John Gast’s allegorical painting, “American Progress,” may have had humble origins, but his flamboyant tableau of Manifest Destiny had real impact in spurring the country’s westward expansion in the late 19th century.
Its symbolism still resonates more than 150 years since it was painted. Earlier this summer, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of the painting on social media under the heading, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” It drew some 37,000 likes on X.
To the Trump administration, the painting epitomizes patriotism and the progress spread by American pioneers advancing technology, democracy and the blessings of Western civilization.
Some historians, however, say, that D.H.S.’s battle cry, in the context of the painting, glorifies racism and glosses over just whose homeland America is.
The heritage exemplified by Gast’s painting, they say, neglects to acknowledge that much of the homeland Americans are being exhorted to defend belonged to Mexicans and Indigenous tribes who were forcibly removed or died of cholera spread by white settlers.
“The ironies are profound,” Martha A. Sandweiss, an emerita history professor at Princeton University and the founder and director of The Princeton Slavery Project, said in an interview. “The painting — commissioned by the publisher of a popular western guidebook — does not depict people defending their homeland. On the contrary, it depicts a group of white men (and an angel-like woman wearing a ‘Star of Empire’) invading the homeland of others.”
The term “manifest destiny” (not capitalized back then) was popularized by John L. O’Sullivan, a journalist and the son of Irish and English immigrants, in an unsigned magazine editorial in 1845, to justify Washington’s divinely endorsed claim to annex Texas. The term was invoked by President Trump in his inaugural address in January.
Gast, a German immigrant who lived in Brooklyn, painted his vision of the bulging frontier in 1872. The publisher who commissioned it, George A. Crofutt, was born in Danbury, Conn., and died in New York City after going bankrupt in Philadelphia and failing as a prospector during the Pikes Peak gold rush in 1860.
It was widely replicated in Crofutt’s travel guidebooks. They were among the first to promote transcontinental tourism and, according to his count, had sold some 300,000 copies by 1878.
Looking from right to left, Gast’s miniature oil on canvas panorama (it measures only about 11 ½ inches by 15 ¾ inches) depicts American expansion across the continent west from New York City: Male European prospectors precede farmers and settlers who are wending their way by horseback, wagon trains, stage coaches and railroads as bison and half-naked Native Americans retreat by foot and travois, a kind of sled, into the shadows from technological progress.
Hovering protectively over the pioneers’ advance in the painting is an ethereal spirit of Miss Columbia, the personification of Americans by a white woman in a white diaphanous gown. She is armed with a schoolbook to spread enlightenment and trails a telegraph wire to bind the nation through instant communication.
What concerns some historians and other critics is less the historical accuracy of Gast’s painting than whether Americans should be unreservedly proud of the pioneers and settlers who laid claim to the continent.
“It’s worth remembering that all peoples in the world (European, Asian, and even African) gained by the settlement of the West,” Professor Bradley J. Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution in Michigan, said in an email, “. but all, of course, at the tragic expense of the American Indian.”
“Manifest Destiny is a perversion of the frontier spirit,” Professor Birzer said. He specifically cited the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which laid the groundwork for admitting new states north of the Ohio River and envisioned “free peoples (families, communities, etc.) moving west and farming, slowly integrating with the Native Americans.”
“Manifest Destiny, as developed in the 1830s and 1840s, was essentially a speeding up of the process through the use of the military, Professor Birzer said. “If frontier expansion was the truth,” Manifest Destiny was the error and the perversion,” he said. “It also is linked, rather seriously, to racist and racialist notions in ways that the Founding Fathers never could’ve conceived.”
The historian Daniel J. Burge maintains that the divisiveness of the mid-19th century, culminating in the Civil War, actually represented a failure of Manifest Destiny and that Gast’s painting retroactively sanitized the record. Oregon, one of the goals of the expansionists, had banned slavery before the war, but also prohibited Black people from even entering the territory.
Adam Dahl, a professor of political science at Amherst, said in an email that “the image overtly celebrates the core of the idea of Manifest Destiny — that it is not only the right but the duty of white settlers to ‘civilize the wilderness’ by pushing Native Americans away into the darkness.”
“That the agency ultimately responsible for the ongoing mass deportations would post this is alarming to say the least,” Professor Dahl added. “It all can be read in the context of the ongoing myth of the great replacement in white nationalist ideology, the idea that white Americans are being demographically overpowered and replaced by nonwhite races.”
“American Progress” is not the only painting D.H.S. has added to its social media accounts. The department’s website has also showcased a newborn on the frontier in “A Prayer for a New Life” (2020) by the contemporary artist Morgan Weistling (without his permission, he said) and Thomas Kinkade’s idyllic small town scene “Morning Pledge” (which the Kinkade Foundation said was unauthorized).
The department’s online gallery of patriotic art is of a piece with the administration’s desire for a more traditional view of American history. President Trump has harshly criticized the Smithsonian and other museums for being insufficiently patriotic and focused too much on the negative.
D.H.S. officials dismissed the criticism. “This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary, said in a statement.
James Chase Sanchez, who teaches writing and rhetoric at Middlebury College, said, “using this painting to promote a defense of ‘heritage’ and ‘homeland,’ both of which are dog whistle terms, asks the audience to interpret who is ‘scurrying’ away from the Trump administration and whose heritage matters.”
Professor Sanchez described Homeland Security’s display of the painting as “memeifying famous art (which is perceived as ‘traditional’) to promote white racial attitudes (also perceived as ‘traditional’).”
Gast’s original painting of “American Progress” is on display at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.
“I don’t know of any current American history textbook that would present ‘American Progress’ as an accurate account of westward expansion.” Stephen Aron, the museum’s director, said in an email. Rather, the painting is “one of the ways 19th-century white Americans wished to imagine it.” Among the Autry’s other current exhibitions are one on Black cowboys and another on the role of women in the West. The museum’s website also includes this disclaimer: “We recognize that the Autry Museum and its campuses are located on the traditional lands of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
The post Homeland Security’s Embrace of Art Reopens an Old Debate appeared first on New York Times.
