There’s a steady flow of people and product moving westward by 1872, when John Gast is commissioned to make this painting for a publisher of western travel guides.
In it, Columbia, the female personification of the United States, presides over westward expansion.
The east, as the dawn of “progress” on this continent, is illuminated by Columbia’s light. The lands to the west are still dark, yet she’s on her way. We are meant to be happy with all the technology and development moving westward, and with the fact that all the Native Americans (and their buffalo) are getting out of the way of our progress. We are meant to understand our westward movement is just.
Today, among the many ways we force our imperial hand is through trade, charity, and other forms of non-coercive intervention, as well as our self-imposed identity as an “international police power.”*
I guess it’s fitting we wind up back at the Pope.
- It’s worth mentioning here that President Theodore Roosevelt self-imposed this identity on us in the early 1900s, and we used it as justification for “intervention” in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. That’s a tangent though. Go there later.