At the most fundamental level, Manifest Destiny was a racist doctrine. Manifest Destiny presupposed that some of the people who lived in North America-citizens of the United States, especially white males-were “real” Americans, and that Native Americans were mere obstacles to the rightful claim of American land by white men. Without Manifest Destiny to support it, one could even argue, the United States couldn’t have convinced its citizens to expand westward. Inspired by the bold slogans and almost religious intensity of the movement, millions of white settlers left their homes in the eastern United States to make their fortunes in California, Oregon, and Oklahoma. Manifest Destiny argued that white American have both the right and the duty to “Go West” and colonize North America, an idea that proved hugely influential in the U.S. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny was perhaps the most important form of ideology that was used to justify America’s murderous policies against the Native Americans. Sickeningly, they used propaganda to give a benign and even moralistic gloss to policies that were, in their effects, genocidal. But American leaders (at least for the most part) weren’t explicit about the destructive intent of their country’s policies. government’s Native American policies in the 19th century were genocidal. Dee Brown makes a convincing case that the U.S.
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