Manifest Destiny in His Preface, Term Paper

Mahan, who advocated creating a colossal navy and building bases, taking more land under MD. Growth is "a vital necessity to a nation," Mahan wrote, in justifying the position that the U.S. should annex the Hawaiian Islands. Lodge was a respected writer and historian, and he put forth the notion (Merk, 237) in articles that Cuba, the Hawaiian Islands, Canada and other territories should be conquered - but not Mexico, Central America, and South America. After all, the people and land there "were not of a desirable kind."

These ideas were well received, and Lodge was rewarded with an appointment in the McKinley administration as "Assistant Secretary of the Navy" - where he used his position to push for a bigger and better navy. In the end of his book, Merk (261) argues that those who were in positions of power and who could sway public opinion were "amoral" and "misrepresented the nation." Those people, including newspaper people and politicians "...fooled a small part of the American people much of the time." And they fooled others in America "much of the time," but "never the mass all the time." Meantime Manifest Destiny had died, Merk asserts on page 266, but the "mission" of the U.S. ("equality of right before the law") remains….....