The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: B002WN2IT4
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a "culture war" within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation's ethnic composition.
Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.
Colonies: all that seems to be necessary is to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English Schools where they are now too thick settled ... I say I am not against the Admission of Germans in general, for they have their Virtues, their industry and frugality is exemplary; They are excellent husbandmen and contribute greatly to the improvement of a Country. (Franldin [1753] 1961: 483, 485) Thomas Jefferson concurred with this liberal view in 1817, writing that he
of Chicago Liberal Progressivism. The Influence ofEthical Culture The cosmpolitanism which Dewey and Addams jointly heralded can be partly explained by their individual biographies. However, both figures drew their ideas primarily from the pluralism of William James and Felix Adler, who together must be credited as the intellectual revolutionaries behind Liberal Progressivism. They helped to transplant cosmopolitan ideas out of their Jewish-messianic context and re-root them in the American
American Protestantism. Much the same could be said of the religious press" (Davis 1973: 188-190; Landis 1941: 30; R. Miller 1958: 291-292). Failure left the Protestant mainline leadership undaunted. In 1925, for instance, 160 representatives from 28 denominations attended the National Study Conference on the Churches and World Peace, which declaimed against immigration restrictions, economic oppression, and Western imperialism (W. IZing 1989: 125). Two years later, mainline Protestant spokesmen
rebuke McCarthy when the U.S. Senate 142 I The Cosmopolitan Vanguard voted to censure McCarthy) were indicative of a new trans-sectarian nationalism that replaced the old Anglo-Protestant brand. Based primarily on the defense of Christian values and capitalism, the new nationalism also allayed the fears of many conservative Protestants with regard to Catholic loyaltylo (O'Brien 1988: 35-37; Handy 1976: 403; Baltzell 1964: 286-287). Even fundamentalist preacher Billy Graham altered his view
illustrious and miserable by so much art and mystery?" (quoted in Taylor 1989: 361). With characteristic aplomb, Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed the zeitgeist of a new cultural movement known as romanticism which took root in eighteenth-century Europe and proved especially influential in the following century. Based on the idea of nature as the source of power and wisdom, it carried within it a critique of rational, civilized modernity. In Germany, romantic scholars like Herder, Hegel, or Fichte