Manifest Destiny

We have all been taught that Manifest Destiny is a morally suspect concept, lying somewhere to the right of the mid-point between the benign (and indeed beneficial) Protestant Work Ethic on one hand and the genocidal, eugenics-driven Deutsches Lebensraum on the other.  

But regardless of how one feels about Manifest Destiny, there can be little doubt that it was a real American thing in the 19th century, especially after the Civil War.  Hegel’s concepts are illuminating here: Manifest Destiny was for Americans of that day der Geist die Zeiten and it descended upon and dominated the psyches of certain individuals, compelling them into this intensely purposive activity of Going West.  

It is difficult to see how it could have played out differently.  We Americans, are, after all, ultimately descendants from those Angles, Saxons and Jutes who left Scandinavia and occupied the British Isles after the Romans left.  A little later, our more immediate ancestors crossed the Atlantic and rowed up onto the eastern shores of the new world. It was then only a matter of time before their descendants would trek further west, across the Mississippi and the wind-swept plains, over and through the Rockies, all the way to the Pacific.  

The AMC series Hell on Wheels graphically depicts this westward march via the expansion of the Union Pacific Railroad.  The race to the Pacific is real, and very violent. It is vital, primordial, compelling and alluring.  For sure, it was a form of warfare, designed to heal a nation that had just finished its own Civil War.  It’s exactly like the opening of Henry IV, Part 1. Now united after civil war, a new war begins.

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CULLEN BOHANNON AND THOMAS DURANT

The protagonist of Hell on Wheels is Cullen Bohannon, a former slave-owning, Mississippi tobacco farmer who saw significant action in the Civil War.  His wife – an anti-slavery northerner - and son were brutally murdered during the War, and Bohannon went west initially in search of his family’s executioners.  Eventually he joined the railroad, replacing the maniacal westward push for his thirst for vengeance. As the saga unfolds, in addition to escaping countless risky situations, Bohannon falsely tells former slaves that he freed his slaves before the war; but yet, his relationships with former slaves demonstrate not only his humanity, but also his deep Southern honor, loyalty, and capacity for friendship.  Bohannon is a fictional character, but he is a composite of many Americans of the era, especially border state Americans who were deeply and legitimately invested on both sides of that great contest which so absorbed the attention and engrossed the energies of the nation (to use Lincoln’s words). With Cullen Bohannon, we are reminded that good fiction reveals more truth, rather than less.

The antagonist is the real life character, Thomas Durant.  Durant was an orphan who went to medical school, then became a captain of industry.  In Hell on Wheels he leads the Union Pacific Railroad, but is also the chairman of the construction company that built the railroad, and a major investor in the cattle operation that fed the railroad workers.  Modern corporate ethics were not really a thing yet. Accordingly, Durant owns and profits from the entire project. Durant’s life and the railroad’s push west are one and the same, and he never gives up.  He is regularly shot, beaten and left for dead, and imprisoned for blatant corruption (though his captors are also corrupt). He murders a United States Senator (that’s fiction; at least I think it is….), beats other men to death and survives numerous gun fights.  He also does normal railroad things like raise money, issue stock to key stakeholders, conduct board meetings, schmooze lenders, and hire and fire workers.  He is relentless, daring, compulsive; violent, unscrupulous, drunken and driven. Sort of a combination of Billy the Kid, Han Solo and John D. Rockefeller.

Then there’s the Indians, the Congregationalist pastor (and his daughter) who rode with John Brown, the freed slaves, the saloon keepers and prostitutes, the ranchers, the Mormons, the Germans, the Irish and even one Norseman, Thor Gunderson, whom everyone calls the Swede.  His journey alone could fill numerous volumes of scholarly studies on abnormal psychology.

Hell on Wheels is sweeping, magnificent and brutal.  It gives no quarter whatsoever to political correctness.  It romanticizes nothing; no one is purely good or bad. Rather, it simply and accurately portrays the war which was westward expansion.  The gory details are mesmerizing, and the story unfolds, in epic fashion, with gripping episodes but with the underlying narrative duel of Bohannon and Durant, ever pulling us forward with them as the railroad inches west.  And as a work of cinematic art, even amateurs like me can appreciate the ubiquitous presence of John Ford, and the many reworkings of the High Noon final showdown.  This stuff never gets old.

Ultimately, of course, as with all great fiction (and Hell on Wheels really is historical fiction), Hell on Wheels is not about the on again, off again partnership of and duel between Bohannon and Durant, or the other relationships and battles that occur all around them.  It’s not about the back-breaking labor, the love interests, the loyalties and treacheries; the violence, the piety, the sincerely held Christian beliefs and the doubts.  Hell on Wheels is ultimately about the awful and heroic struggle of being human, and being human in this particularly brutal and primordial setting of the winning of the American West.

And make no mistake:  it is about being a particular type of human, that is, Americans.  Every character has truly and distinctly American qualities: the dignity of the freed slaves, the industriousness and gnostic individualism of the Mormons, together with their strangely totalitarian theology and practices; the martial virtues and viciousness of the Native Americans, together with their wisdom and compassion and love of freedom; the honor of the Southerner; the law and order of the Northern Carpetbaggers who reconstructed an unrepentant South; the intuitive genius of Ulysses S. Grant and his Midwestern commonsense; the weaknesses and strengths of every aspect of the American character are writ large in this sprawling epic.  Hell on Wheels is a combination of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Walt Whitman’s I Hear America Singing and Song of Myself (though without Whitman’s regrettable omission of the South).  As much as we might like to believe that our story in this era were less brutal and costly, Hell on Wheels reminds us that this story is our story.  And the story is told really well.