Unlearning the American Myth (Part 5)

Our Roots in Violence

The previous post in the series, The War on Mexico, can be found here.

Our Roots in Violence

As usual, I have drawn primarily from Greg Grandin’s, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Also included here is inspiration and information from Juan Gonzalez and his book, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America.

To say that violence is a major theme in the American story can seem obvious, but it’s not a conscious part of how most of us think about our country. Why is that? Maybe it’s because the myth, chock-full as it is with American exceptionalism, has justified, sanitized, and glorified violence all along the way. When it does surface in consciousness it’s in the context of historic episodes or isolated incidents. We don’t tend to talk about the extent to which violence is interwoven into the whole of the American story and what the implications of that are. We’ve retained our innocence to the detriment of the world.

I believe both the myth and the legacy of violence tell us a great deal about our country today—the serial violence and complicity in genocide, the enduring racism and xenophobia, the social and political divisions, and the dramatic turn toward authoritarianism.

It could be said that our legacy of violence starts with the Native American genocide and slavery, but it starts much earlier, back in Europe with the violence and trauma there. And from Native American genocide, slavery, and the Civil War, the violence continued as American capitalism set its sights south, transforming the entire western hemisphere in the process.

Origins

As I wrote in an earlier post, "Forming some understanding of Old World violence, poverty, religious fanaticism, and racism, including the brutal legacy of British colonialism, helps us understand the trauma and racism the American colonists brought with them (1). A deep dive into the specifics of that trauma is beyond the scope of this series but I think it’s important to remember it as the deep, multigenerational origins of American (U.S.) violence, with corresponding parallels in the violence perpetuated by the Spanish and Portuguese invaders to the south.

Fast-forwarding a bit, Greg Grandin offers us a portrait of John Quincy Adams, who late in life, after serving as a member of Congress, a Secretary of State, and a one-term President of the United States (1825 to 1829), came to grasp the full viciousness of the cycle of violence initiated by western expansion and the brutal treatment of Native Americans.

Adams already saw the seeds of perpetual war in western expansion and slavery. He saw that Indian removal was a prelude to war with Mexico and later Spain, and how those wars were linked to the expansion of slavery. In his famous anti-war speech to the House of Representatives in 1836 he said, “The banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners…the banners of slavery.” “He warned that a fight with Mexico over Texas would deepen the nation’s habituation to racist wars, leading to the point where racism and war would be the only thing that gave the republic meaning.” Adams understood that unjust violence would always meet resistance, that there would always be blowback. Toward the end of his famous speech he asked simply, “Are you ready for all these wars?” (Grandin).

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Well before the closure of the western frontier (officially proclaimed in 1890) American settlers and expansionists had already been pushing south, with invasions into Spanish-held Texas as early as 1801 and West Florida in 1809, where Anglos declared a republic that Congress eventually annexed into Louisiana (Gonzalez).

Juan Gonzalez lists 19 such invasions between 1801 and 1860. One William Walker is responsible for four of them with an 1853 incursion into Mexico, where he declares a republic before being chased out; invasions of Nicaragua 1855 (where he took power and ruled as a dictator for two years) and again in 1858; and finally an 1860 invasion of Honduras where he was captured and executed. A primary intention behind all of these invasions, and the eventual war on Mexico was the expansion of plantations and slavery (2).

Expansion was still intimately linked with the Jacksonian ideal of freedom from restraint, specifically freedom from a federal government with the power to curtail certain behaviors and states rights, with the practice of slavery prominent in mind (3). Expansion was still seen as “the great safety valve” which could vent the rising pressures over social injustice, both the northern “class problem” and the southern “race problem.” It was the way to direct outward the energies of the federal government, slaveholders and other business interests, and all of the most violent elements of society (Grandin).

In 1896 President Grover Cleveland affirmed his belief in the American myth, proclaiming that the U.S. needed to “protect its own interests…which are consistent with those of humanity and civilization generally” (Grandin). Unwilling and unable to turn inward toward its internal conflicts, the United States continued looking outward.

The Corporate Frontier and the Origins of the Empire

And so it was that in 1898 the U.S. launched itself even further afield, annexing Hawaii and declaring war on Spain. Capitalism and aspirations of regional domination had everything to do with it. By the start of the war, U.S. companies already owned vast plantations and transportation networks throughout much of the Latin America. Exports from Cuba, for example, accounted for one-fourth of the total commerce of the U.S., “and the island was a Spanish colony in name only.” Likewise, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and much of Central America were already the “economic satellites of an expanding empire” (Gonzalez).

The Spanish-American War only lasted four months and when it was over, along with the earlier annexation of Hawaii, the U.S. had taken Puerto Rico, Guam, and Manilla and established a protectorate over Cuba. And while it was the end of outright territorial expansion, it solidified a “more disguised yet far more extensive system of financial domination.” Latin America would become “the incubator for the American multinational corporation” (Gonzalez).

Howard Zinn quotes a high level bureaucrat with the Department of Commerce of that era:

The Spanish-American War was but an incident of a general movement of expansion which had its roots in the changed environment of an industrial capacity far beyond our domestic powers of consumption. It was seen to be necessary for us not only to find foreign purchasers for our goods, but to provide the means of making access to foreign markets easy, economical and safe (4).

It was the birth of our imperial republic, made possible through a slew of invasions, occupations, collaborations with dictators, and a great deal of violence. As an inherently anti-democratic project, it precipitated many further interventions in the name of protecting American business interests. Any foreign leader with the audacity to not acquiesce to U.S. interests had to be eliminated or neutralized.

The United Fruit Company is an oft-cited example of the new empire in action on the corporate frontier. Created through a merger in 1899 of already powerful American companies, United Fruit came to control the lives of hundreds of thousands in Costa Rica, Cuba, Honduras, Colombia, and Guatemala, toppling governments and degrading ecosystems along the way (5).

As U.S. owned plantations continued their spread throughout Latin America, millions of peasants were forced from their lands, initially moving between those lands, but with industrialization (and active recruitment of labor) in the north, more and more started heading for the United States. And so it was, that in relatively short order, the United States had transformed the entire hemisphere (Gonzalez).

As an outgrowth of the myth, with its white supremacy and entitlement, it is was all seen as the logical conclusion of western expansion, and the ends always justified the means. Ever innocent and of the highest ideals, it was, in Grandin’s words, as if “the United States had empire thrust upon it.”

The Spiral of Violence

The Spanish-American War of 1898 updated the legacy of Andrew Jackson and was a turning point in the reintegration of southerners into the Union, uniting slavers and settlers under a banner of white supremacy and freedom from restraint. Reconstruction ended as a tremendous failure in 1877 with white supremacy and Jim Crow laws firmly entrenched in every southern state (Grandin). Now the country could unite under the banner of Manifest Destiny (6).

In June 1898, just weeks after landing in Cuba and the start of the Spanish-American war, a grand celebration was held in Atlanta honoring the brave warriors. “Speech after speech extolled ‘sublime’ war, not just the Civil War but all the wars that made up the nineteenth century—with Mexico, on Native Americans, and now against Spain.” General John Gordon opened the proceedings by saying that the heroism displayed had led “to the complete and permanent obliteration of all sectional distrust, and to the establishment of the too long delayed brotherhood and unity of the American people.” The South, according to General Gordon was helping to bring “the light of American civilization and the boon of Republican liberty to the oppressed…” (Grandin).

A senator from Mississippi, a confederate veteran, offered a clear expression of the toxic masculinity of the time, stating that any war was better than a “rotting peace that eats out the core and heart of the manhood of this country” (Grandin).

Grandin makes several important points about the relationship between foreign wars and domestic extremism, with each war emboldening more and more extreme racism and xenophobia.

He reminds us that the KKK was organized by Confederate veterans in 1865, that it had lain dormant for decades, and that the second rising of the KKK in 1915, coincided with the start of World War I and was led by southern veterans of the Spanish-American War.

And racist vigilante violence was not limited to the Jim Crow South. In the southern borderlands similar violence had been a reality from the beginning, with lynchings—conservative estimates put the number in the thousands—and other forms of murder and terror (Grandin). It eventually became state-sanctioned with the formation of entities such as the Texas Rangers. Some of the worst violence occurred between 1910 and 1920, with extralegal executions so common that a San Antonio reporter observed that the “finding of dead bodies of Mexicans…has reached a point where it creates little or no interest”(7).

From these roots in violence, Grandin lays out evidence for how the violence also turned inward, with patriotism associated with World War I leading to the demonization and persecution of liberals and social reformers, who were derided as anti-American. “Wars are followed by witch hunts.”

And the violence was also still moving outward, as the American empire continued to expand its range. In the run-up to World War II the new “security frontier” was seen as the entire western hemisphere. It then expanded beyond even that, as economic and political power continued to be projected outward (Grandin).

In a long 1951 essay, John Knox Jessup, an editor for Life magazine, wrote that at some point during World War II, the U.S. had accepted an obligation that was “beyond question”: that on “America almost alone had fallen the awful responsibility of holding open the door of history against the forces of evil until freedom is born anew all over the world.” And echoing Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, which lies at the heart of the American myth (8), he said that America’s long frontier experience produced a new kind of human, a “horizontal man” capable of spreading the "brotherly love” of a true internationalism. (Grandin).

And fast-forwarding again, Grandin reminds us that when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, white soldiers in Vietnam raised Confederate flags, while others held a Klan rally and burned crosses. And he goes on to write that the U.S. loss in Vietnam radicalized a whole generation, with many going on to join the ranks of white- supremacist groups (9).

And not much later, Ronald Reagan would effectively tap the discontent and racism and ride into the White House to begin his legacy of dramatic increases in military spending and state-sanctioned terrorism in Central America, a region he called “our southern frontier” (Grandin). Reagan embodied the myth and its promise of limitlessness and endless freedom, with violence the unspoken means.

Conclusion

This is one of my longer posts and it could be a longer still, as any clear-eyed chronology of violent U.S. undertakings would demonstrate (10). And the through-line of violence in our story continues to this day. It’s not to dwell in darkness, but in the spirit of healing that I offer these posts as incentive for continuing the journey of unlearning the myth and co-creating a life-affirming, regenerative future.

The frontier as a safety valve (for venting domestic pressures and violence) and the myth in general led to a long postponement of honest reckoning with social injustice here at home. In the next post we’ll contrast the U.S. with both Europe and Latin America. We’ll also bring in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which was the first official attempt in the U.S. to recognize limits and legitimize social rights.

Sources and Endnotes

Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, 2022

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, 2019.

1. Unlearning the American Myth (Part Two): Frontier Fantasies, G. Scott Brown, January, 2025.

2. Unlearning the American Myth (Part Four): The War of Mexico, G. Scott Brown, April, 2025.

3. See Unlearning the American Myth (Part Three): Make America Great Again, 1811-1828. February, 2025.

4. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1990.

5. Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, 2022. See also Banana Republics: The Bloody Legacy Of The United Fruit Company, History Chronicler, August 11, 2023.

6. See Where did the term Manifest Destiny come from?, Britannica, Youtube video.

7. The History of Racial Violence on the Mexico - Texas Border, Refusing to Forget Project.

8. See Unlearning the American Myth (Part Two): Frontier Fantasies, G. Scott Brown, January, 2025.

9. And, as Howard Zinn would tell us, many Vietnam veterans were also radicalized in exactly the opposite direction, becoming some of the most powerful anti-war voices in the country.

10. See for example, this chronology of U.S. interventions.