Politics & Power Quote by Nelson A. Miles

It reads like inevitability dressed up as reason. Nelson A. Miles, a career U.S. Army officer who spent years enforcing federal power on the frontier, frames late-19th-century expansion as a force of nature: a "tidal wave" that no administration could stop, an "enterprise" no party could restrain, a "march of civilization" no "reasonable man" would want to check. The sentence is built to preempt argument. If history is a wave, then resistance is both futile and faintly irrational.

That rhetorical move matters because it converts political choices into weather. Immigration, land seizure, railroad capitalism, settlement, and the military campaigns that made them possible get recast as neutral momentum rather than contested policy. Miles isn't simply describing demographic reality; he's laundering responsibility. The subtext is a kind of moral bookkeeping: yes, disruptions happened, but to question the project is to be unreasonable, anti-civilization, outside the adult conversation.

Context sharpens the edge. Miles helped prosecute the Indian Wars and later governed occupied territories. He watched "civilization" arrive through forts, treaties under duress, and coerced confinement. When he argues that no one could (or should) "check" this march, he's speaking from within the institution that quite literally cleared the path. The phrase "reasonable man" is doing heavy ideological work, defining legitimacy in advance and disqualifying dissenters - Indigenous resistance, labor anxieties about immigration, even political opponents - as sentimental or backward.

The line's power is its cool, managerial confidence. It sells conquest as common sense.