Unlearning the American Myth (Part 6)
Raised Lonely, Socialized Late
The previous post in this series, Our Roots in Violence, can be found here.
Raised Lonely, Socialized Late
One of the provocative things Greg Grandin does in The End of the Myth is offer some specific contrasts between the U.S. and both Latin America and Europe. He does this in the context of social rights and democracy, and I offer this synopsis because I think it fits well with our theme of Unlearning the American Myth.
Contrast with Spanish America
By the year 1826 all of Spain’s former colonies in the Americas, with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, had won their freedom. The leaders of the new Latin American republics found no moral justification for colonialism and conquest. They accepted their existing boundaries even though they were based on the old colonial order. They would not do onto others what had been done to them.
The leaders of the new republics, including Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Mexico, and Gran Colombia—what would eventually become Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela— also had robust conceptions of social rights and liberal views on slavery. As Simón Bolívar, known throughout Latin America as the great liberator, stated at the time: The point of republican government was to produce the “greatest possible sum of happiness.”
It was anti-colonial sentiments such as these which put the new republics at immediate odds with the expanding empire to the south. It was, after all, in 1823 when James Monroe articulated the Monroe Doctrine, claiming the entire American hemisphere for U.S. domination. And the new republics were not just thwarting U.S. domination but the reigning international order itself, which held that war, conquest and subjugation were all legitimate means of obtaining territory and establishing sovereignty (1).
By 1850 all the former Spanish colonies had abolished slavery, while between 1801 - 1860 the U.S. engaged in 19 invasions into Latin America, with at least part of the aim, of most if not all of them, being the expansion of slavery (2).
The Monroe Doctrine (America for the Americans) was barely two decades old when it was overshadowed by the more overtly racist cry of Manifest Destiny. Because proponents saw Latin Americans as culturally and politically inferior, it was a natural expression of American exceptionalism that meshed with the pseudo-science of the time promoting white European superiority (3).
A big part of the on-the-ground context for Manifest Destiny’s momentum was the desire to take Texas from Mexico and incorporate it as a slave state. Many violations of Mexican sovereignty had already taken place, but the taking of Texas in 1846 set the stage for further violations and instigated the larger War with Mexico.
As with Latin America as a whole, so with Mexico as far as the American elite was concerned. One hundred years after Latin America freed itself from Spain, Mexico had its domestic revolution and the U.S. interfered in and tried to influence every shift in the political winds during those ten years of war.
It was during that period, in 1917, that Mexico created the world’s first social-democratic constitution, which guaranteed citizens the right to education, health care, decent wages, and unions. It also gave the country more power to control its resources and destiny, including the power to nationalize foreign companies and expropriate lands. Having been hard at work for several decades dominating and controlling the economy of Mexico, the new constitution was immediately denounced by the U.S. as a perversion of individual rights, especially property rights. As it happens, it was also in 1917 that the U.S. ended a costly year-long incursion into Mexico in a failed attempt to capture the revolutionary Pancho Villa (4).
What would Mexico and the rest of Latin America be like today without the historic U.S. interference and interventions? What if good faith economic development and respect for sovereignty had been the approach, rather than economic and political domination and exploitation?
Contrast with Europe
In stark contrast to the unifying and non-interventionist spirit of the new Latin American republics, in that same timeframe the U.S. was doubling down on its commitment to continued expansion and violence. Expanding social rights and actual freedoms was not on the agenda of the elites, and any progress, such as women’s suffrage, was hard won by activists. Some comparison with Europe can also illustrate the U.S. attitude toward social rights.
In 1848 European workers revolted. Those with nothing rose up against those with everything. It started in Paris and spread to Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Hamburg, Berlin, Lyon, Naples and elsewhere (5). The uprising was defeated but it was the beginning of social-democratic reform in Europe: unions, labor parties, rights to education, health care, pensions, and welfare. To quote Grandin:
The U.S. too had crowded cities and hungry workers fighting efforts to subordinate there lives to mechanical routine. But instead of waging class war upward—on aristocrats and owners—they waged race war outward, on the frontier. [The working class] didn’t head to the barricades to fight the gentry but rather joined with the gentry to go west and fight Indians and Mexicans.
The 1848 presidential election offered a choice between a Democratic Party Indian killer and a Whig Party killer of both Indians and Mexicans. In the years that followed, “Jacksonian domination of the executive branch seemed near absolute. Slavery’s statesmen…exercised control over the country’s foreign policy and war-making apparatus” (6). To say that the U.S. has a long-standing resistance to social rights and real democracy (especially as pertains to other countries) seems a gross understatement in light of actual history.
The New Deal
Of course, there were progressive activists and rebels all along—the kinds of folk heroes Howard Zinn lifts up in A People’s History of the United States—but in Grandin’s telling of the story, it wasn’t until Franklin Delano Roosevelt (president from 1933 until his death in 1945) and the New Deal, that America finally had its chance to liberalize, and this only after the desperation of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
The language of the New Deal promoted social rights at home and abroad. It included anti-colonial sentiments and a Good Neighbor Policy that eased foreign interventions for a time. FDR himself, in a 1944 address, called for a second Bill of Rights, a declaration of economic rights that included rights that Mexico had been granting its citizens since 1917.
Finally, with FDR and the New Deal, social democracy had a foothold in the U.S. And it was immediately opposed by libertarians harkening back to Jacksonian “primitive simplicity” and frontier mentality (7). And, as they say, the rest is history.
With the death of FDR real momentum for codifying social rights faded. When the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights conservatives mobilized, calling it a blueprint for socialism (8).
Grandin goes on to write about Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to rekindle New Deal thinking—to instill the idea of limits and the need to adjust socially. He covers Reagan, who provided the counterpoint to Carter with his Administration’s refrain of “more, more, more.” Reagan applied the myth of the frontier to public policy—it was political liberty that mattered, not social rights and social justice.
And then there’s Bill Clinton and globalization of the economy, his pet project. Yet again, the myth of the open frontier was called on: “This new global economy is our new frontier.” Clinton carried forward the republican agenda and Grandin calls him “Reagan’s greatest achievement.”
The upshot of it all is that social rights in the U.S. have never been fully legitimized. Hard won victories only happen from the grassroots up, and are all too easily eroded, as we now witness everyday in real time.
Conclusion
Here in 2025 the core of the American myth hasn’t changed much since 1809, when Thomas Jefferson argued that the U.S. was the “solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom.”
Jefferson’s words offer a way to tie this particular post in with the overall theme of the Myth. It’s a simple but telling formulation that contrasts Latin America and the U.S.: Whereas the former was raised in a large litter and socialized early, the U.S. was raised lonely, thinking it was one of a kind (9). In a reality characterized by relationships and reciprocity, exceptionalism and racism set us up for trauma, for insecurity and violence, from the very beginning.
And with that it seems fitting to repeat a passage from Grandin, riffing off the historian Loren Baritz:
‘Lifted out of history, free from a limiting past, Americans were presumably more self-determining than any other national people had ever been.’ Having defeated the Old World, they resisted the very idea of ‘old,’ the thoughts that limits, decline, and death might pertain to them. The vast, open West ‘contributed its share to the notions that Americans swung free in seemingly limitlessness space unhampered by the dead and deadening hand of the past.’
And a simple follow up to the above: How’s that working out?
Endnotes
1. Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, 2019.
2. Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, 2022.
3. Ibid.
4. Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, 2019.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. See Unlearning the American Myth (Part Three): Make America Great Again, 1811-1828. February, 2025.
8. Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, 2019.
9. Ibid.