You may know Jackson Pollock, the painter famous for his iconic drip paintings. But what do you know about his wife, artist Lee Krasner? On Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollock, the story of the artist who reset the market for American abstract painting, just maybe not the one you're thinking of.
Listen to Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollock on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. From LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award-winning weekly podcast dedicated to personal development. Whether you're looking for ways to shift your mindset or seeking more fulfillment in your life, we've got you covered. Join me as we dive into captivating stories and research-backed ideas that have empowered me and others to lead lives with more clarity and intention. Everyday Better, making growth an everyday practice. Listen to Everyday Better on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel, host of the Hello Monday Podcast. In my 20s, I knew what career success looked like.
In midlife, it's not that simple. Work is changing, we are changing, and there's no guidebook for how to make sense of it. Start your week with the Hello Monday Podcast.
Listen to Hello Monday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the story of the one. As head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the HVAC is humming, and his facility shines. With Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces, plus 24-7 customer support, his venue never misses a beat.
Call quickgrainger.com or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, another installment of our series about us, the story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McClay. By 1850, a 74-year-old America was in a period of prosperity like we'd never seen before, but we were once again embroiled in an old crisis. Something had to break, but would it? Let's get into the story.
Take it away, Bill. Looking back at the time before the Civil War, it's easy to conclude that war was inevitable. It sure seems that way when we're looking backward, but as the late and great historian David McCullough once noted, the people alive at the time didn't know what was going to happen. They were living in the present, their present, just as we live in ours. There were, however, several moments that did make the war much more probable.
But before moving forward with that part of the story, let's take a step backward. Let's go back to the 1820s. Not long after Mexico won its independence from Spain, it sought to bring in immigrants from the American South to farm and work the land, to populate the land. And they came, and they kept coming.
They were lured by this vast, unsettled territory and the immense opportunity it provided. One of those immigrants was the son of a banker from Missouri named Stephen F. Austin. He arrived with 300 settlers and began what would soon become a substantial wave of immigrants. Five years after Austin's arrival, the number of American immigrants outnumbered the number of Mexicans by nearly three to one. Mexico, trying its best to slow the migration numbers down, could not stop the steady flow of newly arrived American immigrants. And that massive influx of migrants created conflict with the existing Mexican population. It was exacerbated by the strong cultural contrast between the Mexicans who were Catholic and the Americans who were Protestant. Things began to come to a head when Mexico's new government abolished slavery and at the same time demanded that the newly arrived Americans convert. To make matters worse, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana came to power with the goal of centralizing authority and making himself a dictator, which he did in 1824 when he abolished the Mexican constitution and ended the state legislatures. It would lead to the struggle for Texas independence, one that would be led by Virginia native and one-time Tennessee Governor Sam Houston. You'll notice these names, even if Austin and Sam Houston, these are people whose names would become the names of major American cities in Texas.
Things didn't begin well for the Texans. Santa Ana's army of 6,000 moved rapidly against their opposition and ruthlessly so, following Santa Ana's orders to execute all survivors. Those orders were followed with brutal efficiency and an old Spanish mission in San Antonio named the Alamo, where a small but courageous American force was slaughtered.
The town of Goliad was next and 400 prisoners of war were massacred. Santa Ana, it turns out, was on the edge of a big and very bloody victory. But less than 30 days later, the American prospects would change dramatically. At the Battle of San Jacinto, a mostly untrained unit of volunteers, along with a small contingent of Sam Houston's men, would launch a surprise attack at a vastly larger and better trained Mexican army.
The battle lasted mere minutes and the Americans captured Santa Ana himself. In the fall of 1836, Sam Houston would be elected president of a new nation, the independent Republic of Texas. This is why until this day, Texans sometimes see themselves as part of their as part of their own country, because it once was.
Not long after that, Texas voted in overwhelming fashion to become a part of the United States and Houston, in his capacity as a nation's leader, made an appeal to the US government. That appeal was not given a warm reception by President Andrew Jackson. Jackson rightly feared that adding Texas to the nation would enrage Mexico and would inflame the slavery controversy. Martin Van Buren, Jackson's successor, also kicked the can down the road all the way to the 1840s. These were wise decisions by both presidents.
Both men understood that war with Mexico was just not an option. It would disturb the uneasy peace at home on the slavery question. All this was happening at a time when America was growing and growing in its own national confidence. The westward expansion of the country was a fundamental part of that confidence. One journalist who argued for Texas to become part of the ever-expanding United States was a writer and journalist named John O'Sullivan who coined the phrase manifest destiny. In modern American life, the term is likely to be used negatively and for good reason.
It's easily viewed as brash, arrogant. That's not an entirely complete or accurate or fair picture, because for O'Sullivan and members of a movement called Young America, manifest destiny was not merely about the acquisition of land. The roots of the phrase were embedded in a kind of American idealism that was born in the era of Jackson but had deeper roots going back to the very beginnings of our nation and the longing and drama of our nation.
And the longing and drama of the generations that came before him that America was a city on a hill and a land of oak. When we come back, more of the story of us, our manifest destiny, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories and all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life. If you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific website, Hillsdale.edu.
That's Hillsdale.edu. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of our expansion into the West. When we last left off, Professor Maclay told us about John O'Sullivan, the mouthpiece of a group of people involved in the Young America movement advocated for the nation to stretch from sea to shining sea. Indeed, O'Sullivan would put a name to this idea, manifest destiny. Here's Professor Maclay now to read the article O'Sullivan published in his democratic review where the phrase was coined.
Let's return to the story. The American people, having derived their origin from many other nations and the Declaration of National Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality. These facts demonstrated once our disconnected position as regards any other nation that we have in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them and still left with all antiquity, its glories or its crimes. On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only. And so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man in moral, political and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. It is so destined because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny and that of equality is perfect, it's universal, it presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul. The self-evident dictates of morality which accurately defines the duty of man to man and consequently man's rights as man.
Besides the truthful annals of any nation furnish abundant evidence that its happiness, its greatness, its duration were always proportionate to the democratic equality in its system of government. And now here's O'Sullivan writing about the cruelties and injustice inflicted upon mankind through the ages. What friend of human liberty, civilization and refinement can cast his view over the past history of the monarchies and aristocracies of antiquities and not deplore that they ever existed?
What philanthropists can contemplate the oppressions, the cruelties and injustice inflicted by them on the masses of mankind and not turn with moral horror from the retrospect? America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battlefields but in defense of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal and franchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dukes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes.
We've had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones, nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat in supremacy. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles, to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High, the sacred and the true. Its floor shall be a hemisphere, its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an union of many republics comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning, no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood, of peace, of justice, of justice, of justice, of justice, of justice, of peace, and goodwill amongst men.
These happy millions did not include slaves tragically. Now here's how he ended things. Yes we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. Equality of rights is the sign-assurer of our union of states, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals. And while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission, to the entire development of the principle of our organization, freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny and in nature's eternal inevitable decree of cause and effect.
We must accomplish it. All this will be our future history to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of men, the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen.
And her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and goodwill, where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who then can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of future? Wow, there was no doubt in his mind. No doubt there were economic factors driving this concept of manifest destiny. And arrogance was most certainly at play considering the many Native American tribes that wouldn't be impacted negatively by this vision. And the African Americans that were somehow left out of the picture entirely. But still, these were remarkable ambitions and ideals being advanced.
And these are ideals that would remain in place and be extended. But anyway, we do have to see the whole notion of manifest destiny, like so many things, as a mixture of good and bad. In 1844, Congress passed the annexation of Texas, and Justice Jackson had predicted it led to real trouble right away with Mexico. That did not deter the newly elected American president, James K. Polk. Indeed, even while negotiating with Mexico, he was preparing for war, which won congressional approval. Unlike the War of 1812, this war, at least in military terms, was a huge success. By September of the very same year, with great speed and precision, the cities of Monterey, Vera Cruz, and finally Mexico City itself, were captured.
A group of Marines raised the American flag at the National Palace on September 13. This was the halls of Montezuma that we hear in the Marine Corps hymn. Remarkably, too, at the very moment General Scott's soldiers were occupying the Mexican capital, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in California, prompting a massive gold rush that would bring over 300,000 dreamers, prospectors, and miners to Mexico. Transforming the once desolate desert landscape into a bustling, thriving new state. Indeed, the discovery of gold in California seemed to cast upon the expanding nation a kind of divine favor.
As historian Robert Johansen would later note, it was almost as if God had kept the gold hidden until the land came into the possession of the gold. Until the land came into the possession of the American Republic. When we come back, more of the story of us here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and the final portion of our story on Manifest Destiny and the impending crisis over the expansion of slavery. When we last left off, America had trounced Mexico and it acquired vast amounts of land in the West, New Mexico, California, and so on.
Let's return to the story here again is Professor Bill Maclay. The war went in with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February of 1848. Mexico gave up its claims to Texas above the Rio Grande River and ceded California and New Mexico to the United States. Added up, America had acquired 1 million square miles. To comprehend that number, it was the addition of nearly 640 million acres of new land, which was by all measures an astonishing number as significant as the Louisiana Purchase in its scope and impact.
Only two years later, America acquired the Oregon Territory in a treaty negotiated with Great Britain. The dream of Manifest Destiny of a transcontinental nation, a nation spanning from coast to coast, had been fulfilled and with remarkable speed. America now was a nation truly from sea to shining sea.
America's future was as bright and replete with opportunity as much as it ever had been in its brief history and perhaps more so. But this did not change the deep divisions that slavery engendered. The question of whether to extend the institution of slavery into this vast new territory or what degree to allow it to expand disrupted what had actually been a rather uneasy piece in place since the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Even before the war was over, efforts were underway to control the impact it might have. Democratic Congressman David Wilmont, who endorsed the addition of Texas to the nation as a slave state, also proposed that Congress forbid slavery in any of the new territories that America might acquire as a result of a victory in our war with Mexico. Called the Wilmont Proviso, it passed the House many times but was opposed by the Senate time and time by southern senators like John C. Calhoun, who insisted that slaveholders had a constitutional right to take their slaves who were their property anywhere they wanted, including any new territories.
It was in Calhoun's and many Southerners' minds a direct violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution that this would amount to a taking of property without due process of law. How could such a fierce division be settled, particularly when it revolved around different interpretations of fundamental constitutional law? Well, one idea that emerged at the time was the notion of popular sovereignty. This would allow the territories to manage their internal affairs in a way that best suited the needs and concerns of the people living in them.
It was seemingly an elegant solution, a simple solution, a preferred solution to the alternative, which was to keep the debate going and get nowhere. The idea was that decisions about slavery could best be left to the people closest to the situation was really in line with the whole idea of self-rule and American federalism. But that solution ran up against an even more foundational principle, the Declaration of Independence itself. But as often happens, events brought the issue of slavery to a head, irrespective of what politicians said or did. The gold rush in California had created an urgent need for a government that could establish basic law and order. And General Taylor himself, a slave owner, suggested the California should be admitted into the ever-expanding nation and admitted as a free state. Californians themselves had drafted a constitution and created a state government prohibited slavery. Needless to say, southerners were shocked.
They were shocked at Taylor's suggestion, believing that a fellow slaveholder would never turn against them. Moreover, the addition of California as a free state and a huge free state at that would upset the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, the balance between slave and free states. Southern states would now be in a minority.
This would lead to thoughts and even talks of southern secession, real talks for the first time about the South, absent from the South, talks for the first time about the South, absenting itself from the Union. Into this fray stepped the great dealmaker of the Senate, Henry Clay of Kentucky, who put together a complex legislative package that contained eight separate resolutions he hoped would settle the differences between slave and free states. One of the Senate's greatest debates followed. Clay and Webster favored a compromise, while Calhoun and anti-slavery Senator William Seward fiercely opposed any compromise. It would take the great negotiating talents of Illinois' Stephen A. Douglas, the little giant, to fashion a deal everyone could stomach, and it would become known as the Compromise of 1850.
The plan is complex, but here are the basic elements. It called for California's admission as a free state, popular sovereignty to determine the status of slavery in the other territories acquired in the Mexican War, and there was also the matter of strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act, which would require citizens of free states to capture and return escaped slaves to their owners. That was a crucial aspect of the compromise, the strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Act, because the Compromise of 1850 had relegated the slave states to minority status in the Senate. So the upside for the South in this was a recognition and protection by Congress of slavery as an essential part of Southern life, a part that the rest of the nation had to respect.
Well, it didn't work. The compromise didn't resolve the issue. It simply reduced the tension that arose out of these great territorial gains, but it didn't solve anything. That's so clear to us in retrospect, but it was not clear to those acting in history at the time in their present. And problems delayed can lead to greater problems when finally confronted. Sometimes delay is the right path, and sometimes it's a disastrous path. That's what statesmanship is all about, determining which is the better path. Many abolitionists and moral reformers of the day, the anti-slavery proponents, were seen as crackpot idealists, but the case could easily be made that crackpot realism was a problem too. The idea that the nation could endlessly postpone addressing itself to an issue as fundamental as slavery and human bondage in a nation that was predicated on the universal expression that all men are created equal, that idea was untenable and even absurd. It seems that way to us looking back.
How much longer could a divided nation withstand this division? The answer to that question was soon to come. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, himself a Hillsdale College graduate, and a special thanks as always to Professor Bill McClay. His extraordinary storytelling continues with The Story of Us. He's a professor at Hillsdale College, author of The Land of Hope and the Young Readers' Edition. Go to Amazon and buy both of them, buy two, and read them to your kids. They're terrific reading.
The Story of Us manifests destiny here on Our American Stories. You may know Jackson Pollock, the painter famous for his iconic drip paintings, but what do you know about his wife, artist Lee Krasner? On Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollock, the story of the artist who reset the market for American abstract painting, just maybe not the one you're thinking of.
Listen to Death of an Artist, Krasner and Pollock on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. From LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award-winning weekly podcast dedicated to personal development. Whether you're looking for ways to shift your mindset or seeking more fulfillment in your life, we've got you covered. Join me as we dive into captivating stories and research-backed ideas that have empowered me and others to lead lives with more clarity and intention. Everyday Better, making growth an everyday practice. Listen to Everyday Better on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From LinkedIn News, I'm Jessi Hempel, host of the Hello Monday Podcast. In my 20s, I knew what career success looked like.
In midlife, it's not that simple. Work is changing, we are changing, and there's no guidebook for how to make sense of it. Start your week with the Hello Monday Podcast. Listen to Hello Monday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Perez Hilton from the Perez Hilton Podcast, keeping you in the know.
Here's a bit of our show. Taylor Swift is bigger than Michael Jackson ever was. That's nowhere near factory.
Yes, it is. Perez, then you don't remember the 80s. I remember the 80s. The media was the most insane thing I've ever witnessed in my life, and nothing will ever be bigger. She is bigger than Michael Jackson ever was.
No, she's not. Listen to the Perez Hilton Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tamika D. Mallory.
And it's your boy, my song, The General. And we are your hosts of TMI. And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect Network, breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture, and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. Listen to TMI on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right.
