Selling Providence

This chapter examines the nationalization of the Marcus Whitman story in the 1890s through the efforts of Stephen Penrose, Daniel K. Pearsons, and Oliver W. Nixon. It talks about Pearsons's financial resources and Nixon's wide-ranging media influence that brought the Whitman story to a wider audience than it had ever reached. It also mentions how Penrose, Pearsons, and Nixon refashioned the Whitman story to appeal to Gilded Age sensibilities. The chapter cites Penrose, Pearsons, and Nixon's narratives that Whitman became an exemplar of white masculinity and a harbinger of America's late nineteenth-century imperial expansion, the hero of an imperial providential history. It places Whitman within other late-nineteenth-century histories of the United States that emphasized the nation's superior racial stock, advanced state of civilization, and providential destiny to carry that civilization to the darker-skinned people of the world.