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July 27, 2025 On July 23, the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast titled American Progress. Gast represented the American east on the right side of the painting, with light, skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City full of ships. He painted the American west in darkness, through which bison and indigenous Americans flee the people. In the middle of the painting, white hunters, farmers, settlers and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook and a telegraph wire being laced on poles along a train track. Behind her, over the reproduced image, the Department of Homeland Security account wrote, a heritage to be proud of, a homeland worth defending. From the time Gast painted it, American Progress has been interpreted as a representation of the concept of manifest destiny, the mid 19th century notion that God had destined the people of the United States of America to spread democracy to the rest of at least the North American continent and possibly South America as well. A number of people who saw the Homeland Security post saw it as the Trump administration's embrace of that ideology. Magazine editor John O' Sullivan coined the term manifest destiny in the July 1845 issue of Democratic Review, a magazine dedicated to defining what it meant to live in a democratic republic. O' Sullivan's concept of Manifest Destiny was different from the constant expansionism of Euro Americans time in part because he was defending a specific partisan policy Congress's annexation of Texas in March 1845 and the apparent determination of Democratic President James K. Polk to seize more territory from Mexico. The Democrats political opponents, the Whigs, opposed the land grab, and Democrats justified their position on the grounds that they were simply honoring God's plan. The spread of democracy and with it American greatness was both the right and the duty of Americans, they claimed, overriding the despotisms of monarchs. Along with that democratic system would travel an economic system that developed resources for private owners, the Protestant religion, and a cultural system that privileged white people. Such a system was best for everyone, even those people whose land, lives and culture would be absorbed by the movement. Democrats constructed a strong sense of US Nationalism around this idea and its corollary, the extension of human enslavement. Manifest Destiny both reflected and fed the era's greed and racism, but there was a key political element in it that adherence to today's right wing political movement appear to reject. At the heart of Manifest Destiny, beneath the language of civilizing other peoples and the embrace of human enslavement, was the concept that the lands the US Acquired would become states equal to the older states in the Union, and that the people in the lands the US Absorbed would eventually become Americans equal to those who had been in the United States for a generation or more. New territory is spread out for us to subdue and fertilize, daniel S. Dickinson of New York told the Senate. New races are presented for us to civilize, educate, and absorb new triumphs for us to achieve for the cause of freedom in the 1840s, indeed, until the last few years, Americans accepted that the United States was based on an idea, even in that era of crabbed racism that excluded black Americans and women and circumscribed others. Lawmakers embraced the idea that the US could expand to include new people in the immigration boom of the 1840s and 1850s. That was no small thing. Rather than advancing the concept of Manifest Destiny, as deeply problematic as that would be, the Trump administration's reposting of American progress to harness American traditional symbols in order to advance the idea of blood and soil citizenship popularized in 1930s Germany, blood and soil ideology claimed true Germans were defined by race within a specific land. Nazi propagandist Richard Walter Darry reflected these ideas when he celebrated agricultural life and what he claimed were rural values, elevating those who had lived in Germany for generations. He suggested that German blood was mystically connected to German soil. The German soul, with its warmth, is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it, derry wrote. To maintain that soul, he wrote, Germany needed to preserve racial purity and reject foreign blood. To that end, it needed to protect pure marriages and encourage the right people to have lots of children. The main job of a wife was to produce children. Unless the country took drastic measures, he wrote, the German race might become extinct. The details of the blood and soil ideology might not be clear to MAGA today, but its adherents definitely get the concept. At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, white nationalists shouted blood and soil. Those ideas are now advanced by MAGA leadership. On July 5, 2025, Vice President J.D. vance told an audience at the Claremont Institute he rejected the idea that being an American simply meant agreeing with the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He complained not only that such a definition would include too many people, but also that it would exclude those who disagreed with it, even if their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong, he said. He continued, I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century. America, he said, is not just an idea where a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life. Vance claimed that Democrat politicians and corporate oligarchs want to import millions and millions of low wage serfs, and he hailed Trump's immigration policies as the most important part of Trump's first six months. He said citizenship must mean recognizing the unique relationship but also the obligations that we all share with our fellow Americans. You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect for America to remain unchanged. This is a distinctive moment in time with a distinctive place and a distinctive people. Attacking the left as driven by hatred, Vance rejected the statement of Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I'm proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, vance said. Mamdani's statement shows no gratitude and no sense of owing something to this land. I wonder, vance said, has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union army to parents and sweethearts that they'd never see again? Who the hell does he think that he is? The use of American iconography to push blood and soil showed in another post by the Homeland Security account from earlier this month. On July 14, it posted a painting of a white man with a white woman holding a baby in a covered wagon, an image the artist Morgan Weisling titled A Prayer for a New Life. The HHS account posted the image without Weisling's permission, retitling it Remember your homeland's new life in a new land. The new name and capitalization are significant, just as in the words in the post about John Gast's painting. The two H's are capitalized, evoking hh accepted in right wing circles as a way to write Heil Hitler. On his webpage, Weisling posted Attention the recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.
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Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, MA. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.