From “Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice” by L. Daniel Hawk
The accounts of the Seneca County historians represent local iterations of a national narrative that had become well established by the end of the nineteenth century. No one articulated this narrative with more panache and enthusiasm than Theodore Roosevelt, whose multivolume The Winning of the West constitutes both a celebration and a defense of US colonial conquest and dispossession. American national mythology casts Roosevelt as the epitome of the energetic, can-do spirit the nation prizes. Teddy is a larger-than-life figure, an American icon, who exemplifies optimism, perseverance, initiative, achievement, self-reliance, and above all winning. The mythic Roosevelt is a man of the people with a broad grin and a fondness for exclaiming “Bully!” This is the courageous leader of men who led his Roughriders to victory at San Juan Hill, Puerto Rice, during the Spanish-American War. He is the visionary president who preserved the West’s breathtaking landscapes for future generations and laid the groundwork for the rise of the United States as a global power.
The Winning of the West, however, reveals a Roosevelt of less noble sentiments. Convinced of the transcendent destiny of the United States, Roosevelt writes, “The conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the (white) race and to the well-being of civilized mankind.” Indeed, “it was all-important that [the land] should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind.” Roosevelt regarded Indians as a selfish people who impeded the advance of civilization. He therefore had little patience with those who challenged the American myth or the righteousness of its conduct.
It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of same and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whole life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they hold joining ownership.
The United States, Roosevelt writes, acquired its land fairly and justly by treaties that had more than compensated the Indians for the loss of their homelands.
In these treaties we have been more than just to the Indians; we have been abundantly generous, for we have paid them many times what they were entitled to; many times what we would have paid any civilized people whose claim was as vague and shadowy as theirs…No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.
Roosevelt’s narrative expresses an unquestioned belief in the superiority of the White race and an unveiled disdain for Indians. This is the Roosevelt who famously riffed on the well-known quip that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” by declaiming, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are. And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Roosevelt believed that “the English-speaking race” was “the mightiest race on which the sun has ever shone” and declared that the pioneers who forged the path westward had “accomplished a task of great ‘race-importance’ in killing off the Indians, a weaker and inferior race.