The Terms and Conditions of American Democracy

Last summer in July, 2025, The Department of Homeland Security posted an image of John Gast’s American Progress (1872; Autry Museum of the American West) on X.^[1] As Gustavo Arellano of the LA Times writes, the DHS has published a stream of “meme-worthy” content (aimed at, as he puts, a “meme-slinging basement dweller on 4chan”) that reveals a darker purpose— “showing the racist id of the Trump administration in real time.”^[2] American Progress justified the concept of Manifest Destiny^[3], the quasi-religious belief that the United States should expand Westward from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean in the name of God. It made the violation of Native American rights appear righteous. This concept alone promotes conditional democracy as defensible, albeit at the expense of those whose rights have been sacrificed to make “progress.”

The invocation of such imagery is deliberate. It exposes a truth that has always undergirded the American project: democracy in the United States has never been absolute. It has always been conditional—granted, withheld, and redefined to serve those in power. The concept of democracy as we know it today has fluctuated. What we understand as a dynamic system of shared accountability and protection of civilizations has, so far, withstood the assaults that have been made on it. However, given our current political climate, where division seems to take precedence over unity, it is worth analyzing what democracy has always been since the birth of an independent America.

While citizens hold authority over government– ensuring their rights are heard and translated into freedom— democracy as a concept, particularly an American one, is conditional. By this, I mean it is fickle: bending to the will of anyone who imposes their ideals over others to legitimize their status. Those who demand democracy be upheld are often the same people who once governed the democratic livelihoods of others. Early American depictions of democracy, rooted in resistance to British rule, evolved into a distinctly white Christian idea embedded in the nation’s foundational laws and amendments. As a result, visual representations of democracy, including paintings like The Contraband; The Recruit; The Veteran (1860; The Metropolitan Museum of Art), illustrations like Frank Leslie’s New York—Welcome to the Land of Freedom (1887; Library of Congress) and artifacts like The Statue of Liberty, as symbols of freedom, obscure the reality that many people’s rights were controlled by others, who determined the terms of citizenship.

Addressing democracy as something conditional is a call that begins from within the home. To understand how this conditionality operates, we must examine the icons that construct national identity. American icons were created to cement national identity after the British left in 1783. Iconography, as a scholarly concept, interprets the purpose, themes and imagery of these symbols beyond their appearance; it understands that symbols take on identities of their own, which, in turn, can be endlessly malleable. Such malleability is a product of the fact that an icon is instantly visually recognizable. They put forward images representative of different aspects of American society, whether those images are flattering or not. Invented figures like Uncle Sam, Columbia, and images of real people, whether Abraham Lincoln or President Donald Trump, have been turned into caricatures embodying different versions of the ongoing American Dream– or set in opposition to it.^[4]

But as icons do, they invite varying interpretations. The Statue of Liberty demonstrates this instability most clearly. Whether those interpretations feel true reflects how American democracy shapeshifts depending on who is seeking it. The Statue of Liberty, often seen as a beacon of hope, provides a key example. It is a major tourist attraction for both national and international tourists alike, averaging around 4.4 million visitors a year. Edward Moran’s The Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, Enlightening the World (1886; Museum of the City of New York) depicts crowds of French and American flags, blanketing the lower composition, boats full of celebrations amid clouds of smoke blending into the polluted sky. The crowd’s mass emphasizes the statue’s monumental size, as Moran cleverly paints them almost as a swarm. Even the title (eventually transformed into a slogan used to justify its creation) raises a democratic question: are we enlightening the “world” or America alone?

Although the statue united France and America, signifying early diplomacy between the two nations, its image did not reflect the diversity involved in its making. As Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby explains, the photographs from the Gaget and Gauthier atelier showcasing Liberty’s detached body parts publicized the intense labor and technical expertise behind the statue.^[5] Unintentionally, these photographs reveal that the statue’s power derives from its fragmentation. As migrants poured into America, they were often the ones who most likely hammered, nailed and risked their lives erecting the very monument and its plinth meant to symbolize their hope.

Immigration became central to Liberty’s iconography. Yet the promise of welcome quickly became qualified. Many immigrants came to America seeking opportunity, eager for life in a country constantly on the verge of discovery. Yet many paintings and cartoons often depicted them using heavy stereotypes, casting them as desperate and thankful simply for being allowed entry. Frank Leslie’s New York—Welcome to the Land of Freedom— An Ocean Steamer Passing The Statue of Liberty: Scene on the Steerage Deck (1887; Library of Congress) shows a cluster of presumed Jewish or Eastern European immigrants – judging by their dress - gawking at the statue, their faces filled with awe and hope. Children accompany them, idle yet swept into the same uncertain future. These images portray immigrants as perpetually “waiting”— their pending status part of the process of becoming American. In reality, such depictions justified the mistreatment and humiliation they endured, framing conditional acceptance as the price of earning democracy.

The statue’s likeness soon became a tool to assert that democracy belonged exclusively to American-born people. Satire amplified what painting only implied. The cartoon The Future Emigrant Lodging House, published by Judge Magazine in 1890, portrays the Statue of Liberty as a helter-skelter tenement house filled with immigrants, further mocked by clownish figures walking across washing lines and blatant business banners. If one looks closely, a Turkish flag is hung beside Liberty’s torso. The cartoon embodies nearly every xenophobic ideology possible, implying that incoming immigrants threatened the American vision Liberty once symbolized. Notably, despite its hateful imagery, the illustration paradoxically promotes capitalism and consumption. It mirrors the same presumptuous “immigrant problem” the U.S. grapples with today: immigrants are denied full belonging yet relied upon for labor and economic gain.^[6] Democracy becomes conditional once again— granted only when America receives something in return.

The medium of these pieces further complicates how Americans interpreted the calculated messaging of their evolving country. Form shapes reception. The Future Emigrant Lodging House and New York—Welcome to the Land of Freedom— An Ocean Steamer Passing The Statue of Liberty: Scene on the Steerage Deck was circulated via paper, boosting circulation and readership—enough to encourage citizens to believe in the paper’s propaganda: being used to elevate a particularly refined image of immigrants as parasitic to their ideals. Whereas Moran’s The Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, Enlightening the World, existed as a commemorative painting, almost imitating the grand manner of portraiture. His use of luminism illuminates the statue, communicating the power and excellence of Liberty. Considering its public visual setting—upper echelon included—its aims to galvanize nationalism. Similarly, both works embody the First Amendment, granting the new freedom of the press and artistic license to portray the nation. Both were accessible to all corners of American society. The dichotomy in messaging coexists, manipulating who and how they decipher propagandic projections. In doing so, these expressions exhibit a waning image of democratic freedom and eerily foreshadow the divisive nature of America today.

U.S. history is differently distributed depending on racial and ethnic groups— including, arguably, some “white” ethnic groups. Nowhere is this more visible than in the aftermath of the Civil War. After the war, which left roughly 700,000 casualties, people of all mixed identities were fighting for different social and political futures for the same land— Unionists and Confederates. The scarcity of Civil War paintings reflects not only the inadequacy of history painting to capture trauma, but also the contradictions between patriotic myth and documentary evidence. It was left to illustrations in periodicals like Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, and photography, to fill in this visual gap.

The role of the Black veterans is often misplaced or overshadowed. Thomas Waterman Wood presents a rare, sustained visual meditation on this tension. The Contraband; The Recruit; The Veteran (1865; The Metropolitan Museum of Art) offers an exception. It is a triptych charting the progression of a Black man before, during and after the Civil War. In the first panel, he appears content and simply comfortable. His body language and facial expression suggest he is at ease, mid-greeting with a slight smirk. Though his prior status (enslaved or free) remains unknown, still, at that time, he was legally considered three-fifths of a white man.^[7] His apparent comfort, then, must be read through the lens of restricted liberty.

Wood’s three images invite us to explore how this restriction may motivate or even force this man to enlist in the war, despite his conditional status as an “American.” In the second portrait, he stands in the cerulean uniform of a Union soldier, cradling his rifle, chest forward, gaze steady yet uncertain, looking ahead, and ready for combat. His stance is more meditative, almost as though he is still unsure of his position in the military. The representation itself is auspiciously masculine: there were no women openly serving as soldiers just yet (however, there were 501,000 women who disguised their sex and joined the Civil War).^[8] However, it is his race that holds him back and presents him as an unsure Black man. Even the limp, backwards-facing American flag behind him symbolizes his ambiguous standing as an “American” granted conditional belonging.

This tension reflects Wood's own emotional ambivalence that underlay his finished paintings. As Vanessa Meikle Schulman notes, Wood alternates between an artist who made bold, optimistic statements about the capacity of Black citizens, only for him to return to a caricature-like style next. It is as though Wood is unsure of his own artistic role, and perhaps, his position as an apolitical white male: what does a Black male look like according to him?

In The Veteran, the subject looks ahead with an empty gaze. He holds himself up, barely standing, with thin, worn crutches and one leg amputated. Whilst his body language indicates an input of physical effort, the man salutes in orderly fashion, still wearing his military hat. His rifle is set aside against the wall. The American flag is gone. One might read this as a rejection of political identity, the soldier following commands while acknowledging his racial inferiority. However, without caricaturizing, Wood imbues him with a quiet dignity through the man’s inanimate body language and expression. His missing leg indicates the sacrifice he has made in the Unionist cause, as though proving his worthiness as a representative of his race. The triptych becomes an overt record of the physical and emotional consequences of participating in war, unfolding a larger chronological narrative from slavery to freedom, beating in time with the contradictions of American democracy.

Those who mastered its rhythm were the ones who often held democratic authority: primarily white upper-class Americans who could “afford” democracy in practice. They were seen as more deserving and thus gained certain rights and privileges, especially voting rights. Wood’s American Citizens (1867) reinforces the idea that not everyone who appeared white in America was treated as such. Four men stand front-facing, waiting in line to cast their vote against a cracking grey wall. Wood pays close attention to the details of the costume, emphasizing the caricature aspect even more. Wood includes a trifecta of "ambiguously white” people; as Paul Heller writes, “the Yankee whittling, the Irishman gesturing with his shillelagh and the German holding a huge Black Forest pipe.”^[9] Yet each of these has a casual attitude, the viewer’s central focus is their stark contrast with the Black man, beaming with what appears to be joy of his first election vote. Class distinctions and political tensions radiate from the scene. These men carry potentially threatening items, a sharpened stick and a clublike item, protecting themselves from a danger that may be implied in the ruggedness of the dark setting, an unspoken reminder of the potential conflicts that often accompany voting in contested periods.

In typical American fashion, the fight for human rights becomes entangled with the fight for property. This entanglement resurfaces most clearly in westward expansion. As the U.S. expanded westward, particularly across the Great Plains and into California, where settlers began to acquire land and discover gold, it forced Native Americans to surrender their ancestral lands and further assimilate into white American customs, law, and power structures.

In American paintings picturing the concept of democracy, Native Americans are often relegated to corners or marginal space— either amid an exodus or observing the destruction. In John Gast’s American Progress (1872; Autry Museum of the American West), an image widely circulated as a lithograph, we see the use of iconography propelling another rhetorical version of Americanness suitable for the post-Civil War period. Columbia, draped in flowing cotton white fabric fluttering against the wind, flies above a band of settlers, along with cattle and carriages, moving West and ready to work. She leads them, clutching a telegraph pole symbolizing technological progress. On the left-hand side of the painting, four Native Americans run away from this “advancement.” Unsurprisingly, the group are portrayed through the lens of a white man: showing them shirtless in stereotyped headdresses and armed with spears. This imagined narrative of savagery is exactly what justified displacement. A mother and child are left to sit atop a rock, wrapped in a black cape, and barely rendered, as if fading from the nation’s future already. Gast’s precise attention to Columbia’s drapery contrasts sharply with his vague delineation of Native American people; it is either that he was incapable of presenting them accurately, or he deliberately chose to blur their visual image, as if erasing them from history.

Artists frequently mythologized Native Americans, portraying them as picturesque relics rather than living communities. Sometimes, they are used as props. Thomas Cole’s Distant View of Niagara Falls (1830; Art Institute of Chicago) positions two Native people at the center of the painting. The composition is neatly composed with shades of ochre, rouge, and forest green against earthy brown tones to vivify the scenery. It embodies elements of the picturesque: reorganizing landscape, centralizing individuals to give a sense of scale and framing and controlled nature; however, what we see here is a rare glimpse of Native Americans left in untouched nature. Cole presents a nostalgic depiction of natural order before technological advancement and the displacement of indigenous people, reflecting his own anxieties about the direction American development was taking as early as 1830: the year in which President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.^[10]

These interpretations, suggestive of the erasure of Native American history, leave room for mythification. Artists frequently mythologized and othered Native Americans— whether in portraits, as “part of the scenery,” or in narrative groupings. When we look at Sarah Huntington Whitlock's The Last of their Race (1853; Scottsdale Art Auction), we witness destruction and devastation: a family perched on a mountain, watching the destruction of their homeland as dark clouds swallow the horizon. The only male figure stares ahead, while the women hide their faces, riddled with grief. It’s a harrowing depiction of the assisted naturalization of conquering the West, and consequently, the state-sanctioned erasure of Indigenous presence. As modern viewers, we are left ashamed and reminded of an erasure once proclaimed, “in the name of God.”

Two centuries apart, the mythology remains: American expansion is imaged as inevitable, heroic, and divine. In fact, it’s sanitizing violence. The American government is systemically responsible for building on the historical imagination of settling in the West. What we must understand when picturing democracy is the circumstances that once enabled such destruction. Our empire has not collapsed, as Thomas Cole warned earlier civilizations might.^[11] But the American empire we analyze, critique and even protest has manipulated a human right to control democracy itself. Democracy is a principle praised loudly in America, yet rarely practiced authentically. It has limited the rights of many and excluded rich, authentic histories. When we picture democracy in 19th-century American art, we must remember that it is portrayed as conditional, granted only through acts deemed worthy, while ultimately functioning as a double-edged sword, wielded to enforce dominance over those deemed less deserving humans.

Bibliography

Invokes Manifest Destiny with ‘American Progress’ Painting.” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-26/dhs-manifest-destiny-american-progress-painting.

Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. 2012. Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal: Transcontinental Ambition in France and the United States during the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: Periscope.

Heller, Paul. n.d. “Artist of the Racial Divide: Montpelier’s T. W. Wood Had a Profound Legacy.” Times Argus. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.timesargus.com/news/artist-of-the-racial-divide-montpelier-s-t-w-wood-had-a-profound-legacy/article_b40ec74b-6bf8-580c-9263-d40a9d0d7010.html.

Leonard, Elizabeth D. 1999. All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. New York: W. W. Norton. https://archive.org/details/alldaringofsoldi00leon/page/165/mode/1up.

Schulman, Vanessa Meikle. 2019. “Visualizing Race at the Polling Place: Thomas Waterman Wood’s American Citizens.” American Art 33 (1): 24–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/703710.

“The Best Political Cartoons on Donald Trump.” n.d. U.S. News & World Report. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.usnews.com/cartoons/the-best-political-cartoons-on-donald-trump.

“The Course of Empire.” n.d. The Art History Project. Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.arthistoryproject.com/subjects/politics/the-course-of-empire/.

Council on Foreign Relations. n.d. “The U.S. Immigration Debate.” Accessed February 18, 2026. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-immigration-debate-0.

^[1] X (formerly Twitter), 2026. https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1948150126494482555?lang=en.

^[2] Arellano, Gustavo. “With Manifest Destiny, DHS Goes Hard on ‘White Makes Right.’” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 2025. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-26/dhs-manifest-destiny-american-progress-painting.

^[3] Roberts, Sam. “Homeland Security’s Embrace of Art Reopens an Old Debate.” The New York Times, August 28, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/arts/design/gast-dhs-american-progress.html.

^[4] https://www.usnews.com/cartoons/the-best-political-cartoons-on-donald-trump

^[5] Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. Colossal : Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal : Transcontinental Ambition in France and the United States during the Long Nineteenth Century. First edition. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Periscope, 2012.

^[6] Roy, Diana, Claire Klobucista, and Amelia Cheatham. “The U.S. Immigration Debate.” Cfr.org, July 25, 2006. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/us-immigration-debate-0.

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^[7] Britannica Editors. “Three-Fifths Compromise | Definition, Purpose, & History.” Encyclopedia Britannica, June 26, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-fifths-compromise.

^[8] Internet Archive. “All the Daring of the Soldier : Elizabeth D. Leonard : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive,” 2026. https://archive.org/details/alldaringofsoldi00leon/page/165/mode/1up.

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^[9] Heller, Paul. “Artist of the Racial Divide Montpelier’s T.W. Wood Had a Profound Legacy.” Times Argus, October 26, 2015. https://www.timesargus.com/news/artist-of-the-racial-divide-montpelier-s-t-w-wood-had-a-profound-legacy/article_b40ec74b-6bf8-580c-9263-d40a9d0d7010.html.

^[10] Britannica Editors. “Indian Removal Act | Definition, History, Significance, & Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 20, 1998. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indian-Removal-Act.

^[11] Obelisk Art History. “The Course of Empire,” 2016. https://www.arthistoryproject.com/subjects/politics/the-course-of-empire/.