By John Davis
Special to THE DAILY

It is said that many of the first American gold-rush miners who raced to California truly believed God sent the glittering metal as confirmation of their manifest destiny to rule the continent. It was, they believed, indeed God’s will made manifest that the wealth of a wonderful land should come to those rightfully intended to own, exploit and govern this continent of which California was only a sparkling diadem. Thus were some of the rationalizations of the Americans who went west in 1849.

There were other, more insidious, less romantic views of this cross-continental movement. Business and self-interest drove many westward. There was also an expressed American peculiarism: that God so ordained this conquest as a reward for America’s faithfulness to him. How America grew “from sea to shining sea,” west across the vast North American continent, is the thesis of Richard Kluger’s outstanding work. Kluger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is renowned for his magnificent works dealing with the New York Herald Tribune, the 1954 Supreme Court decision ending segregation, and the award-winning “Ashes to Ashes” about the tobacco industry. Once again, in this remarkable study, he demonstrates his critical eye for detail and the significant anecdote.

Americans, Kluger contends, were driven not only by a belief in the value of their blessed-by-God young democracy, but also by simultaneous beliefs in the perfidy of their European adversaries. No one would stand in their way. God was indeed smiling on these, his most blessed children. Did he not give them this land to begin with? Was this not a place of refuge from Old Europe, and its myriad persecutions? Did he not lay the land before them in ways only divine intervention could account for?

I’ve visited the Jefferson Memorial building in St. Louis. There the signatories of the Napoleonic French and the Jeffersonian governments are enshrined forever in bronze. The background of that story is remarkably recounted here. Little did most Americans know their representatives to the French dictator were constrained originally to purchase only New Orleans and part of the surrounding wetlands.

How the machinations of those representatives play out is itself worth reading. It lends new meaning to the phrase “Getting forgiveness is easier than getting permission,” for we ended up with virtually a third of the present day American nation as a result.

We follow then to the Southwest, where we won vast tracts by war, then by purchase, or the threat of war against Mexico. Noteworthy too are the revelations that the American victors of the War against Mexico in fact defeated a country that outlawed slavery. Slavery was to remain an issue until our American Civil War, for each new tract added by our manifest destiny was to be either slave or free, and that was one of the true driving forces behind this incessant movement westward.

There was no end to the acquisition that would balance the states created as a result. Oregon and Washington were added from British claims, resulting in a near war with them.

Of course, an unlikely ally, the Russian battle fleet of the Czars, came to visit the young democratic United States in 1864, at the height of our Civil War. Russia did so to outflank (in a sense) their adversaries, the British and French with whom they had recently fought in the Crimea.

From this strange acquaintance arose the purchase from Russia of Alaska, U.S. Secretary of State Seward’s “Folly,” which expanded by one-third again the new American country with the stroke of a pen and enriched the cash-strapped Russian monarchy.

Stranger stories are written in a gripping manner. We learn that our belief in the uniqueness of our nation, our belief in our divine blessedness, was truly felt, and often employed to cover otherwise crafty statesmanship. How we reconciled these divergent beliefs and practices is masterfully told.

Kluger is a master, a storyteller who brings this remarkable American expansion to life.

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