New Romes for a New World

Every age has some ostentatious system to excuse the havoc it commits.

Horace Walpole, 1762

… “History is a ribbon,” the president [Reagan] had said. A blue ribbon coiling itself like an anaconda around Indians at the top of the mural bore the painting’s title: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. It had been painted during the Civil War, during the completion of the Capitol Building ordered by President Lincoln as a symbol of the states forged by blood and iron into unbroken empire. While a German immigrant named Emanuel Leutze was working on it, the groans of mangled men brought in from nearby battlefields filled the rotunda. Leutze poured into that mural thousands of years of prophecy as well as the seemingly limitless prospects of his adopted country. In the grand tradition of European painting inherited from the Italian Renaissance, his painting idealized the past to legitimate the present. One hundred and twenty-one years later, the president from California was doing the same to television cameras.

Across a mountainous wall, a procession of buckskin-clad pioneers followed the sun from the darkening east into a Far West awash in golden light. Pausing on the crest, the emigrants gaped at the prospect below them. In the distance lay the Golden Gate and the Pacific Ocean, while at the center of the picture, a pioneer Madonna in red, white, and blue calico gave thanks to the Lord as she cradled her child. A coon­skin-capped Joseph pointed joyfully to the Promised Land below. On a crag behind them, a fellow pioneer claimed the land with the Stars and Stripes. Their companions hewed the virgin trees of the Pacific Slope. To Leutze’s cultivated sensibility, these were more than mere settlers entering California: they were both the Israelites entering Canaan and the holy family of the New World. [1] At the Lord’s behest, they went forward, “a nation still mighty in its youth and powerful in its purpose,” in Reagan’s words. They were as inevitable and as natural as the course of the sun. As had the Hebrews before them, so these Christian Chosen entered their Promised Land fully armed and implacable. Springfield rifles carried the will of Providence forward…