This should be an interesting thread. We can finally discuss the true causes of our decline. This book should be on the must read list for every white American racialist.

Cosmopolitanism Institutionalized, 1930-1970

"Consider the dismany that provincial Protestants must have felt . . . most threatening of all was the inescapable recognition that the leaders who had customarily spoken for the Protestant masses . . . were giving way to faceless bureaucrats in the business world [and] cosmopolitan secularists in the universities."
-- John Higham, 1997

The period between 1900 and 1917 ushered in a great wave of cosmopolitan Americanism, articulated by the Liberal Progressives, ecumenical Protestants, and Young Intellectuals and based on the foundations of expressive liberty and cultural equality. The interwar period extended the thinking of these actors throughout the nation's intellectual stratum. In effect, the moral compass of the nation's elite received a magnetic shock that altered educated Americans' deepest sense of what it meant to be a good person. At the same time, a cosmopolitan aesthetic that priviliged expressive freedom linked American intellectuals, well-to-do consumers, and corporate businesspeople with the federal government. The new mood resulted in a stripped-down national identity consisting purely of the symbols of liberty and equality inherited from the Constitution. In this sense, the post-World War II United States would incarnate the liberal ideal of the transethnic, civic nation.

Cosmopolitan Thought and the Federal Government

World War II, as never before, generated an impressive amount of government-sponsered activity directed toward ameliorating relations between American ethnic and religious groups. Pluralist academics, together with their interfaith religious colleagues, churned out numerous pamphlets urging education as a remedy for intergroup tensions (Higham [1975] 1984). The Progressive Education Association's Committee on Intercultural Education (1937), the Common Council of American Unity, and the U.S. office of Education's "Americans All" broadcasts on the contributions of particular ethnic groups (1938-1939) represented the front end of this new effort (Savage 1999; Gleason 1992: 164-166; Glazer 1997: 88). That cosmopolitanism was integral to the new Americanism is evident from the spate of universalist works emerging in the 1940s and 1950s.

As early as 1943, Republican Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie penned a best-seller entitled One World, which bore the impress of cosmopolitan-humanist ideas of both Liberal-Progressive and ecumenical Protestant origin. His conclusions echo those of the post-World War I generation of Protestant elites: "We must come to a better understanding of what is happening in the East . . . of their loss of faith in Western imperialism and in the superiority of the white man," Willkie wrote (Willkie 1943: 89). He also shone the light on humanitarian reform on the United States itself, criticizing its failure to live up to its ethical standards while celebrating its new, streamlined identity based solely on the common denominator of liberalism:

Our nation is composed of no one race, faith, or cultural heritage. It is a grouping of some thirty peoples possessing varying religious concepts, philosophies, and historical backgrounds. They are linked together by their confidence in our democratic institutions as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution for themselves and their children. The keystone of our union of states is freedom (Willkie 1943: 157)Although the liberal and religious egalitarianism of ecumenical Protestantism and Liberal Progressivism appears to have been the clearest influence on Willkie, elements of modernist thought, reminiscent of Bourne or Kallen were also apparent:

Minorities are rich assets of a democracy . . . minorities are the constant spring of new ideas, stimulating new thought and action, the constant source of vigour. Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads . . . It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and gentile, of foreign- and native-born. Let us not tear it asunder. (Willkie 1943: 159-160, emphasis added)Two decades later, an American of Irish Catholic origin felt confident enough to crown the postwar mood with a new catch-phrase, America is a "nation of immigrants." John F. Kennedy's short book bound together eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cosmopolitan utterances, disembedding them alongside invented traditions from the post-1930s period, like Emma Lazarus's poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty (Kennedy 1964: 1-3, 68, 77). Kennedy concluded with an attack on the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 and outlined his blueprint for the nation -- which displayed the same blend of pluralist cosmopolitanism and melting pot universalism that had characterized Progressive thought on American identity for some 40 years:

The ideal of the "melting pot" symbolized the process of blending many strains into a single nationality, and we have come to realize in modern times that the "melting pot" need not mean the end of particular ethnic identities or traditions. Only in the case of the Negro has the melting pot failed to bring a minority into the full stream of American life. (Kennedy 1964: 67)Other titles soon caught the cosmopolitan spirit of the times. The best known include Carey McWilliam's Brothers under the Skin and Edward Steichen's 1950s photo exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man. In David Hollinger's view, the scientific, humanistic, religious, and political discourse of the day was exuberantly universalistic and the new, international-style, United Nations building in New York was taken as a symbol of the universal nation, America, which would prefigure a new global solidarity (Hollinger 1965: 52-55).

Such sentiments are certainly present in John Higham's Strangers in the Land (1955), a critique of American nativism. In this important work, Higham was directly inspired by ecumenical Christianity and consensus liberalism. For example, he introduced his work with a universalist biblical passage redolent of the Interfaith movement. Looking back on Strangers in the Land some 30 yars later, Higham betrays a clear lineage to the cosmopolitanism of both the New York Intellectuals and the New Liberals influenced by the Liberal Progressives: "In the late 1930's I had become convinced, by reading European history and the antiwar novelists of that period, that nationalism was the bane of the modern world . . . I was drawn to the kind of progressive thought -- distinctly socialist rather than communist -- that looked forward to the fraternity of peoples rather than the solidarity of a class.

Several pages on, the Liberal-Progressive connection emerges into the open as Higham distances himself from 1960s radicalism, proffering that "the cosmopolitan strain [of American nationalism] was present in the Progressive movement" (Higham [1955] 1988: 339-340). In bringing cosmopolitan ideas into the mainstream, writers such as Higham were participating in an intellectual sea-change which Michael Lind claims prompted elites to recast the American narrative along universal lines. This national story embraced what Lind calls a "generic Christianity," in place of Protestantism, rejected both Anglo-Saxonism and Nordicity, and redefined America as a nation of immigrants. To hold the polity together, post-1930s elites looked to Gunnar Myrdal's "American Creed," an overarching ideology of liberal democracy shared by diverse ethnic groups (Lind 1995: 90).

TBC

Title and author?

And before you even ask, yes, the Jewish role is discussed. But the good thing about this book is that it is discussed within the context of the other factors that were involved.

Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004)

I wasn't asking out of a weisenheimer context. The excerpt was quite interesting but didn't indicate the name of the book or author.

The Process of Elite Institutionalization

The emergence of the American Creed as the centerpiece of American nationality pointed Anglo-Saxon and Protestant symbols toward the exit of the American national stage. This took place over the space of some 30 years, as large segments of the American elite appropriated the expressivist, cosmopolitan heritage of the modernist avant-garde and the egalitarian mantras of the Liberal Progressives and ecumenical Protestants. How might we explain the penetration of new ideas into these former ethnically conscious bastions of privilege? Mario Diani contends that social movements tend to succeed to the extent that leaders of a movement possess "social capital," in the form of social ties to the mass media, corporate cultural intermediaries, and the state intelligentsia -- where dominant interpretations of reality are generated (Diani 1997: 136).

In the American case, the steady post-1930s growth of the secular higher education system, mass media, and federal government helped to increase the social capital (in the form of influence and connections with the elite) of cosmopolitan movements -- whether Liberal Progressive, ecumenical Protestant, or expressive-modernist. The result was a thinning of American identity: the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core was abandoned, bringing the new ethical universals of liberty and equality to the fore. Accompanying the new consensus was a corresponding rise to predominance of the symbols of liberal universalism, exemplified by the nation of immigrants' narrative and the reinterpretation of the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty myth provides a good case study of the shift to a post-WASP, consensus-liberal vision of America. In current parlance, the Statue of Liberty is viewed as a symbol of the openness of America to immigration, and the plague at its base by Emma Lazarus, which urges other nations to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," is believed to be organically connected to the statue and its liberal-universalist narrative. Unfortunately, reality is not so simple. Lazarus's poem was not present when the statue was inaugurated in October 1886. Nor did President Grover Clevland make any mention of the statue's significance for immigrants in his acceptance speech (Perea 1997a: 47).

Some Americans, especially Protestant clergymen, greated the gift of the statue cautiously. In addition, the statue was often viewed less as a beacon to immigrants than as a guardian of American purity. As for Emma Lazarus's oft-quoted poem, it was first erected on an interior wall of the immense statue in 1903 owing to the financial contribution of one Georgina Schulyer. Schulyer had donated the bronze plaque in memory of Lazarus, an obscure poet of Jewish ancestry whose work she admired. Not until the 1930s did the contemporary myth of the statue was a beacon to immigrants arise -- exactly the period in which the cosmopolitan ideas of America's organic intellectuals were starting to win wider elite acceptance. In turn, this attitude change prompted officials to relocate Lazarus's obscure poem to its current position at the base of the statue (Higham [1975] 1984: 73-78; Perea 1997a: 48-51).

The new doctrine rapidly established a foothold in the nation's school history texts. "The notion that America was a "melting pot" entered the majority of the texts during the forties," writes Frances FitzGerald. "In the forties and fifties, it was the catch phrase for all discussions of the immigrants, and the Statue of Liberty was the illustration beside them" (FitzGerald 1979: 80). I am not suggesting that Lazarus's ideas, or the statue's universalist interpretation, were entirely unacceptable prior to the 1930s. However, before this time, universalism had its place -- a place it was forced to share with Anglo-Protestant symbolism.

I wasn't asking out of a weisenheimer context. The excerpt was quite interesting but didn't indicate the name of the book or author.Its a good book. You should check it out. Its especially interesting because it sheds light upon the other factors that played a large part in our decline that have generally been ignored by the emphasis placed upon the Jews.

Lets rewind the videotape for a second. We are getting a little ahead of ourselves.

Expressive Pathfinders: The New York Modernists

The older America, whose voice and spirit were New England, has . . . gone beyond recall. Americans of British stock still are prevailingly the artists and thinkers of the land, but they work, each for himself, without common vision or ideals. They have no ethos any more. The older tradition has passed from a life into a memory.
--Horace M. Kallen, 1915 (Quoted in Kallen 1924: 104-105)

The Liberal Progressive and ecumenical Protestants leveled the intellectual barriers preventing the emergence of a universalist America. Politically, the identity of these Victorian humanitarians was secure: they were university educated and considered themselves a "better element," a historical advance guard that would lead mankind toward a higher stage of civilization. Yet such ethical progress obscured an underlying cultural confusion: their chief mode of self-expression remained a Milquetoast, genteel Christianity -- a meager symbolic repertoire.

Lacking this carrot, and beaten only by the stick of Liberal-Progressive moralism, American intellectuals would probably not have been so attracted to a project of cultural change. In this sense, the genteel Liberal-Progressive vision was limited. The task of completing the epic of American cosmopolitanism would ostensibly reside with a new generation. Under their tutelage, the logic of expressive individualism implicit in liberalism was driven to its theoretical endpoint. It would thenceforth be their imperative to carve out a subcultural communitas in which liberal apostates from the dominant ethnic community could regain a sense of community, wholeness, and enchantment. Thus it as that the New York avant-garde came to preside over the liquidation of Anglo-Protestant influence in progressive intellectual circles -- overseeing its replacement with cosmopolitan modernism.