Trump is the heir to Morse
Amid all the hand-wringing about Donald Trump Making Greenland Great Again, it’s worth noting that #47 was hardly the first president to envision America as one great swath of global real estate, rightfully his. For as it turns out, imagining geography has been a longstanding American obsession.
Since the California Gold Rush of 1849, territorial expansion has been driven by a lust for minerals. And today the case is no different. As has been widely noted by the gob-struck press, Greenland conceals all sorts of big grey rocks underneath its mile-long layer of ice, within which lurk fortunes in gallium, cerium, and lanthanum — essential ingredients for iPhones, jets, and nuclear weapons. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have already invested untold sums in KoBold Metals, which will use AI to figure out where all those goodies are hidden. Not to mention the fresh-water riches locked in icebergs — a few of which might have come in handy during the Los Angeles fires. Poland Springs and Evian may soon face stiff competition from those massive chunks of ice, which hold one-fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water.
Yet to be honest, even before the present brouhaha, America was already brandishing its military supremacy in Greenland. For the past 60 years or so, the US has essentially ruled the frozen land from an outpost on the northwest coast, a United States Space Force base called Pituffik (in local Inuit, “the place the dogs are tied”). The natives are too busy staying alive during sunless winters to care about what goes on at the northernmost tip of their island. Just across the North Pole from Russia, Pituffik is home to a large and extended family of squadrons, satellite control networks, and ballistic missile early warning sensors.
The base was established in secret under the code name Operation Blue Jay after the Germans occupied Denmark in 1940. An armada of 120 ships, 12,000 men, and 300,000 tonnes of cargo was needed to build it, plus a brutal schedule of continuous work through the endless daylight of summer. The project was comparable to the Herculean efforts to construct the Panama Canal half a century before — yet another strip of land presently tempting MAGA.
The only hiccup in America’s show of snow-globe supremacy came in 1968, when a cabin fire doomed a B-52 bomber with four B28FI nuclear bombs on board, which crashed in Baffin Bay. The conventional explosives onboard detonated the nuclear payload, resulting in widespread radioactive contamination. The good news is that not all of the H-bombs exploded. The bad news is that one still rests at the bottom of the bay.
Not that Americans care much about radioactive fallout near the North Pole. Or popular sovereignty, for that matter. When did Americans ever shed a tear over displaced Algonquins, Comanches, or Iroquois — much less Danes, Norsemen, Paleo-Inuits, or any other Greenlander lost to frost-bitten history? Thankfully, the Trump administration already has a scheme for reparations in mind. When Don Jr showed up in the territory’s capital, Nuuk, right before his dad’s second inauguration, reports came in that the contingent had enticed a crowd of homeless people to the event with the promise of a free lunch and MAGA hats. It is unlikely that the grub was sensitive to native tastes, as Don Jr probably had no interest in suaasat, national dish of Greenland — a delectable stew that can feature seal meat, whale, caribou, or seabirds. But one 11-year-old did apparently come home to show his daddy what the nice Americans had given him as a souvenir — a $100 bill.
Many reasons lie behind such historical hubris. The Greenlandic Inuits dubbed their island “The Land of Great Length”, and it’s an appellation that might apply just as well to America — a country bordering on the Allegheny mountains, the Mississippi River, and the vast swamps of Florida that was so large and diverse that it was impossible in the 18th century to envision it as any sort of union. As a result, maps became essential political tools to forge national identity in the early republic, as the secrets of mathematical surveying were known only to the settlers. Only the settlers had the power to draw those magical lines on paper. And only they, by examining their folded and coloured scraps, could define trespass or, for that matter, taxation.
Maps were in particularly high demand in 1784 when Jedidiah Morse, a Yale student in need of a little extra cash, published his first geography textbook for elementary school students — and sold out the print run. His American Geography not only became required reading at his alma mater and in every classroom in America, but a huge best-seller throughout the nation.
Morse was the first enabler of what has become MAGA dogma: “You can’t have a country without borders.” For the would-be imperialist, however, the best country of all would be one without any borders whatsoever — a sentiment that would eventually be turned into the poetic sublime by the great Transcendentalist, Walt Whitman, who famously “contained multitudes”.
Global hegemony was locked into the American mind early, with generations of students consigned to memorising Morse’s geography textbooks — reprints of which were making him rich. The second edition of his opus was the two-volume American Universal Geography, expanded to 1,250 pages, featuring more than 7,000 articles that included a history of the ancient Israelites, Egyptians, and Greeks, a summary of all the earth’s climates and ethnic groups, various mathematical formulae, and a description of the creation of the universe. Name after name of mountain, town, lake, and sea fell from Morse’s imperial pen, as if he were Adam at the dawn of a new creation, at the centre of which lay America.
At Yale, Morse had snagged as his thesis adviser Professor of Theology Jonathan Edwards the Younger, son of the legendary Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards, whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had detailed the hair-raising horrors of hell. And it turned out that geography was fertile soil for Calvinist doctrines of pre-destination, as Morse declared that climate not only decided the political but the personal. New England was a “high, hilly, and in some parts mountainous country, formed by nature to be inhabited by a hardy race of free, independent republicans”. Further south, however, the warm weather of Georgia produced “a general relaxation of the nervous system”, which, in combination with slave labour resulted in an “indolence” that was the “parent of disease”. Americans couldn’t get enough of such wisdom. Morse had made it clear: geographical determinism trumped self-determination.
One unfortunate result of this philosophy was that once America’s borders had been established, the worst threat to the country always came from within. It’s a belief that aligns well with the MAGA fear of the Deep State. Thus did Jedidiah Morse rise to a pulpit outside of Boston in 1798 and warn his congregation of those who might seek to “root out and abolish Christianity and overthrow all civil government”. “We have in truth secret enemies,” he declared, “…insinuating its members into all positions of distinction and influence, whether literary, civil, or religious.”
Morse’s nightmare was that his enemy, the “globalist”, would replace America’s national government with a European-style political union, a bloated bureaucracy that nominally honoured national borders, but secretly wished for international power. “The future does not belong to globalists,” Trump insisted to the General Assembly of the United Nations. “The future belongs to patriots.” Morse could only have dreamed of a Trump and his serial withdrawals from the World Health Organisation, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, UNESCO, and the UN’s Human Rights Council. For Morse, like Trump, possessed a deep-seated scepticism of Europe. Moreover, Morse’s fears of international contagion sparked by the liberal enemy within align perfectly with Trump’s insistence on a deep state, on the dangers of the woke media, and a federal court system dedicated to lawfare.
By the end of his life, Morse’s investments in stocks had tanked, his land speculations had yielded nothing but debt, and his liberal congregation in the Boston suburbs had fired him. All the more reason for him to remain convinced that there was a plot against the country hatched by a cabal of globalist child-murderers aided and abetted by Satan worshippers, radicals, sexual deviants, and people of colour, all of which he believed were the result of the secret workings of the Bavarian Illuminati.
The answer to such pervasive anxieties? More real estate! In long and enthusiastic forewords to ever-growing editions of his life’s work, Morse insisted that the uncharted spaces to the north, south, and west of the early Republic must become part of America. He envisioned a realm larger than all of Europe, “about twice the size of the Chinese Empire, and if we except Russia, … by far the largest territory on earth”. It would be called Fredonia.
And as fate would have it, it was around the time Morse retreated in disgrace from liberal Boston to conservative New Haven that the 1814 Treaty of Kiel was signed — an agreement that languished in obscurity until last week. This was the document that officially stripped Norway of its colonies, thereby allowing the Danish monarch to declare Greenland terra nullius — Latin for “nobody’s land”. Which is precisely how Trump sees Greenland.
“We do not want to be Americans,” lamented Greenland’s Prime Minister, Múte Egede. Nor Fredonians, for that matter. His snow-covered, mineral-rich island bristling with intercontinental missiles may dwarf Mexico, but what is that compared to the moon and Mars? To Americans, who have long suffered from full-blown geographical megalomania, it’s all the same.
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Had the U.K. been bright enough after the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763 to grant its American colonies the status of a Kingdom, rather like Ireland, none of this would have happened.
The Americans would obviously have revelled in their own House of Lords and Commons and the ‘privilege and patronage’ it would have engendered. Like Ireland they would also have had their own Military Establishment.
The result would have been the greatest Empire the world had ever seen* and we would ALL have basked in the ‘Immensa Britanniae Pacis Maiestas’.**
Even Jedidiah Morse would have approved.
*With the possible exception of Ancient Rome.
**The boundless majesty of Britannia’s Peace.
I found this article enteraining and informative in a “whaddaya know” sort of way. But wherever ya stand on Trump and his MAGA hopefuls, Kaufman’s present-day parallels seem thinly drawn. I understand we’re only a few days into what (in one way or another) is likely to prove a very consequential four years, but…must everything be suffused with the notion that Trump is either the greatest blessing, or curse, that we’ve seen in generations?
You have a generous word allotment in a weekend essay of this sort. Let the implications speak for themselves more. Rediscover the arts of investigation and nuance, to replace the history-as-grab-bag-to-support-fixed-overarching-claim approach that’s on the rise in all directions. And in the case of this specific breed of article: Don’t you see that a negative spotlight is DJT’s second favorite thing?
This collection of fun facts coulda (woulda shoulda) been more fun and informative. Or at least less concocted to a predetermined end.
You’re too generous. This article is terrible. Conflating the history, personalities and ideologies of the far-ranging American phenomenon called “manifest destiny” with Trump’s geo-strategic response to Chinese mineral hegemony and Russian militarism… is utterly retarded. You can smell the ‘deadline approaching’ desperation from here.
Maybe. I tend to alternate between being too generous and being too harsh. I think you may be falling into the second line of excess here. Did have to extract the value I found out of a collection of points and claims that don’t cohere into an real argument.
I’m also playing underdog’s advocate for an author whose admittedly unfocused, anti-Trump takes routinely get trashed here, in a way that doesn’t usually mean or say much either; more venting and piling on.
I think Kaufman provides a seed of discussion or at least lively dispute about America’s past and present direction writ large. (But to address a scattershot case of his sort to this readership seems akin to trolling—on the part of the editors too. So let the rage and mockery reign if it must).
And the author includes this little ‘fact’:
underneath its mile-long layer of ice
If the ice were only a mile long it would be meaningless and no different than many roads this past week. But at a mile thick, it is a store of fresh water.
How can an author and the editor let something so obviously ridiculous go?
Well i just saw a propaganda “documentary” from an Islamist movement that said “11m Algerians, a third of the population, work in agriculture”. They then said Algeria needs to develop mineral and auto industries to serve its 39m population. I believe the English vernacular saying is “Cos math is waycist innit”.
Agreed – don’t let the facts get in the way of the (failed) liberal religion.
Yep. There are no ICBMs in Greenland, never have been, and actually very few aircraft are stationed at Pituffik. It should also be noted that it is the last American outpost in Greenland, down from nearly a dozen a half century ago and more.
Then we have this: ‘Only the settlers had the power to draw those magical lines on paper. And only they, by examining their folded and coloured scraps, could define trespass or, for that matter, taxation.’
Tell that to the historians who have documented the Comanche warriors who levied transit taxes on settlers crossing their territory on the Oregon trail, settlers who in their fear shot each other by mistake more than Comanche.
As they say, you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.
No, it’s an interesting article and rooting it in the 18th century was informative. Trump’s approach seems to be a combination of the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, geopolitical concerns and the good old-fashioned imperial instinct to conquer and exploit other countries/territories and their resources. Europeans did it for long enough so they can’t complain if Trump now does it to them. The US will take control of Greenland but it will remain nominally Danish.
Didn’t the Marx Brothers have a satire on a country called Freedonia in one of their films?
They did. 1933 pre-Code movie: “Duck Soup”. One of my favorites of theirs. They were brilliant.
Great movie. For raw comedy, probably their funniest.
Yes. I live in Nacogdoches, Texas where the Marx brothers got funny, and which used to call itself “Fredonia,” long before Morse is alleged (by Kauffman) to have coined the name. “Fredonia” was also one of the names proposed for the USA–Colombia and America and Fredonia have four syllables, just like Brittania! Plus ca change…
Hail, Hail Freedonia Land of the Brave and Free!
Clearly a different place to Fredonia – a small Kingdom led by King Fred Schneider after he deposed Fred Kaufmann! National anthem is “dance this mess around” and the national dish is Limberger cheese, with no sides, served at room temperature. Srsly humor is prob the only way to react to articles like this – i expect Hr. Kaufmann’s real name is Phil Space. Morse was maybe the inspiration for Frestonia in Notting Hill late 70s – early 80s, Marx Bros same for Freetown Christiania in Denmark?
Wasn’t that the basis of the film “The Mouse that Roared “?
Why, Mr Firefly!
Love it.
“To Americans, who have long suffered from full-blown geographical megalomania, it’s all the same.”
Oh, yes, the exceptional nation that has quite literally saved the world several times in addition to bringing unheard of levels of prosperity, health, freedom and well-being to vast swathes of the earth (not always honorably, but hey, Americans are at root humans, after all) is THE WORST THING EVER TO HAVE HAPPENED TO THE PLANET.
Yada yada.
Curiosity drove me to skim read Jedidiah Morse’s geography where I found the following snippet in his chapter on the British Isles
“The English government, favourable to liberty and to every exertion of genius, has provided by wise and equitable laws, for the secure enjoyment of property acquired by ingenuity and labour, and has removed obstacles to industry, by prohibiting the importation of such articles from abroad which could be manufactured at home.”
In another chapter he refers always to the “Gulf of Mexico”.
Like all educated people, he understood that “America” is the proper name for the western hemisphere
One can only shrink in horror from the great unwashed, particularly the authors of “Death to America” signs. Or perhaps common usage is more relevant than geographical precision.
I seem to recall there being another Fredonia in North Kensington, near Latimer Road, when I lived in Notting Hill 30 years ago.
Ah, that would be Frestonia – named afer Freston Rd but also it was home to lots of stoners (and speed freaks, psychonauts etc). The place nurtured some great bands though – Pink Faries, Androids of Mu, Motorhead, The Clash etc. As the punk era limped on the junkie contingent grew and like all hippy pipe dreams the thing fell apart – amid acrimony, obvs.
I expect quite a few Native Americans were pleased to see the back of the more violent tribes – they probably looked at the Sherriffs’ posses and the Pinkertons and wearily exclaimed “they may be b**t**ds but at least they’re our b**t**ds”
Is anyone else thinking of the Marx Brothers classic, Duck Soup?
Hail, Freedonia!
Pretending that America is uniquely wicked is an old, predictable and ignorant game. Usually played by academics.