Picture Credit Ipmaps
It is a little recognised fact that no president of America has yet died under the same flag he was born beneath. The speed of the expansion of America has continued unchecked for two hundred years. The last two states admitted Alaska and Hawaii, were as recently as 1959.
So the sudden rush of liberal hot flushes with the usual pearl clutching about Canada and Greenland is a little over worn.
In a quiet corner of my local library lurks a copy of John Fiske’s “American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History” (1885) which shows that the idea of US imperial ambitions had achieved common assent by at least the late nineteenth century – when he was writing- and maybe a long time before that. Fiske was another oligarch, taking descent from Brewster who came over with the Mayflower. Immensely popular in his day, and a staple of the university and schoolroom, he still remains in print. He tells a story of a dinner party in Paris at the end of the American Civil War when the talk turned to the future and what it might hold for the United States in her Third Republic. Fiske writes: –
“Among the legends of our late Civil War there is the story of a dinner party given by the Americans residing in Paris at which were propounded sundry toasts concerning not so much the past and present as the expected glories of the great American nation. In the general character of these toasts geographical considerations were very prominent and the principal fact which seemed to occupy the minds of the speakers was the unprecedented bigness of our country. “Here’s to the United States,” said the first speaker, “bounded on the North by British America, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, on the east by the Atlantic and on the west by the Pacific Ocean”. “But” said the second speaker, “this is too limited a view of the subject: in assaying our boundaries we must look to the great and glorious future which is prescribed for us by the Manifest Destiny of the Anglo-Saxon Race. Here’s to the United States – bounded on the north by the North Pole and on the South by the South Pole, on the east by the rising and on the west by the setting sun”. Emphatic applause greeted this aspiring prophecy. But here arose a third speaker – a very serious gentleman from the West. “If we are going” said this truly patriotic American, “to leave the historic past and present and take our manifest destiny into the account, why restrict ourselves within narrow limits assigned by our fellow countrymen who have just sat down? I give you the United States – bounded on the North by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by the primal chaos and on the west by the Day of Judgement”
Fiske cannot tell us whether this party actually took place, or who might have been there, far less the names of these eloquent soothsayers. He admits as much by calling it a “legend” openly acknowledging that he has no impartial evidence for it. But whether this dinner party actually took place is not the main point. It shows, at the least, that such thinking – of an ever expanding sphere of influence-was well established at the time Fiske was writing in the 1880’s. Indeed, given his popularity, there was a ready audience for such views. This US sphere of influence was not to be confined to the area of continental USA but to stretch far beyond to the stars themselves. The final frontier was already envisioned before the close of the old west.
Fiske himself saw this as not simply a rhetorical flourish, but a sign of the future. “I believe the time will come when such a state of things will exist upon the earth when it will be possible (with our friends of the Paris dinner party) to speak of the United States as stretching from Pole to Pole…and we may with Tennyson celebrate the parliament of men and the federation of the world”.
He ends the piece with a chilling vision of a world covered with cheerful homesteads blessed with a Sabbath of perpetual peace.
A vision, under Trump that clearly is still current.
Copyright The Oligarch Kings 2025
