foreign and domestic news, fiction, essays on many subjects, and humour, alongside illustrations. It carried extensive coverage of the American Civil War, including many illustrations of events from the war. During its most influential period, it was the forum of the political cartoonist Thomas Nast. These were the immigrants required to sustain the viability of an expansionist and continental nation.
Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom (1854–1857) that tops the dome of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. introduces the idea of a key aspect of American exceptionalism, being cast as a prototype superheroine.
This story reveals the contradictions of this type of American exceptionalism. Freedom as a symbolic representation of a nation's destiny when many US states upheld the rights of slave owners, including Clark Mills, who used one of his slaves as a key worker in the project. Born a slave, Philip Reid acquired his name when he was purchased by Clark Mills for $1,200 in the 1850s. Around that time the architect of the Capitol approached Mills to cast the model of the Statue of Freedom, a mold of which had been sitting inside the Capitol, at his Bladensburg, Maryland foundry. Reid was the one who came with the idea of using a pulley to move the statue, and was then paid $1.25 a day by the federal government to “keep up fires under the moulds,” according to the architects records. Mills in return kept most of these wages.
Slave who built the statue on top of the Capitol building finally to be honoured
The most influential monument to "Freedom" associated with the United States is the "Statue of Liberty", a gift of the French Republic to the United States, following the abolition of slavery and the ending of the American Civil War.
The French title for this monumental statue is: "La Liberté éclairant le monde" - "Liberty Enlightening the World". This colossal neoclassical sculpture was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and its metal framework was built by Gustave Eiffel.
The statue is a figure of Libertas, a robed Roman liberty goddess. She holds a torch above her head with her right hand, and in her left hand carries a tabula ansata inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI (July 4, 1776 in Roman numerals), the date of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
After its dedication, the statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, seen as a symbol of welcome to immigrants arriving by sea. The idea of a monument presented by the French people to the United States was first proposed by Édouard René de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent and important political thinker of his time. The project is traced to a mid-1865 conversation between Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist, and Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor. In after-dinner conversation at his home near Versailles, Laboulaye, an ardent supporter of the Union in the American Civil War, is supposed to have said: "If a monument should rise in the United States, as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations."
With the abolition of slavery and the Union's victory in the Civil War in 1865, Laboulaye's wishes of freedom and democracy were turning into a reality in the United States. In order to honor these achievements, Laboulaye proposed that a gift be built for the United States on behalf of France. Laboulaye hoped that by calling attention to the recent achievements of the United States, the French people would be inspired to call for their own democracy in the face of a repressive monarchy. According to sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who later recounted the story, Laboulaye's alleged comment was not intended as a proposal, but it inspired Bartholdi. Given the repressive nature of the regime of Napoleon III, Bartholdi took no immediate action on the idea except to discuss it with Laboulaye.
Bartholdi and Laboulaye considered how best to express the idea of American liberty. In early American history, two female figures were frequently used as cultural symbols of the nation. One of these symbols, the personified Columbia, was seen as an embodiment of the United States in the manner that Britannia was identified with the United Kingdom, and Marianne came to represent France. Columbia had supplanted the traditional European personification of the Americas as an "Indian princess", which had come to be regarded as uncivilized and derogatory toward Americans.
The Franco-Prussian War delayed progress until 1875, when Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue and the U.S. provide the site and build the pedestal. Bartholdi completed the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was fully designed, and these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions.
The torch-bearing arm was displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, and in Madison Square Park in Manhattan from 1876 to 1882. Fundraising proved difficult, especially for the Americans, and by 1885 work on the pedestal was threatened by lack of funds. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, started a drive for donations to finish the project and attracted more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar. The statue was built in France, shipped overseas in crates, and assembled on the completed pedestal on what was then called Bedloe's Island.
As I went out one morning, to breathe the air around Tom Paine, I spied the fairest damsel that ever did walk in chains
Not always visible to a wider public, and not often depicted in imagery of Liberty, a broken shackle and chain lie at her feet as she walks forward, commemorating the recent national abolition of slavery.
Liberty unchained
The original abolitionist inspiration for this "enlightening of the world" shifted significantly in public consciousness, toward America as a refuge for the poor, and focussing more on the experience of immigrants arriving in New York from the "Old World". It was the poem "The New Colossus", a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), that re-shaped the meaning of this monument in the early twentieth century.
This poem was originally written as a donation to an auction of art and literary works conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" to raise money for the pedestal's construction. Lazarus's contribution was solicited by fundraiser William Maxwell Evarts. Initially she refused but writer Constance Cary Harrison convinced her that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into New York harbor.
"The New Colossus" was the first entry read at the exhibit's opening on November 2, 1883. It remained associated with the exhibit through a published catalog until the exhibit closed after the pedestal was fully funded in August 1885, but was forgotten and played no role at the opening of the statue in 1886.
The poem was, however, published in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as well as The New York Times during this period. But it was in 1901, due in most part to Lazarus's friend Georgina Schuyler, who began an effort to memorialize Lazarus and her poem. This effort succeeded in 1903 when a plaque bearing the text of the poem was put on the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
The Colossus of Rhodes
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, / With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand / A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips.
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Remember Your First Thrill of AMERICAN LIBERTY
By 1917 the prompt to fulfill a patriotic duty to New York's goddess of "Liberty" and buy government bonds, used the sentiments of the poem, and the collective memory of immigrants, recollecting how gazing up at this global symbol, "enlightening the world", they had arrived in their new homeland, in the "New World".
How things have changed!
Paul Auster said in his "NYC = USA", Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, and Collaborations with Artists, (Picador, p. 508), that "Bartholdi's gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but 'The New Colossus' reinvented the statue's purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world."
John T. Cunningham wrote in his, Ellis Island: Immigration's Shining Center, (2003) (Arcadia Publishing, pp. 46–48,) that "The Statue of Liberty was not conceived and sculpted as a symbol of immigration, but it quickly became so as immigrant ships passed under the torch and the shining face, heading toward Ellis Island. However, it was [Lazarus's poem] that permanently stamped on Miss Liberty the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants."
The poem has entered the political realm. It was quoted in John F. Kennedy's book A Nation of Immigrants (1958) as well as a 2010 political speech by President Obama advocating immigration policy reform.
On August 12, 2019, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, revised a line from the poem to outline a new immigration policy that would evaluate potential visa/green card immigrants on the basis of income and education, stating: "Give me your tired, your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge."
Ron Charles in the Washington Post was among many who criticized Cuccinelli's interpretation of the poem, stating:
There’s something obscene about Cuccinelli’s efforts to contort Lazarus’s words of welcome into a litmus test of economic self-sufficiency. Over the decades, “The New Colossus” has acquired a patina of universality. Its phrases are as familiar to us as “The Star-Spangled Banner” or the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. Staining “The New Colossus” with the bile of discrimination is a shameful act of cultural defilement.
Give me your poor . . . as long as they can stand on their own two feet!
m
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