Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? I'm alright, I'm getting there. You are already aware I've come with quite a confrontational energy today. We'll see how that manifests. AI is ruining your life.
AI and capitalism are ruining my life. Yeah. So, but I feel like if we're going to be having a confrontational energy, then this is the kind of thing where we want to be confrontational. Yeah. It's a good subject to be feeling riled up about. Yeah. Yeah.
Because today on History is Sexy, we are talking about the history of manifest destiny and American expansionism from Patrick Thompson, who I don't know if Patrick is an American, but he said houses the US square, throwing off the shackles of imperialism to then go ahead and do some shackling themselves. Which the short answer is they did not throw off the shackles of imperialism. They took imperialism for themselves and ran with it even further than we thought they could.
I feel like watching America currently, which is not fun, it really, the whole place is an experiment in just repeating the catastrophic mistakes of the British Empire. Like, that is what is going on, right? Like, they just don't learn. They did not learn. And as far as, yeah, it is the American...
empire America is basically a total continuation of the British Empire. They threw off the shackles of imperialism, not because they rejected imperialism, but because the 13 colonies that were involved in the revolution... Wanted to do more imperialism. Yes, they were irritated that they were being treated as a colony, as people
but as like as if they had been colonized by the British rather than colonizers which is what they thought they were and they were like you seem to be like treating us really unfairly and like taxing us and being really mean to us but we are the white guys in this conversation and
And we don't think that that's how this is supposed to work. The thing I find interesting is that democracy, and I feel like I've talked about this before, but democracy in Britain came slowly, right? As regents and kings and queens did insane things, slowly we grasped more and more political power to stop them from doing insane things. And because America was founded as a democracy...
They don't have a memory of that version of attaining it. So now they're just trying to do monarchies and insane things because they don't realize we've tried it already.
Yeah, and it's not great. It's not great. It's not great. Yeah, but the main thing I think that it's important to always remember about America and about American history is that it starts as a colonial project, which is just a fight between basically Britain, France, Spain, and every so often when they felt like turning up Russia. Yeah.
and for control of the North American continent. And...
America was created because the British part said, we're not British anymore. We're our own new thing. And we're just like the fourth player in this game. But we are still in this game. And the game is who gets to control the most of this land that we really like the look of, even though people already live here. And I do think that it is worth noting before we even get to, you know, Texas and all of that, that...
One of the reasons for the American Revolution was because Britain, the Crown, had treaties with Native American nations saying, we won't colonize any further in this direction, so that land is yours. And American colonizers wanted that land. So removing themselves from allegiance to the Crown meant that those treaties were now in void. The revolution was an imperialist project.
From the start. From the start. Yes. And it is fun to me that the American myth, a lot of this for me, the process of researching this has been like detailed or in a detailed way, like really dismantling the American myth of 1776. Which I think is important to do, right? Like I think obviously we are outsiders. We are watching in horror what is happening in the US right now. But
I think that America will never achieve a real democracy without just like putting some distance between the veneration of the founding fathers and like recognizing that the project was flawed from the start. And it's that sort of deification of the founding fathers and of the constitution that gets in the way of democracy, like as in just what is the will of the people right now? And also that...
Most of America was not America in 1776. Yeah.
that it is that lots of America is not America legally during like very important times in what I have been sold as American history because I've never been like a particularly American history person it's I consider it all to be too modern for me there's too much too much information I mean you consider 1066 to be too modern 1066 is effectively the modern era but
I mean, anything after like 600, I will say. I like Gregory of Tours as a bit of modern history. But yeah, it's always considered a bit too modern, but it's interesting how they kind of align with Roman history. What I like about Roman history, which is that the story that they tell themselves and the story that they sell to the rest of the world is different.
It's fundamentally at odds with the reality of what was happening on the ground and bears little to no relation to it. And the myth version is so glorious and then the reality version is kind of so grim. And it's kind of that how you live in the middle of that is quite interesting to me. Yeah. I'll tell you the point at which I was like, what the fuck have I been learning for...
the past 41 years of my life was the part when I realized that the Donner expedition, which like I've read books about, I've listened to podcast series about it. I have like, you know, it's a kind of fascinating period of history, the Oregon Trail and going across to California and then they all get stuck eating each other. Yeah.
occurs in like 1846 and they are going to California and they're having a bad time getting to California. In 1846, California is not in America. Yeah. In 1846, it is the beginning of the war with Mexico. It is Mexico. Legally, California is Mexico. I'm like, why? What? Yeah.
That was the point when I was reading these books where I was like, oh man, I have been like badly misled by the kind of bits and bobs of American history that I have picked up of like, America is a tiny baby country, you know, by European standards at the best of times. But like it's continental borders, like not including the continent,
kind of non-continuous parts. Yeah. They're called like Alaska and Hawaii and Guam and American Samoa is not settled until 1848. Like... Yeah. That's so recent. It's so recent. You can practically ring someone up from 1848. Like, that is... That's... Yeah. It's like kind of wild that that's basically when America becomes America. Anyway...
Yeah. So that was my kind of big learning curve, I suppose, during this, which is that the first kind of 100 years of American history really is just relentless expansionism combined with an isolationist perspective that the reason that they are expanding is so that they never have to talk to any Europeans ever again. Yeah.
Which is pretty funny. Yeah. And a belief that...
And this is where the manifest destiny part comes in. The manifest destiny has like three parts. The first is that America as a country and as an institution with its constitution and whatnot has a mindset
moral virtue that is superior to everybody else in the entire world. Stolen from the British Empire, that one. Exactly. It is directly everything. And I want to be clear that this is... America is just the British Empire continued. Yeah.
Everything that they say is... So I have no right really to criticise anybody at all because I'm as English as they come. And if it wasn't for the fact that my people were bog people going back a million generations, I'm sure that I would have gone and done some colonising for my...
But this is just literally the British Empire with American cellar taped over the top. Yeah. But the USA, like the British Empire but different, is uniquely virtuous and moral and perfect, unlike everybody else, which mostly Spain and France and Britain. Mm-hmm.
The USA has this kind of mission to redeem everybody by spreading its virtues. A game stolen from the British Empire. The British Empire. Yeah. They are civilizing people as they go. And everybody that they see, they can civilize them by shouting at them about Jesus until they agree. Uh-huh.
And if they won't agree, you can just kill them. And three, that this has come from God. Hence the Jesus part. The British Empire. It reminds me a lot of, I don't know if you ever saw it, that Bollywood-ish, kind of British Bollywood Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Bride and Prejudice, with Martin Henderson and Aishwarya Rai. Because there's a bit...
Martin Henderson plays Darcy and he's an American in this. And she calls him imperialist. And he's like, I'm American. And she's like, that's what I meant. Because Americans do not see that they're essentially a continuation of the British Empire. I feel like we need to convince them. We do need to convince them because they're like, well, we threw off the British. No, you became the British when the British started to die.
Yeah. And you're like, okay, well, you threw off the king, sure. But you do appear to have copy and pasted the mission of the British Empire and continued it. So that's a thing. And then this becomes this idea that it is the clear and obvious divinely ordained fate of the continental North America, which when mostly they are talking about it, does also include...
probably most of mexico and ideally canada as well it is only because like the the the feeling started to change once they reached the pacific and they started looking at asia instead that they gave up on that idea but that it is the the clear obvious and and divinely ordained fate of the united states of america to swallow all the land that it can see yeah um
So there's a good quote from a magazine from 1869, which is about the acceptance of Texas, which is...
a kind of fairly late... We'll talk about Texas in a minute, but it was actually kind of a... Every single point of this, it was actually quite contentious as to whether more land should be gathered, which is why they had to develop this idea of manifest destiny, because then that became an argument for every point. Yeah. So this is basically...
Democratic Party, which is when the Democrats were the bad guys, against the Whigs and Republicans who were more cautious about this sort of thing. Yes. In large part for kind of slightly odd reasons, but...
When Texas was finally accepted into the union, the guy called John O'Sullivan wrote, it is surely to be found, found abundantly in the manner in which other nations have taken to intrude themselves into it between us and the proper parties in this case, that being Texas and the USA, in the spirit of hostile interference for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by providence for the free develop of our yearly multiplying millions yeah so basically we are supposed to be able to have many babies and overpopulate the continent and anyone who wants to stop us is evil
is literally evil because they are getting in... God has given us this whole continent and anyone who tries to stop us... He is specifically talking about the British and Spanish there and Mexico. But anyone who tries to stop them is basically the devil. And this kind of pushed everybody...
Forward and forward from the very beginning of America, the first thing they do is say, okay, well, we've done that. And they turn around and push, start pushing Europe out of the continent, which I think is a very important. It is at first, it is not entirely about engagement.
Expansion for the sake of expansion necessarily. A lot part of it is like we've got Britain. Britain still owns Canada. So Britain is to the north. Most of the central United States is quote unquote owned by France.
And then Mexico goes pretty much up to Oregon. And that's Spanish when the USA kind of is formed in 1776. So the USA as it is actually only consists of like a teeny weeny little bit of about a quarter of the country. Yeah, just that slice down the side, down the east side.
A little weed sliced down the side and they're all, you know, weirdo Puritans and rich guys. Except for maybe Pennsylvania, which is a little bit more like of a port with lots of different stuff going on. It's got like banks and shit in it. Yeah. Yeah.
They gradually use basically a series of kind of treaties and sales to buy up the first lots of land. And it is astonishing how much land in America gets just sold. Yeah. Because basically the doctrine of discovery, which is the doctrine that underpinned all of the European empires, which basically is like the first white person to see a thing owns a thing. No...
The eyes of people of colour do not count and nor does their existence on the land which I have seen. Yeah, it doesn't matter who was here first and how long they've been here and what their deal is. I am white. I saw it. It's mine. Yes. And on this note, because obviously the USA originally are mostly civilised,
slave states and they are importing huge amounts of people as slaves and they have a fairly unique immigration law for a lot of this early period which means that citizenship by naturalization is only available to white people so that's fun good for you guys
The Australians also had a similar thing called the White Australia Policy. They're fun guys too. I mean, New Zealand also didn't have a great path to citizenship. I think you had to be a subject of the crown to vote. So everyone in, like, that meant all settlers from here and it meant all Maori people because the Treaty of Waitangi made Maori people subjects of the crown. But yeah, immigrants from Asia were...
didn't have a path to citizenship initially. That took a while to get there. Yes, Asian people, Americans didn't let Asian people have citizenship until the 20th century, I believe, which is, again, fun for you guys. Although I did read a whole book recently about how the –
fall of the British Empire caused a kind of low-key crisis in Britain with things like Windrush and Asian people being removed from Uganda and then coming to Britain because they had British citizenship as members of the British Empire. And post-war Britain did not want that at all. And so they had to invent a lot of laws to basically take citizenship away from people who already had
it. Is this why we have a commonwealth now instead of the empire? You can be part of the commonwealth and that doesn't actually give you any rights. I mean, it does give you the right to vote if you can live here, but you have to, you can't live here.
And that is precisely why they invented it. Anyway, the reason that a lot of America is purchased is that one guy had seen it. So one French guy had walked through Tennessee, looked at it and said, I claim this for France. And that was considered in international law to be sufficient for France to own...
the entirety of the middle part of the USA, effectively. And this was...
non-ideal, but it allowed America to buy Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. They sent out a land ordinance survey in 1785, which then parceled all of those states up into 640-acre lots.
Which they then sold to people in the States for $640 each. So you could buy 640 acres, $640. Yeah. All right. And then if you bought that, then you were responsible for slaughtering all the people who already lived there. Yeah.
Which is how you get away with doing this stuff without having a standing army, basically. Every stage of this is the very, very long process of forcing indigenous people off of their land into camps and slaughtering the hell out of them. So that is very much...
At every stage. And occasionally there would be treaties where people would say, oh, okay, we're not going to buy like this land here. We entirely promise that we're going to let you keep. So like the Treaty of Grenville in 1795 was a treaty between the USA and a coalition of 12 indigenous nations in the Northwest where they were like, this is your land. This will be our land. We promise that we definitely won't come and take your land. Yeah.
And there's no reason to disbelieve them. And yet, and yet. And yet. In 1803 is when things really kick up a gear. And this is the point when it seems to...
the Americans and in a lot of the history books that you read that God really was shining down upon them and giving them everything they could ever possibly want because they basically sent some people to France to say, hey, do you think that we could have some of this land that you own? Like, we just think it would be really nice to have Louisiana because it kind of like juts into our bit.
And it looks pretty cool. And you don't seem to be like, I mean, I guess you're using a bit of it, but it'd be nice if you could have that. And at the time, Napoleon was in charge. This is 1803. And there had just been a revolt, an incredibly successful revolt in French San Domingue, which is one of
the few incredibly successful revolts by enslaved people in the Caribbean. And it had been so successful that the enslaved people had managed to completely free themselves, obliterate the French and create their own
Hell yeah. Which had upset the French, but not as much as the fact that they were clearly about to go to war with Britain. Because Napoleon just kept invading stuff in Europe. He loved to do it. He loved to invade things. He loved to do it. He was a little scamp. Yeah.
You've still not seen Napoleon. I tried. I really tried. And like, if we do it for a bonus episode, I will try again. But I really couldn't get 20 minutes into it. Anyway.
Yeah, so he was about to start and he basically was like, look, I don't have the time or the energy really to be dealing with overseas territories anymore. I've not got the troops. I'm not going to have the money, the time. I don't have any people really to be sending over there to colonize it. Do you just want the whole thing that we've got? And they said yes. And in exchange for $15 million, the USA bought from Napoleon the
right to colonize, like basically the property rights to Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, half of Colorado, a bit of Texas and the top east corner of North Mexico, plus bits of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Great. So much land. That's a lot of land.
It's so much land and almost everyone that lives there is indigenous. There's only about 30,000 white people who have ever bothered to turn up in that entire area, which is so huge. And then approximately 30,000 slaves that they had taken with them. So enslaved African people who were also there because that is what people did at the time. They were bastards. Yeah.
This is like, I've not seen Hamilton, but this is what I gather Hamilton is about because the argument over whether this would happen, which was incredibly contentious, was about whether the USA had a right to have a central bank or not. Yeah.
That is basically the second act of Hamilton. Well, not the whole second act. Much of it is about dueling and sex scandals. But like, yeah, that was the big point of contention between Hamilton and Jefferson is that Hamilton wanted to establish a bank. And basically they do not have $15 million. In order to do this, they have to go into debt.
debt. The idea of national debt is kind of anathema to the founding fathers and to early Americans. The idea of a central bank is still weirdly contentious in America. And they will still talk about the Federal Reserve as though they're talking about like a Nazi paedophile ring. And this is basically why. So on one hand, you have them saying like, this will make us a proper country and goddamn, look at all that land. And on the other hand, people saying, yeah, but ideologically, do we want a bank? Yeah.
And also, I think there was tension between, and again, this is mainly based on Hamilton, the idea that wealth from one state could be used to support another state rather than be maintained entirely where it was created. And a fair amount of fretting about whether if America got too big, if it would be possible to maintain the Constitution. Right, yeah. Which...
I'm not commenting on that. Jefferson's next move, which is a fun one, is the Lewis and Clark expedition, which he seems to be like obsessed with. It's like his little pet project and you can read like his plans for it. And he's got like a little day to day plan for what they should be doing. And he makes like a little list of supplies for them and like,
It looks very much like he wishes he could have gone. And he's kind of sad that he has to stay at home and be the president instead of hacking through the woods with... Did you know that Lewis is called Meriwether Lewis? Yeah, it's great. What a delightful name. So good.
Yeah. Unfortunately, I always get the Lewis and Clark expedition kind of mixed up with the Lidl and Scott Latin dictionary. I get it mixed up with Lewis and Clark, The New Adventures of Superman. LAUGHTER
The Lewis and Clark expedition is not often seen as, I think, part of the expansionism project, but is seen as part of the kind of exploration of stuff that is already owned. But it's not. It is a explicitly colonial project where the point is to use the doctrine of discovery to see as many things as possible. And then say, that's ours.
Yes. And then force their way to the Pacific Ocean. And in order to make a claim over what is now Oregon, basically. I mean, I can understand that because the Pacific Ocean is the best one, obviously.
Yes. Not that you're biased or anything. Not that I'm biased. I'm going to go on the Pacific Ocean in a few weeks. It's going to be great. Yeah, it's going to be so good. I mean, it's a nice warm one. The Atlantic's pretty cold, which is a problem. I once jumped in the Atlantic in a bikini and nearly died. Yeah. Never again.
And the expedition is kind of fascinating in that they really do just try and look at as many things as they possibly can in order to explain to as many of the indigenous people that they come across as they're going that they're American now or that they're not American because they can't have citizenship, but they belong to the Americans now. And these people are like, hmm.
Are we? I feel like I may be a member of the Eastern Shawnee people. And they're like, no. We have a flag and everything. I don't think that you have a flag. Yep. And everyone knows that's the thing. Having flags. And they have kind of a nice time because this is the first time that a lot of the indigenous nations in the northwest of America have ever met any of these colonists, these imperialist bastards. And so they're like, hiya, what are you doing? Yeah.
Do you need a hand? Are you okay? This is how we trap fares. This is what we're doing. Yeah. And then like the only other people they've met, there's like the Hudson River Company who are a British company because the British own everything. Yeah.
And yeah, they're like, hi, how you doing? And they're like, hi, how you doing? You've got like 100 years. Good luck to you. It's not even that much. And it's basically just, it's this idea at every stage and with every single president in this first 100 year period and every single secretary of state and every single like
who is involved with the American government that it is their destiny to keep colonizing land, to keep sending people to land and to keep acquiring land. Yeah. And a lot of the books that I read, like there must be some kind of myth
that all of this just fell into the lap of the Americans when they weren't even trying. Napoleon rang them up and was like, hey, I've got some land I'm not using. Would you like it? Rather than this is a concerted political effort at every stage to tell
take land at every stage and that there are they are strategizing they are planning they are negotiating they are and they are using force when they feel like they want to or when they feel like they need to in order to fulfill what they perceive to be their intense destiny to own everything so we are in
In 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition is finished. They've plotted a load of stuff. They're selling land to people. People are arriving in America and then moving into the kind of central regions now. And they also want to be pushing south. But the people who already live there are not loving it.
Shocking. Shall we say? They're a bit like, okay. And they are resisting with passive resistance. They're resisting with force. They are resisting. They are doing whatever needs to be done, basically. I read a book called
continent, which I would generally recommend. The epic contest for North America, which the main point of which is that all of this was exceptionally hard work. Like even with the wiping out of 80% of people with smallpox when they first arrived, the British and the then Americans had to work incredibly hard every single day at every single stage in order to wipe out the
indigenous peoples who already lived there yeah it's fascinating that there is this myth that it was super easy when every western i've ever seen is like god we're so gritty and hardcore look at us fighting off these irrational indians
But I'm going to mention very specifically Andrew Jackson, who is, I think, in the running for one of the worst people in the world. Yeah, possibly one of the worst people of all time. Yeah. Real bad guy. Yeah. Yeah.
There had been kind of varied approaches after the, in various different places. And some presidents and people had used negotiations. Some had used treaties. Some had used trade. Some had used force with indigenous nations. And Andrew Jackson was like, look,
I'm better than you. I'm an evil bastard. And we've got more guns than you have. So in 1830, he passed a bill called the Indian Removal Bill. You just, you know, every so often an evil plan is just called evil plan. My evil plan, yeah. And it's couched in this language that's like, we are going to offer native peoples the...
we're going to exchange their land in the east and give them land in the west. And then we will provide assistance. And I like, you can't see, but I hope you can hear how incredibly heavy these quote marks are in moving to these new reservations that we will build for you, that this will help civilize them and protect them from the bad influence of alcohol. Mm-hmm.
Yes. This specifically was confronting people like the Wichitas, the Kiowas, the Comanches, the Cherokee and the Seminole. And there was intense violent resistance to this, as there would be.
The Cherokee and the Seminole people in particular were like, absolutely, fuck no. And violently, we're just like, no, we've not agreed to any kind of exchange. And I don't want to. Yeah.
Jackson, on the 23rd of May, 1838, removed 15,000 Cherokee people from their land in Georgia, put them in a concentration camp for six months, and then in winter marched them 1,200 miles at gunpoint to the new quote-unquote Indian territory that he had given them, which resulted in the death of 4,000 people. It's like...
One of the things with Indigenous history, this is the thing that kind of bothered me when Kills of the Flower Moon came out and it's a very good movie, but I feel like a lot of the rapturous response to it was a response to the events rather than the film. And that felt to me like...
People hearing for the first time about the kinds of atrocities that have been committed against indigenous people, which is natural, right? No one is taught this. You kind of have to seek it out. Even New Zealand, which is slightly better than most other modern former colonies at the stuff because it's too small to ignore people as well as America can and as Australia can.
But like this stuff is horrific. Like, I don't know. It's, it's the acts in themselves are almost inconceivably awful. But what they also have done that I don't see people talk about as much is expansionist settler colonialism deprived indigenous people of the ability to enter the modern world on their own terms. There was a widespread cultural genocide in,
And one of the examples of it that is extremely frustrating is that because it came along with missionary work, the biggest victims in the modern era are indigenous queer people. Because like in New Zealand, the te reo Maori, the language almost died out. But all of the terms that were associated with it,
acts and behaviours and ways of being that were considered immoral by European Christians, that stuff was the first to kind of be criticised and go. So the work of rebuilding pre-colonial queer identities and what that was like is really, really hard. Like there are people whose whole job, academics and historians and linguists,
That's what the impact is. It starts with just, we're going to put people in a concentration camp because we don't want to deal with them and we don't think they have a right to be there. And the ramifications of that are permanent. They're permanent. You can't rebuild to who you were before. You maybe can't even learn about who you were before. And that, like, I don't know. I think that's why I find it frustrating that even...
The failure to recognize America as an inherently imperialist nation from the start is very frustrating because this was always the point. It was always the point. And this was always the plan. Yeah. From every point, the plan was. And when the plan doesn't go right, it fails.
infuriates them to the point that they will like you know their plan was that the Cherokee people would just go oh okay you're bigger than we are which is basically Andrew Jackson's entire justification he's like we are bigger than you like what are you going to do about it and they said well we're going to fight I will say the Seminole people resisted so intensely led by a soldier called Osceola that the Americans eventually had to back down
And they were allowed to remain in the Florida Everglades. But for a lot of people, that wasn't possible because they were bigger than them. Yeah. And they had spent the past, you know, what is this, 1838? They've been...
obliterating people since the 1400s. And this was only kind of followed by... Actually, before I do that, I'm going to say that there is a great episode of This American Life called The Trail of Tears, which is what the Cherokee Trail is called, by a woman called Sarah Vow, who, with her sister...
the trail that their ancestors walked and talk a lot about how this feels from a Cherokee perspective and what you do with the history of this place and being an American of Cherokee descent and how you live as an American and it's...
It's like episode 100 and something, but it's called Trail of Tears and it's fantastic. And it's how I learned about this. But he is basically, yeah, he's an evil person. And it's...
He really pushed expansionism into a new area. And it was as a result of his actions and his bringing this idea that white people should have everything. Like by nature, all of the USA is... Well, basically the idea that all of the continent is continuous with the USA and therefore belongs to the USA. And
And which kind of culminated in this thing called Oregon fever, where they became absolutely desperate to own Oregon and eat up all of Oregon's delicious natural resources. Oregon at the time was owned by Oregon.
the British as part of Canada, basically. And they had lots of lovely fur trapping companies there and were having a lovely time. And the Americans kept saying, can we have it? And the British kept saying, no.
And they kept saying, yeah, but it's continuous with the USA and therefore by nature it belongs to the USA. And the British kept saying, and it's continuous with Canada. Because that's what happens when you've got a land border. Yeah. And therefore it is a continuous part of the British Empire, which neither of them were like, oh, and there are people who live there. That's just expecting a bit too much.
Yeah, and they were just like, and so then the British were like, okay, no, well, we got here first. So the Dictionary of Discovery says like 1792, Captain Cook landed here, it's ours. Two, all of like all of the white people who were here are British really, and some Russians because of our fair trading company. So we have it by the right of having the most people here. And three, it's
Like, you know, by international law, it's ours. And the Americans kept saying, but it's continuous with the United States. And we really, really want it. Manifest destiny to own it. And so what they kept doing was just sending people there. And most of the, like, Oregon Trail stuff was an explicit, like...
policy really so every time some people went there they would write back and say god oregon's gorgeous and then this would spark more people to load up and go there and but they are just illegally occupying and illegally immigrating to the british empire so they do deserve the dysentery yes the dysentery was entirely deserved
And but it was like the American newspapers were like mega hyped. And in his inaugural address in 1845, President James Polk, a man who I had barely heard of, said amongst a bunch of other stuff about how much he hates the Europeans and how much he really badly would quite like to own Texas, said, and remember at this point, they do not own it.
It is British. He said, our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable and already are our people preparing to perfect that title by occupying it with their wives and children. So we've decided it sells and we're currently stealing it. Yeah.
So we're just sending families over there until basically there's more of us than there are of anybody else. And at that point, we hope that you'll just give up, which is pretty much what happened. And the British were just like, look, this is too much effort. And they agreed a boundary and backed off of Oregon and gave the USA access to the Pacific. But this was like...
a presidential policy to be like, well, we're sending people there illegally and they're just going to live there until you agree it's ours. Which is exactly what they then did to Texas. Yeah. Where James Polk also, big fan of wanting Texas. They had wanted Texas since like 1920s and they kept trying to buy it from Mexico. Since the 1820s.
I've written 1920s for some reason, that was good. They wanted to exit since the 1820s and they kept trying to buy it from Mexico because Mexico owns it and Mexico also owns pretty much the entire west coast of what is now America. In 1824, Mexico was declared independence. So that's why we're talking about Mexico now rather than Spain and was like tootling along.
Mexico at that time was kind of being run by a dictator called Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. And they clashed a lot over Texas because there were mostly indigenous people living there. Some Mexicans were moving there, but not that many. But lots and lots of Americans were moving there. When we say Mexicans, I assume at this point we are talking about the descendants of Spanish colonizers. We're talking about Spanish colonizers.
Yes. Rather than...
indigenous mexican we are not talking about indigenous mexicans we are talking about like mexico yeah we are talking about people who have colonized or people who are of mixed heritage or but people who are now calling themselves mexicans as having declared independence from spain so they're no longer no longer colony or collection of spanish colonies there yeah
They are now their own country. They basically kind of not really doing much with Texas, I guess. It's just part of Mexico that they're not like, you know, using. But they also don't really want to be in Mexico. Yeah. I mean, Mexico is enormous at this point. So, yeah, they've got a lot of spare Mexico. Yeah.
But the Americans just kept moving there, white Americans. And so in 1830, Mexico made American immigration to Texas illegal and outlawed slavery in order to try and force Americans who were moving there and putting in labor plantations and things. So Americans just kept illegally emigrating to Texas and doing slavery. Yeah. Which was illegal also. Yes. Yeah. Cool.
Causing the Mexican army to try to remove them, to move along the Mexican border with America in Texas and try to keep out the Americans. I'm not saying that there are parallels. I'm just saying that this is a thing that happened in history. But unfortunately, they could not stop the Americans coming, partly because they just kept coming.
Yeah. There's kind of all kinds of political goings on in Mexico that are related, but eventually because of a kind of attempt to create more centralized power in Mexico, Texas rebels against Mexico, led by American immigrants, and declared itself the independent republic of Texas via a bloody revolution in 1836, and then turned around and said, hi, American, can we come in? Yeah.
And this is what the Alamo is, incidentally. Learned that. And the Americans said, no.
Actually, so 1836, they're like, no, actually, hilariously, and this is a sentence I found in one of the books. One of the reasons that the Republicans rejected Texas entering was that since it was a slave state and would benefit slaveholders, it was considered anti-Republican.
which is a sentence that hasn't aged. It's incredible. It's incredible. But this is this debate over whether to annex the Republic of Texas is where we first hear the term manifest destiny as well. Yes, it is. So this is the 1840s where there is huge arguments of
about whether they should, it goes on for like a decade as to whether Texas is a reasonable part of the country, whether it is because it's continuous or whether it would cause too many constitutional problems to have it basically.
And repeatedly they reject treaties over and over again. James Polk is like all for it and like really badly wants it. So James Polk in that same inauguration speech, he said to Texas, the reunion is important because the strong protecting arm of our government would be extended over her. It's a nice image, isn't it? And the vast resources of her fertile soil. I don't know why Texas is like a nice girl who's having babies in this. Yeah.
She's like a pretty girl and the American government is like a strong man. A strong husband to protect her. With a moustache. Yeah.
And the vast resources of her fertile soil and genial climate would be speedily developed while the safety of New Orleans and of our whole southwestern frontier would be protected against hostile aggression as well as in the interest of the whole union. So eventually they do like illegally basically kind of like
sort of wriggle it through Congress by passing it as a joint resolution of Congress. It passes with a vote of 27 to 25, which is tight. And it turns out that they had a fairly decent reason for it because it immediately kicks off the Mexican-American War. Yeah.
Mexico was kind of fine with Texas being independent. One of the main reasons, incidentally, that that passes is that Texas had kind of given up petitioning to enter the USA and had turned around and started sending letters to the British saying, maybe we could come and hang out with you. Hmm.
That's just not on if you're America. No, and they were like, we can't, we're getting rid of Europe. We can't have more, like we've now got no Europe really near us except in Canada. So we can't be doing that. And that kicks off the Mexican-American War, which is led by James Polk. There's very contentious beginning to this where Abraham Lincoln picks a fight with him as one of the first thing that Abraham Lincoln does in the Senate because there's basically this big fight
fight over the Rio Grande whereby the American troops kind of provoke the Mexican troops until somebody gets shot. And then Abraham Lincoln is like, and then James Polk starts the war and it's like, oh my God, they shot an American. And then, and they did it on American soil. And Abraham Lincoln is like, where specifically on American soil did it? Like, can you point on the map to where the Mexicans touched you? Yeah.
Which is very contentious. And it goes on for two years. It's quite nasty. This is when the Donner Party is like, now seems like a brilliant time to go into that contested land. Yeah, great idea. Should we move to Mexico? And, you know, because they're so good at decision making, they end up having to eat each other by a pond. But...
But this war ends kind of nastily for Mexico and is the kind of cause of a lot of the contention, like political contention between Mexico and America and why Mexican government just still will never trust the Americans, that and everything else they've ever done. Yeah.
It's a crowded field for reasons not to trust the Americans. Yes, but it ends in 1848 with kind of the final part of the continental United States falling into place because America wins from that war. California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico and pushes the Mexican border down to effectively where it still is. And immediately people start like fighting
flying into California and filling up with gold rush stuff. Yeah. But it is such a nasty war and it kind of goes on for such a long, like it's two years and it's unpleasant and the war is like just really grubby. Really? Like there's no glory in it at all, which is why it doesn't get talked about very often. Sprucial and ugly. Yeah.
Yeah, there's no like big glorious battles or anything like that. That it basically kills Manifest Destiny and Expansionist Fervor and stops. And they realize that there's not going to be any more buying land. There is one more buying land, but after that, there's not going to be any more buying land. And this is kind of the end of that phase of American expansion. And you...
that there's no any pushing up into Canada or pushing down into more Mexico is going to be military action at this stage. It's with 1848, like we're now in a new phase of what warfare looks like. It's not men on horses anymore. It's men with big guns. It's, you know, it's cannon warfare. It's Napoleonic, post-Napoleonic stuff. Yeah.
And so that kind of kills off arguing about how much more land they can take and they turn instead to just violently colonizing what they have, which is when like Bury My Heart, Wounded Knee kicks in. Yeah. And the race to settle and colonize California and the Southwest. And, you know, I think Bury My Heart, Wounded Knee, somebody can tell me if it isn't, but I think it's still like the key text on the...
the use of violence and kind of being sneaky little cunts to disenfranchise and then slaughter huge numbers of like the Navajo and the Cheyenne and the Apache and who were living kind of fairly reasonable lives up until that point. Just this sort of extra legal attitude in that like that's what's
which has become so romanticised, but all it really meant is that you are not answerable to anyone for what you do. Yeah. And you are entitled to claim whatever you find and no one's going to do anything about it. And you can make your riches and there is no law. Effectively, you can declare yourself the war. Yeah. But that is, I don't know, it's just so late. Yeah. And...
The last kind of two pieces of what is now US states are Alaska, which is the last thing that they're able to just purchase with money, which they buy from Russia in 1867. It is in the administration of a president I genuinely don't think I'd ever heard of before. I think that I just assumed that Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson were the same person. Yeah, I know.
Who knew that you could have two such bland names and just let them be president? But another Andrew, who I couldn't pick out of a lineup of one, I'm sorry. In his administration, his secretary of state basically purchased Alaska kind of semi-secretly from Alexander II of Russia for $7.2 million. Sure.
And there is a kind of myth around this as well, which is the idea that it was super unpopular and nobody wanted it. And it was like Seward's Folly. But actually...
A lot of the stuff that I read about it was like, "No, that's not true." Everybody was incredibly into it because by 1867, America, certainly the East was an industrial country and it was interested in export. Having another base in Alaska made transport to East Asia, to Japan and China much, much easier.
And the New York Times said, the main importance of this acquisition of Alaska grows out of its bearing on our future trade with Japan, China, and other countries in Eastern Asia. Like this is what, this was good. And it wasn't that they wanted it. They didn't want the land for the same reasons anymore to fill it with people. They wanted it because they wanted, they had their eyes set on kind of on capitalist. Yeah.
Global trade and whatnot. Yes. Although in 1914, I found a speech from someone who said that the dreams of Seward of a regenerated Orient, where the long march of westward civilization should complete its circle, seems almost to be in the process of realization. So...
Cultural imperialism was not off the table. Yeah, no, they still were considering wandering... Right, yeah. This is the thing. You can never satisfy imperialism. There's always more to grab. If they don't own everything, they own everything. And then the last little piece of the puzzle, little weirdo piece of the puzzle, is one of, I know, your personal bugbears, which is Hawaii. Hawaii is such a depressing story. Yes. And so...
Americans had had their beady little eyeballs on the Pacific as a place where they could like expand. Like they were always like, I see some land. Do you reckon we could own it? And they had started with, and I like this, the Guano Islands Act.
where they just kind of unilaterally declared that they had come across these uninhabited islands and they actually quite liked them and they would like to have them please. And everybody was like, well, yes. Which is a stupid thing to do with the Americans because much like the Romans, if you let them have one inch, they will take one mile. Just eternally hungry.
Yes. So the next thing that happened is in the 1890s, Americans had a bit of an existential crisis because in 1890, the US Census Bureau officially announced that the Western frontier was settled and was closed. There was no more frontier land left to set that hasn't been settled.
And because of the entire history of America up until that point had been frontier settlement, free land, pushing, pushing, pushing. They basically had a bit of an existential crisis about it. Yeah. Who are we if we can't be brutally conquering indigenous people?
Exactly. What if we run out of land? What if there's too many of this? What if America becomes full? And as a result, they were like looking around to see like what else they could get involved with. And that led to the Spanish-American War, which started when there was a Cuban revolution against Spain in Cuba, which was going on. And really, the Americans didn't have anything to do with it.
But they did think that Cuba was very close and therefore they would maybe quite like to have a say over who owned it. And so William McKinley was like, well, we're going to send some troops and we're just going to decide who wins. And guess who wins is not Spain because we don't want any European powers near us. And that started the Spanish-American War, which lasted for four months and ended up with
Spain agreeing to sell to America for another 20 million. Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Sure. Yeah. And Cuba gained independence with a government that was installed by the Americans. Mm-hmm.
So they ruled those spaces until the war. They still have Guam and Puerto Rico. The Philippines declared independence in 1946. And McKinley was like, well, that's good. Now there's nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them. Yeah, it's always the fucking same story. Just out-British in the British.
And then finally, they use this as a...
as an excuse and annexed Hawaii, basically accepted Hawaii because there had been a coup in Hawaii five years previously, which overthrew the indigenous queen. A corporate coup, right? A corporate coup, yes. Like business interests had just moved into Hawaii, which was a sovereign independent nation at this point with its own monarchy and said, we're going to do business here and
We're going to steal land and use it for business. And the queen had written to America being like, can you come get your boys out of my country? And they were like, what? No.
Yep. And they were like, it sounds like a you problem. And she was like, well, okay. And eventually, she fairly reasonably was like, you can't just do whatever you want. And the American and British businessman landowners, plantation owners in Hawaii just overthrew her. This is Queen Liliuokalani. I don't know if we've seen that. Yeah. Yeah.
And decided that they would just put in their own provisional government, made it the Republic of Hawaii. And then, yeah. And she had to leave the entire place, which is great. It is fascinating.
fitting somehow that Hawaii was stolen by corporate interests and then turned into essentially like everyone's vision of Hawaii now is so corporate and so resort town. It's not everything that's there obviously it's a whole place with a rich history and like I was astonishingly old before it occurred to me that probably much more closer in vibe to New Zealand than to the rest of America because all you ever see of it is like
the white lotus style resorts yes and americans on honeymoon americans on honeymoons yeah yeah and the government there of the republic of hawaii the business government had been basically like can we come into the americans uh can we be a state please or can we be a territory and the americans kept saying no um but after the war largely in order to rub spain's nose in it a little bit they
They decided to accept. And to finish this off, President William McKinley argued for the acceptance of Hawaii as a territory, which later became a state, by saying, we need Hawaii just as much, if not a good deal more than we did California. It is our manifest destiny. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And that, I mean, that takes us up to 1900s. Things start to change after that because of industrialization, because then we're moving into Asia. And also then the world wars really change everything a lot. But that is the history of Manifest Destiny. Yeah.
It is grim. It is long. Yeah. It is colonial and imperialist at every stage, and it still is. And it wouldn't surprise me if you heard in the next few years people start to use the term again about, for example, the Gulf of America. Yeah.
I am honestly surprised not to have seen it splashed around in the last couple of weeks already. If I thought that any of the people currently doing terrible things in American government had any idea of American history, even that two of them are South American or South African, it seems like they've probably never read an American history book. If any of them had any schooling in American history, I suspect that they probably would be. But they're all too...
stupid yeah they've simply never read a book but it wouldn't surprise me if we saw it at some point yeah and it should be resisted as hard now as it was then just because we lost then doesn't mean that we have to lose this time yeah because it's very much does feel as with a lot of history like the bad guys winning yeah but
But sometimes the good guys get to win. Sometimes. But I do think part of that has to be, and this is the thing that has always frustrated me, is the noble view of your own identity as a country. We're bad at this in New Zealand as well. I don't think we're quite as arrogant about it, but we think of ourselves as good. And it means that you don't see so much of what the country actually is. If you believe that...
What is going on in America currently is anti-American, is against the American ideal. It is against the stated ideal, but it is not against the acted ideal. Like this is a continuation of an imperialist legacy. So if you want to actually fight it and build something better, you have to face that. Yeah. You know, it's heartening to know that there are...
A lot of people, much like there are a lot of people in England today, like digging up the, you know, long, long history of slavery and imperial horror and showing it to us and saying, look, and you can have as many people in the National Trust and Michael Gove rolling around saying, but they've
railways as you like but the more you do it the more the bad guys are fussing the more harm you're doing but yeah if you have anything final to add Janina I mean it's just it's just revolting it is revolting and it is
it's consistent like now more than ever but always infuriating to see like how little it's known and understood like there are there's no pride in being as someone from a colony as a colonizer there's no pride in it and I'm not saying that we should be eaten up with guilt over these aspects of our history because guilt is not a productive emotion but like we have to acknowledge it we can't
If you don't, then you end up perpetuating it. The only... Yeah, I don't know. The world is an ugly place. We have made it an ugly place and we don't improve. We don't move beyond that without acknowledging it. Yeah. I
That's the first phase. Yeah. And yeah, be kind to each other. Be kind to each other. And yeah. But next time we're not going to be talking about kind people either. But we are going to be talking about funny people. Yes. Felt like we needed some light relief. So Jennifer in Perth, which is where a lot of my family lives. So hello, Jennifer in Perth. Which Perth though? It could be Australia, Perth. Australia. Perth in Australia or Perth in here. My.
A big chunk of my family were also settler colonizers who moved to Australia. They asked, who are the most infamous charlatans in history, be they religious, scientific or historical? It's going to be fun because I feel like historical charlatans will be particularly refreshing. Living as we are in an age of modern charlatans, all of them are such boring losers. The world is scammy in a deeply tedious and shabby way and I want to read about some fun.
Fun scams. Yeah, I want to find some people who pretended that they could turn, you know, lead into gold. Yeah. The fun guys is what we're aiming for next time. Fun guys, yes. And after this, we are going to record our second bonus episode. So if you would like more of me and Janina talking about things, then you can sign up to our Patreon. Yes. Patreon members also get episodes a week early.
as well as sometimes discord access and sometimes I do check the discord I'm trying to be better about that and you can
Excellent. And you get a sticker if you're at the three or five pound level. I sent out stickers for everybody who signed up in the past two weeks today. So now, even more excitingly, I bought myself for no good reason a big red SPQR stamp and I didn't really have anything to do with an SPQR stamp. So now I'm stamping all of the sticker envelopes with SPQR stamps. So...
Did you get that too? And I don't know why you wouldn't want that. Everyone wants that. Yeah. But if you want to sign up or if you want to ask us a question or if you want to see any of the reading list or show notes or anything, then you can do all of that at historyofsexy.com. Yeah. We would appreciate that. And I think that is everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Bye, Janina. Bye.