Convinced of the special place that America had both in history and in the world of his time, Adams pursued one of the longest public careers in the country’s history, stretching from the mid-1790s until his death in 1848. He constantly strove to protect the independence of the country and to advance its prestige and standing.

In no area did his determination stand out more than in his commitment to both American territorial expansion and pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere. As a Federalist United States senator from Massachusetts, he supported the Virginia Republican President Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from France even though his own party and his state opposed it, fearing it would in time significantly enhance Republican political strength. In Quincy Adams’s view, adding the immense Louisiana Territory stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains enhanced the greatness of his country. To him that result far outweighed the possibility that new states eventually carved from the Territory might diminish the influence of his own New England.

When Adams became secretary of state in 1817, he brought to the office a vision of his country extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean. He saw his opportunity in negotiations with Spain over the purchase of Florida, the only remaining area east of the Mississippi not then possessed by the United States.

Spain was willing to sell Florida, but worried about a powerful and expansionist United States moving closer to Mexico, the jewel of Spanish America. In those talks, Adams advocated pushing the southwestern border with Spain beyond the Sabine River, the boundary between American Louisiana and Spanish Mexico, deeper into its northern province of Texas. But, sensing Spanish apprehension on that matter, Adams instead pressed Spain to relinquish to the United States its claim to the Pacific Northwest, and Spain acquiesced.

Thus, in the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, also known as the Adams-Onis Treaty, for the first time the United States gained a legitimate claim to territory bordering the Pacific Ocean. It had become a continental nation. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, Americans would migrate westward toward a distant frontier that Adams’ diplomacy initially made possible.

Texas would reappear in Adams’ future. As president between 1825 and 1829, he tried to purchase the province from Mexico, by then independent of Spain and the new owner of Texas. His efforts failed. Later, as a congressman in the 1830s, he opposed adding Texas to the United States—because it permitted slavery. Likewise, Adams opposed the Mexican-American War because he interpreted its origins as an aggressive move to advance slavery.

Yet, where there was no possibility of slavery, Adams remained an ardent expansionist. As a congressman in the 1840s, he vigorously backed sole American control of Oregon. Since the Transcontinental Treaty, the United States had possessed the Spanish title, but Great Britain also had a claim. And the two countries had agreed on a joint occupation, with the stipulation that with one year’s notice either party could terminate the agreement. In 1846, the United States did so, with Congressman Adams enthusiastically on the side of an American Oregon.

Adams also never stopped looking south in search of domination over the Western hemisphere. And in time, a weakened Spain would again offer opportunities.

By the early 1820s Spanish colonies in both North and South America had begun breaking away from their former colonial master. Spain simply did not have the power to hold them, but Adams worried that another European power or a concert of them would replace Spain on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

With the most powerful navy in the world, Great Britain represented the greatest potential threat. But a growing rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States led to an unexpected British overture. In the summer of 1823 the British government invited the U.S. government to stand with it and together tell the world that no other power would be permitted to replace Spain. Applauding this initiative, many prominent Americans wanted to accept.

Adams was almost alone in demurring. He wanted his country to make a unilateral declaration that the United States alone would not allow any future European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. And against considerable opposition Adams persuaded President James Monroe to adopt this position. In his message to Congress in December 1823, Monroe promulgated what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Yet, fundamentally it was the John Quincy Adams Doctrine. A major thrust of the doctrine proclaimed that the United States would not stand for any other European power establishing a new colonial empire on this side of the Atlantic. That prohibition applied to Great Britain too. The United States would dominate the Americas, Adams said, and assert its hemispheric hegemony without challenge. He wrote, “We have it; we constitute the whole of it.” From his time forward, the United States has in different ways affirmed its pre-eminence in this hemisphere.

Thus, for the future United States as a continental nation and the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, the vision and policy of John Quincy Adams were formative and far-reaching.

The post Why John Quincy Adams Was the Founder of American Expansionism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My mouth was numbed with spice from pulverized chiles. So many outdoor comals, toasting so many tortillas, extracting the caramel from so many thinly sliced onions, lined the streets of the small towns, and I felt compelled to pull the car to the side of the road, stop, and eat from each one. I’m here, I told myself, to eat all the chile sauce I can. I’d spent most of the season on the road, conducting research across America for a book that begins each chapter with a foodstuff typical of a state, and digresses from there. But what I was concerned with at the moment was winter—particularly, how even among all of this sun-cooked cacti, the holiday season was bound to a dominant narrative, one that depended on images of snow, rosy cheeks, exhalations condensing like ghosts in the air before us.

Winter is coming to an end now, but I still can’t help thinking about how in America—in song and story, TV commercial and dream—the season is white. And when the Earth itself doesn’t manufacture snow, we do it ourselves, with machines named Snow Gun, American Output, Atomic Chill. When I arrived in Tularosa’s town square, I saw one such snow machine spewing its cold manufactured flurries into the air. I parked the car along the square’s southern border, watched as a team of smocked volunteers worked with inadequate gloves to mound the snow into piles from which children, for a few coins, could pack snowballs for the throwing.

The line for the snowballs was long and snaking. Up front, a 7-year-old girl forked over her mother’s money and built a pathetic 8-inch snowman with the aid of a rigid burlap mold, under the supervision of a beautiful red-vested volunteer with matching red Santa Claus barrettes. Behind this odd snow station, a skinny teenage boy stood behind a pot-bellied beast of an instrument—a harmonichord, the premature offspring of piano and violin, wide as a park bench—and, with the aid of a hand-crank, elicited a pathetic winter circus tune.

I got out of the car, and crossed the square to be closer to the music. A small girl ran up to me, blew soap bubbles into my face through a blue plastic wand. She wore no shoes. Her mother, younger than I was, touched my arm, said, in barely-accented English, “Don’t be sad.”

But I couldn’t help it. Behind this version of winter, there was that other: nuclear winter. On July 16, 1945, Tularosa had shuddered in the aftermath of the nearby Trinity atomic bomb test. Ash rained over the residents after the blast, and their bodies incubated rare forms of cancer as they picnicked and played soccer and celebrated birthdays on poisoned ground decorated with radioactive green trinitite glass. Some residents collected—and still collect—this glass and set it on their mantelpieces, because, in spite of its toxicity, it is so beautiful.

At the other end of the fake snow-covered square, couples ice-skated in tank tops, tube-sled down squat radioactive hills. I wondered what compels us to sacrifice our bodies to things we deem beautiful. I wondered how many fingers we’ve lost to the frostbite because we couldn’t stop ourselves from touching the snow.

Tularosa’s residents at the time of the bomb test primarily were descendants of Mexican farmers. In the 1840s, following the Mexican-American War, these farmers were bemused to find that they now lived in the United States, even though their houses remained fixed. It was a devotion to Manifest Destiny that allowed America to justify embellishing its borders—a belief that we had a divine right to owning whatever we please. In raining down nuclear ash on their families a century later, our impulse was the same: a pursuit of a fresh national personality, that of global superpower, with the ability to defend the borders it fabricated.

In coldness—even this forced coldness—we can feel this atrocious American ideal anatomically. As we shiver, as our hairs stand on end, as our teeth chatter, the atomic electricity within us compels our flesh to rise into goosebumps, hundreds of little piloerections running from neck’s nape down to chest and shoulders. We gain such a barely noticeable elevation, expanding, imperialistically, that much further into air that once belonged to other molecules. In coldness, we can tell ourselves that we’re celebrating the sort of cockeyed, diverse heritage that only bears the illusion of singularity.

In this conversation between body and weather, past and present, the electricity within us communicates with the electricity without—the streetlamps and telephone wires, the generators and grids, the charges and currents and fields and magnetism, the neons and the fluorescents, the gases both noble and peasant, the potential and static, the kinetic and flowing. The nuclear weapons. The snow machines. We’re as dizzy as in a dream, our bodies blossoming as they quake.

In this way, and in this weather, we can time travel—sense the energies of the past and future, our bodies, as our ideals and empires, expanding, even as they implode.

This is who we are, I thought, as I picked chile skins from my teeth with my tongue, as the flakes of fake snow whirled above, drawing lassoes or nooses or mushroom clouds onto the sky. We appropriate. We make of things what they’re not in order to gel with a dominant narrative. Because the borders have been redrawn, because we are a superpower both militaristically and commercially, winter, here, must be cold, in order to fit in.

And now there I was, once again bound to appropriation, however different the scale, trying—as so many have before me—to claim brief ownership of this place, via chiles, definitions of winter, and a chapter in a book. Even as I felt terrible about this, I didn’t know how to avoid it; how to avoid asserting some sort of malign dominance in my compulsion to girdle all of these elements into a delusional thesis. So, like most of us, I ate chiles, and watched the fake snow gyrate, and took my notes, and made no difference. I am American, after all, wedging my quiet violence up into the crevices of apathy. My writing did none of these people any good. I was a peeping tom, both entitled to peep yet somehow still unworthy, fogging up the glass of history, other people’s milieus. I spat chile skins to the cobblestone and licked my lips. I watched.

To her mother’s snapping camera, the 7-year-old girl with the snowman beamed as the barretted employee supplied her with small pieces of cork and a reusable string of carrot to stick into her creation’s face. Machine-pumped flakes waltzed around her head, collecting in her black hair. She knew, as I knew—if only via goosebumps, and some inexplicable and unpleasant smell—the testing of the limits of human invention isn’t quite over, nor is our compulsion to name the ultimately destructive after the holy. Slaughter renamed destiny. A bomb called Trinity.

Though this world was melting quickly, and the girl was already being ushered out to allow for the next child, her face, as if trapped in a mold of its own, would endure its smile.

The post Manifest Destiny, That Atrocious Ideal appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, conceived of by L.A.-based visual artist Zoe Crosher and co-curated with Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), answered that question with a series of about 100 billboards by 10 artists installed along the I-10 Freeway—from Florida to California.

In 2013, Crosher and LAND’s director Shamim Momin invited 10 artists to create “chapters” of 10 billboards, and the results were as diverse as the landscapes they inhabited. In New Orleans, people spotted a billboard by Sanford Biggers—a photograph of a long line of camels crossing an arid desert—while Houston drivers pondered the four words printed on one of Eve Fowler’s billboards: “the difference is spreading.”

For Crosher, this kind of reflection is key to the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project.
“The hope is to urge people to reconsider the history and mythology of the cross-country road trip,” says Crosher. “Instead of talking abstractly and fantasizing about the trip west, the idea is to physically move through the very landscape being fantasized.”

The first 10 billboards went up in Jacksonville, Florida, in October 2013—Shana Lutker’s “Onward and Upward” series, which showed historic images of skies, like a painting of pre-Spanish Florida or a photo of Jacksonville in 1909. Whizzing by on the freeway, drivers catch a glimpse of a double image—one skyline superimposed on top of another.

After Florida, billboards popped across the I-10 east to west—from Alabama and Louisiana to three cities in Texas, then on to New Mexico, Arizona, and finally California. The last chapter, by Matthew Brannon, will be installed in L.A. in late June, to coincide with a culminating weekend of events and exhibitions throughout the city related to the project’s themes.

Several of the project’s artists played with the device of repetition so often used in traditional advertising—using the same image on every billboard so it became ingrained in commuters’ minds. For his chapter, “Love and Work,” in San Antonio, John Baldessari created a split image of a man reclining in a hammock and a huge black-and-white gear. The visual parallel of man and machine, and leisure and labor speaks to “the precarious balancing act that is both America’s ambition and the source of many of its most salient problems,” according to the project description.

Crosher’s own chapter, “LA-LIKE: Shangri-LA’d,” went up along the I-10 in Palm Springs in April 2015. Her billboards show lush green foliage—which is meant to symbolize the promise of abundance in contrast to the desert that surrounds it—that becomes increasingly brown and withered as you progress through the billboards.

The quick glimpse, the experience of viewing art at 70 miles per hour, is part of what makes the project so special. “When you actually see the billboards, it happens so quickly,” said Crosher. “There’s this wonderful moment of billboard hunting, of trying to find something that is so very difficult to see, going that fast.”

The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project’s Culminating Weekend takes place across Los Angeles from June 24 to 28.

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