- Hi. My name's Matthew Pinsker, and I'm a historian. Here are a few things you need to know to sound smart about manifest destiny. People think of it as the official policy of territorial expansion-- the idea that God had blessed America to become an ocean-bound republic in the 19th century. But the truth is presidents and secretaries of state-- they didn't use the phrase "manifest destiny." It was the slogan of a journalist named John L. O'Sullivan who invented it in 1845 when he was writing editorials about the annexation of Texas and about the boundary dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory.
He said it was blessed by Providence, it was the manifest destiny of the country to become this continental power. It immediately became controversial at the time. The phrase itself was used more by critics than supporters as a way to ridicule expansionism. Whigs and others opposed it. A lot of Northerners thought it was code for spreading slavery.
In fact, a lot of manifest destiny advocates, people who believed in territorial expansion-- they felt like they had failed. They didn't think the country was spreading widely enough. They wanted all of Mexico. They wanted Canada. They wanted the entire continent to be part of the American Republic.
The phrase actually kind of disappeared from American political life until the 1890s, when it was reborn as part of the drive to make the United States a global power. Some people began to talk about expanding into the Caribbean or the Pacific. This is the era of the Spanish-American war. And that's when manifest destiny became ever-more popular.
But the irony is, by that point, John L. O'Sullivan-- he had died in 1895. And when he died, his obituaries didn't even mention the fact that he was the author of the phrase. He had sort of struggled and fallen into obscurity by that point. It took decades for historians to recover his role. And it's taken a lot of time for people to realize that the policy of manifest destiny was really a contested one that was controversial in its beginning, and remains controversial today.
- Young people in large numbers came out and joined what became known as the Red Guards. These largely terroristic organizations were used to publicly humiliate, assault, and in some cases, even murder political enemies of Mao and the Communist Party.