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James Bryce, a former Ambassador to the United States, was the most positive Victorian writer on American democracy. His magisterial book The American Commonwealth dealt with virtually every aspect of American government, including the Founding Fathers, the Federal Constitution, the spoils system, the Supreme Court, the party system, the electoral politics and the emergence of a plutocracy. Bryce was a British liberal, who did as much as anyone in his generation to advance the idea of Anglo-Saxonism in transatlantic relations.

This chapter explores the roots of American francophobia into the early twentieth century. Historically, Americans had long been cautious of conniving French diplomats, alarmed at France’s sexual and racial permissiveness, and dismissive of France’s supposedly weak republican system of government. Set against the backdrop of Social Darwinism, intense nationalism, Anglo-Saxonism, and conceptions of a racial hierarchy, the parent generation of the future men of the Kennedy administration began to ascribe hard, negative attributes to France and the French that they passed down to their offspring. By casting the French as overly emotional, excessively proud, vain, cruel, conservative, backward, and effeminate, these elites were better able to rationalize their own perceived racial superiority and legacy as inheritors of sound British traditions. This chapter sets out to explain the evolution of American views of France with the intention of illustrating the perceptions and stereotypes that were common currency during Kennedy’s formative years. The candid notations in Kennedy’s 1937 diary from his summer trip to Europe—during which he spent several weeks in France—clearly illustrate that he had absorbed many of the popular francophobic themes in circulation during the interwar years.

This chapter looks at the contours of Irish American racial discourse between the arrival of the first Young Irelanders in the late 1840s to the United States and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. It challenges the truism that the Irish, in assimilating themselves in American society, had cut ties with their homeland and adopted a white identity, thus ceasing to be “Green.” As a matter of fact, American Anglo-Saxonism constituted a greater threat to these migrants than any alleged lack of whiteness. Rather than seek to become Saxon, however, Irish immigrants expanded the boundaries of American citizenship by depicting themselves as members of what one exile termed a proud and noble “world-wide race” of Celts.

This chapter discusses how earlier heroic fiction developed in the immediate post-Civil War era and into the early twentieth century as republican modernity gave way to the industrial modernity. Responding to new heights of immigration, industrialization, urbanization, mechanization, and modernization, the next generation of American authors to write heroic fiction updated earlier heroic archetypes as creative and personal responses to industrial modernity. Generally speaking, their fiction involved imaginative withdrawals from modern society that affirmed white middle-class masculinity in the face of those forces they perceived as threatening to its viability. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, for instance, allowed him and his readers an imaginative escape from modern urban society. Central to this escape was a rejection of cities, technology, bureaucracy, and business culture, as well as the celebration of white, male Anglo-Saxonism over “others” defined by gender, class, race, and ethnicity. The chapter also considers the horror fiction work of H. P. Lovecraft.

The introduction provides a grounding in the diplomatic history of Anglo-American relations and surveys the main events of the so-called ‘Great Rapprochement’ between the two countries, including the Alaskan Boundary Dispute, Britain’s response to the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the US’s subsequent attitude to Britain’s war with the Boers. The introduction analyses the concept of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ and discusses the ways in which it was important both to the Pilgrims Society and to official Anglo-American relations. The introduction also provides a chapter by chapter breakdown of the rest of the book and outlines the argument that while the Pilgrims never set the agenda for official Anglo-American relations it nevertheless played a leading role in public diplomacy and, by extension, in how people have thought about how Britain and the United States have related to each other.

This chapter lays the contextual groundwork for all succeeding chapters. It revisits the social, political, and cultural catalysts that led to the transnational flowering of organized youth after 1900. Unlike the default narrative, which emphasizes the British roots of the Boy Scouts, this chapter locates the movement’s inception in uncertainties about the future of youth and manhood that haunted imperial societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In crafting a young imperial masculinity that pivoted on physical exercise and hygiene, sexual abstinence, strict gender segregation, and a heroic understanding of white Anglo-Saxon history, the U.S. architects of Boy Scouting walked a fine line between drawing on foreign precedents and framing their remasculinization scheme as thoroughly American.

This chapter examines the U.S. reception of Rudyard Kipling's poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899), in a variety of forms such as newspaper opinions, scientific treatises, political speeches, and parodies. This examination demonstrates that rather than intensifying Anglo-Saxonism or a racialized linkage between whiteness, U.S. nationalism, and overseas expansion, the poem instead exacerbated anxieties about the meaning and importance of whiteness for a U.S. global mission. While some satirists demonstrated the poem's hypocrisy by pointing out the onomantithesis in Kipling's binary treatment of black beneficiaries and white servants, for some readers Kipling's binary was not deceptively reversed but troublingly collapsed in a context where the meaning and stability of whiteness was in question. As part of the inquiry into racialization and empire building, the chapter shows the importance of literature both in scripting and in interrogating fictions of racial identity.

This chapter examines the role of Anglo–Saxonism on the racialisation of the English Diaspora in America and Canada. It analyses how modern history professor Goldwin Smith's ideas on Anglo–Saxon superiority and race related to discourses of continental union and imperial federation. It compares nature of Canadian and American identity to determine the role of Anglo–Saxonism as a trope of English ethnicity. This chapter also considers how Canada's political position within the North American and British imperial contexts was framed by means of divergent appropriations of Anglo–Saxonism.

This chapter considers the rise of the United States to world power status and hegemony in the Western Hemisphere at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that America’s decision to “turn outward” and establish an imperial presence in the world embodied the recognitive practices constitutive of world power status. Specifically, American leaders envisioned that a powerful naval capability and sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere would be the backbone of its national greatness on the world stage and lead the established powers to recognize its position among the system’s world powers. The fragility of the United States’s aspiring social identity and the importance of British recognition to that identity became apparent during the Venezuelan Crisis, when the United States initiated an international crisis over its right to become involved in hemispheric disputes. The crisis was defused when British leaders engaged in recognitive speech acts that constructed a shared, Anglo-Saxon identity, which would become the foundation for cooperation between the two adversaries. These recognitive speech acts expressed a normative acceptance of American power and legitimated its status among the world powers.

Historians have tended to ignore the importance of religion to nativism and the Mexican-American War, and have played down the relationship among anti-Catholicism, republicanism, and race. This book shows that as Catholic immigration to the United States increased and Americans embarked on the era of Protestant revivalism that became known as the Second Great Awakening, anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to Americans’ understanding of how best to preserve their liberties in a more diverse country. Constituent to this future prosperity was the American republic’s seemingly inexorable expansion westward. Within two decades, this popular drive for territorial aggrandizement became known as “Manifest Destiny.” What was United States of America? An increasingly common answer by the 1840s was that the United States was all of those things that Mexico was not: free, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, republican, and prosperous. During the Texas annexation debates anti-Catholic themes foundational to American republicanism and Anglo-Saxonism incorporated a growing literature on Mexico that highlighted its religion, helping to form in the American mind a monolithic picture of Roman Catholicism.

By 1844, the year of Catholic-Protestant rioting in Philadelphia, Americans believed Lyman Beecher’s claim that Catholicism was inimical to civil and religious liberty. Native American Party members simply took this a step further by proclaiming that this meant no person could be a good Protestant or American and not be a nativist. But what if the Catholics who endangered American republican institutions were neither native-born nor immigrants, and lived not in the United States but south of the American border in Mexico? This not entirely new question turned immediately pressing during the controversy in spring 1844 over the proposed annexation of Texas, making Mexico central to debates over the meaning of America for the first time since the Texas Revolution. With the annexation fight, Mexico became the last, crucial element in the now mostly complete American civil-religious discourse, and the Beecherite anti-Catholic synthesis played an integral role. This process allowed for a fuller definition of just what a true American republican was. The opinions expressed by congressmen and senators during the Texas debate combined racialist, religious, and expansionist sentiment. Amid this acrimonious debate, the Beecherite synthesis found a new name, “Manifest Destiny.”

This chapter outlines Polk’s war strategy and summarizes the first two months of the war, including the Siege of Matamoros and the Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. The main focus is the call for volunteers and the relationship between religion and recruitment. As recruiters sought to entice men to volunteer to go fight the Mexicans, they did so within a milieu shaped by strident Manifest Destiny rhetoric. In many conflicts sacred or ideological language might be used as people begin to beat the drums of war. The contextualization of American expansionism within the discourse of the Beecherite Synthesis was such that in the case of the Mexican-American War, American recruiters drew on specifically anti-Catholic, Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric. This interplay between religion and recruitment was just the beginning of American attempts by Protestants and Catholics to negotiate the meaning of the war.

Coming on the heels of over ten years of heightened anti-Catholic activity, the Mexican-American War held explosive religious implications from the very beginning. By 1846 the vocabulary of anti-Catholicism had given new direction and definition to American exceptionalism under the term, “Manifest Destiny.” The war forced American political leaders to negotiate the web of meaning connecting race, religion, republicanism, war, and the meaning of America. Whigs and Democrats concluded that the best way to explain their wartime polices was through theological and nativist language borrowed from the anti-Catholic movement. Meanwhile, the war revealed the deep religious underpinnings of the upstart Native American Party, proving that there was more to the nativist movement’s appropriation of the Beecherite Synthesis than a Machiavellian exploitation of an advantageous political tool.