I said in the Time To Face Reality thread that I wanted to spend more time in the future talking about about other subjects. Anyway, I will spend some time in this thread posting some excerpts about the people we used to be. I will use the The Fall of Anglo-America thread to post information about how we came to be who we are today.

The Rise of Anglo-America

"Imagine, my dear friend, if you can, a society formed of all the nations of the world . . . people having different languages, beliefs, opinions: in a word, a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character, yet a hundred times happier than our own."
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville's optimistic description of the new American Republic in the 1830s has been uncritically accepted by most scholars. American or otherwise, ever since. Recent examples include Seymour Martin Lipset ("The First New Nation"), Wilbur Zelinsky ("American nationalism has been international in character from the outset") and Liah Greenfeld ("the Ideal Nation") (Zelinsky 1988: 115; Greenfeld 1992: 438). Are these authors, Tocqueville among them, correct in viewing the Uited States as a cosmopolitan civilization based on eighteenth-century liberalism? This chapter argues that they are not. It does so in two unique ways. First, it brings together the disparate historical literature on American Anglo-Saxonism and white Protestant "nativism." Second, it casts this material, which necessarily spans the history of the United States itself, within the purview of recent theories of nationalism.

Ethnicity describes the set of sentiments and actions related to a sense of identification with an ethnic group, or ethnie -- a comunity that believes itself to be of shared ancestry (Francis 1976: 6; Eriksen 1993: 12; A. Smith 1991: 21). Dominant ethnicity refers to the social action of an ethnic community that is politically, economically, or culturally dominant within a nation-state (Doane 1997: 326). Often, the dominant ethnic group furnished the "core" myths, symbols, memories, and homeland maps that gae birth to the modern nation (Smith 1991: 39). In this chapter, I attempt to locate the origin of America's Anglo-Protestant ethnic core, framing the U.S. case within a more general model. The mytho-symbolic cores of ethnic groups are typically created through a break with the parent stock (fission) or through the melting together of the myths of several groups (fusion) (Horowitz 1985: 64-70; Connor 1994: 214-216). Once in place, ethnic groups usually maintain these cores, policing symbolic boundries while admitting new members. New entrants assimilate into the core, transmuting into co-ethnics over time (Barth 1969: 20-25; Francis 1976: 28-31, 93-94).

The "American" ethnic group, for example, emerged through fission from an English Protestant parent stock and used methods of dominant conformity to accrete diverse immigrant populations to its mytho-symbolic core while maintaining ethnic boundries. Similar processes were at work in this era among new groups like the Taiwanese, Afrikaners, Anatolian Turks, and Ulster Protestants. What complicates this otherwise simple picture is (1) the reflexivity of American society represented by its high standard of recordkeeping and (2) the nature of American liberalism, which occasionally presented itself in the form of cosmopolitan rhetoric.

The latter should not lead us to believe that Americans saw themselves as a liberal cosmopolitan civilization. On the contrary, for Americans, liberalism served as a symbolic border guard reinforcing their sense of particularity. The notion that a cosmopolitan idea can be used for particularistic purposes should not come as a surprise, for, as John Armstrong shows, ethnogenesis was nowhere more prevalent than along the medieval border between Christianity and Islam. These two universal ideas formed the boundry symbols that distinguish Christian ethnies like the Croats and Spaniards from Islamic groups like the Bosnian Muslims and Berbers (Armstrong 1982: 54-92). In this respect, The American ethnic's liberalism was a universalist idea that distinguished it from illiberal ethnies both on its southern and northern borders and in Europe.

Although the symbol of liberalism reinforced American ethnic particularlism, the underlying theoretical conflict between liberalism and ethnicity should not be overlooked. There was this tension in American culture that gave serious consideration to both liberal principles and ethnic boundry defense and furiously tried to marry the two. In the next chapter, I focus on this dualism by presenting a less selective analysis of the writings of the authors who are often used as exemplars of America's cosmopolitan exceptionalism.

American Ethnogenesis

The Colonial Period

The principal reason the United States developed a dominant ethnic group is chronological: the first inhabitants to keep written records and establish the institutional matrix of contemporary American society were English Protestants. Wilbur Zelinsky describes this phenomenon, as it pertains to cultural geography, as the doctrine of First Effective Settlement, whereby "in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more . . . than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later" (Lewish 1990: 84; Zelinsky 1973: 14-15). David Hacker Fischer's writings outline a similar theme. He notes that the United States began as a collection of cultural regions based around core English settler ethnies. The Puritans dominated in New England, the Quakers in the Mid-Atlantic States, southern English Cavaliers in the coastal South, and Anglo-Scottish Presbyterians in the Appalachian hinterland (Fischer 1989: 787).

Since most of this "colonial stock" had arrived in the seventeenth century from Britain, it is not surprising that on the eve of the revolution the American white population was over 60 percent English, nearly 80 percent British, and 98 percent Protestant. Colonial America, though relatively homogeneous ethnically, did of course embrace great sectarian diversity. Without question this diversity (as in Scotland and England) powered a pluralism that resulted in the de jure separation of church and state, as well as the toleration of Catholics and Jews (Bruce 1990: 99-100). Yet American Protestantism could draw on several points of unity to cement its de facto position at the nation's cultural center. The first was its non-conformity: Quakers, Mennonites, Congregationalists, Huguenots, and Baptists were conspicuous in this regard (Zelinsky 1973: 13). Even the Anglicans, supposedly an established church, were far less hiearchically organized in the United States than in Britain (Brookhiser 1991: 26).

Protestant identity also fed off a tradition of anti-Catholicism that was well established in Britain by the early eighteenth century, forged as it was through protracted warfare with France and fanned by a stream of popular pamphlet literature (Colley 1992: 40-42). In the American colonies, the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 helped to ignite these inherited British anti-Catholic sensibilities. The treatment of French-speaking, Catholic, Acadian refugees illustrates the degree to which an exclusive Anglo-Protestant consciousness operated in this period just prior to independence, for "at not time were the Acadian exiles given more than grudging acceptance" (Dormon 1983: 16-17).

In the decades following independence, America's Protestant unity -- which the treatment of the Acadians underscored -- would begin to crystallize around a Protestant "voluntary establishment" centered on the major theological seminaries (Hutchinson 1989: 4, 303). Later, this interdenominational unity was expressed through voluntary associations such as the anti-Catholic American Protective Association (APA) and ecumenical bodies such as the Evangelical Alliance for the United States (1847), precursor to the Federal Council of Churches (1908) (Roof and McKinney 1987: 85-87; Schneider 1989: 99-100; Jordan 1982).

In the meantime, the four ethnic regions of Anglo-America faded into purely cultural entities, with each region acting as a vehicle of assimilation, molding successive waves of immigrants into a particular cultural pattern. This process was accompanied by the rise of a New England-influenced, pan-Anglo-Protestant ethnicity that transcended regional boundries. The spread of New England cultural ideas during 1725-1825 is a testament to its influence. The first important New England export was the Great Awakening of 1725-1750 led by, among others, Johnathan Edwards. This Protestant revival movement spread like wildfire across the colonies from New England to Georgia and has been described as the first instance of American self-consciousness (Guelzo 1997: 144; Wood 1997; Heimert 1966).

The neoclassical movement, most visible in the realm of architecture, is another New England inspiration that took flight around the turn of the nineteenth century. Though strongest in New England and upstate New York, it also swept through the South, which is evident in the names of cities like Athens (GA), Augusta (GA), and Alexandria (VA). Meanwhile, an increasingly vibrant intercolonial trade pattern helped erode entrenched regional and state identities (Savelle 1978: 484). Some evidence for this blurring of identities is provided by the eighteenth-century standardization seen in the vernacular architecture of American farmers in both North and South (Zelinsky 1988: 226-227).

The American Revolution

Important as they are, none of the pre-Revolutionary integration movements was as significant as what followed. The American Revolution of 1776-1783 quite simply changed the American colonist's terms of reference. The Revolution, however, did not emerge ex nihilio but rather had roots in the colonists' sense of "British-American" self-consciousness (Kaufmann 2002). The Proclamation Acts of 1763 and 1774 were particularly incendiary for they erected barriers to what the colonists (now known as "Americans") perceived as their destiny of Anglo-Protestant, millenial, westward expansion. The Proclamation Acts were seen as part of a British Grand Design which was rumored to include the installation of an Anglican bishop and the eradication of American liberties. "A barefaced attempt against the success of the Protestant religion," was how the Pennsylvania Packet described the legislative events of 1774 (Hastings 1997: 75).

Upon its success, the Revolution began to be woven into a new American ethnohistory in which a nation of small-farming Davids had vanquished the Imperial Goliath. A Russian observer noticed that every American home contained a likeness of George Washington that was worshiped like Orthodox icons were in his homeland (Zelinsky 1988: 32). Meanwhile, chronclers like Yale president Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards's grandson, saw Washington as a latter-day Joshua leading his flock into the Promised Land (O'Brien 1988: 30).

Many would agree that an American sense of community had developed, complete with heroic mythology, but mot would label this a civil national process rather than an ethnic one. Yet from the outset, the words and actions of Americans indicate that a growing sense of American ethnicity flowed alongside the civic rhetoric. An ethnic response grew out of a sense of isolation that Oscar Handlin calls "the horror." This rootless condition was occasioned by the colonists' incessant migration, coupled with an existential meaninglessness they encountered while living in alien surroundings (Handlin 1957: 130). Anthony Smith and Regis Debray draw our attention to this phenomenon more generally, noting the ways in which people seek to achieve a measure of this-worldly immortality though identification with an ancestral community rooted in land and kinship (A. Smith 1986: 175). The result is ethnogenesis.

Rogers M. Smith has dubbed this respoens "Ascriptive Americanism." The French and Indian wars of the 1750s and early 1760s had driven home the differences between the English-speaking, Protestant American colonists and their nonwhite, Catholic/pagan, and French/Indian speaking "other." Furthermore, the Proclamation Acts had stymied what the Anglo-Protestant colonists deemed to be their providential mission to settle the Catholic-occupied trans-Allegheny West. Accordingly, Smith holds that many Americans were unaware of liberal rights theories and were only persuaded to revolt by the religious and cultural arguments that designated them a chosen, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant people (R. Smith 1997: 72-86; 1995: 237-239). For Alexander Hamilton, the Quebec Act of 1774, which retained the laws and customs of the French in Canada (despite the presence of thousands of British Protestant residents), reflected the fact that British monarchists and French Catholics were united in their support for hierarchy and tyranny against the republican Americans:

This act [Quebec Act] makes effectual provision not only for the protection, but for the permanent support of Popery . . . What can speak in plainer language, the corruption of the British Parliament, than its act; which . . . makes such ample provision for the popish religion, and leaves the protestant, in such disadvantageous situation that he is like to have no other subjects in this part of his domain [Canada], than Roman catholics; who, by reason of their implicit devotion to their priests, and their superlative reverence they bear to those, who countenance and favour their religion, will be the voluntary instruments of ambition; and will be ready, at all times, to second the oppressive designs of administration against the other parts of the empire. (Hamilton [1768-1778] 1961: 170, 175)A sense of divine election is common to many ethnic groups, especially Protestant groups, and it appears that the Americans were no exception (O'Brien 1988: 59-61; Moorhead 1994: 165; Armstrong 1982: 81-90; Hastings 1997: 74). It is also significant that a set of symbolic border guards (what Anthony Smith calls cultural markers) were being used to distinguish the "Americans" from surrounding populations. The Americans were considered to be white, in contrast to the Natives and the black slaves; they were Protestant and English (in speech and surname), unlike the "papist" French and Spanish; and they were liberal democrats, in contrast to the British.

On the contrary, for Americans, liberalism served as a symbolic border guard reinforcing their sense of particularity. The notion that a cosmopolitan idea can be used for particularistic purposes should not come as a surprise... The American ethnic's liberalism was a universalist idea that distinguished it from illiberal ethnies both on its southern and northern borders and in Europe.I like this. This is what I was thinking on the bus yesterday.


--Mark

The Anglo-Saxon Myth

The American ethnie has always been closely tied to its Whig origins, and the work of Whig historians helped to define the genealogy of the new Republic. The idea that the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxons had known a primitive form of freedom that had its roots in the German forests had emerged in England by the sixteenth century. Seventeenth-century figures such as the great common law jurist Sir Edward Coke, in resisting royal power, "frequently asserted that English liberties were inherited unchanged from the ancient constitution of their sturdy Anglo-Saxon ancestors." (R. Smith 1997; 48-49). Some of the more radical variants of the theory held that the Anglo-Saxons carried a desire for freedom in their veins and had a destiny to realize this impulse. John Wilkes and Edmund Burke, for instance, were well-known eighteenth century exponents of this notion, with Burke noting that an English continuity existed "from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right . . . derived to use from our forefathers" (Haseler 1996: 34). These ideas found a very responsive audience across the Atlantic. Eighteenth-century "Real Whig" historians such as James Burgh and Catherine Macauly stand out in this regard. These interpreters of English history witnessed the direct assimilation of their work into the American independence movement. In Reginald Horsman's words,

The various ingredients in the myth of Anglo-Saxon England, clearly delineated in a host of seventeenth and eighteenth-century works, now appear again in American protests: Josiah Quincy Jr., wrote of the popular nature of the Anglo-Saxon militia; Sad Adams stressed the old English freedoms defended in the Magna Carta; Benjamin Franklin stressed the freedom that the Anglo-Saxons enjoyed in emigrating to England; Charles Carroll depicted Saxon liberties torn away by William the Conquerer; Richard Bland argued that the English Constitution and Parliament steemed from the Anglo-Saxon period . . . George Washington admired the pro-Saxon history of Catherine Macaulay and she visited him at Mount Vernon after the Revolution. (Horsman 1981: 12).Were these prominent Americans merely expressing an abstract ideological exuberance that happened to have an English historical referent? Liah Greenfeld appears to take this stance, arguing that Americans equated Englishness with Liberalism and no more (Greenfeld 1992: 409). Yet such an argument cannot explain the infatuation with the Anglo-Saxons displayed by both pre-Revolutionary pamphleteers and the statesmen of the new Republic. (R. Smith 1997: 72-86). Most explicit in this regard was U.S. president and founding father Thomas Jefferson, who proclaimed to John Adams after drafting the Constitution in 1776 that the Americans were "the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Henigst and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed" (Horsman 1981: 22, emphasis added).

Notice that Jefferson distinguished between Americans' ideological and genealogical inheritance, both of which he saw as deriving from the Anglo-Saxons. The idea that the Anglo-Saxon English had self-selected themselves through immigration to escape the British (Norman) yoke to bring the torch of freedom to America was a quintessential myth of ethnogenesis (Ross 19984: 917; Gossett 1953: 82). Accompanying purified religion and purified liberty, therefore, was a purified American genealogy. In this manner, one similar to the Quebecois, Afrikaners, and Ulster Protestants, the Americans were performing a feat of particularlistic fission from the mother stock which would form the basis for an entirely new ethnic group.

Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon myth came to be grafted onto American experience by the mid-nineteenth century. For instance, the New England town meeting was likened to the Anglo-Saxon tribal council, and the statements of Tacitus regarding the free, egalitarian qualities of the Anglo-Saxons were given American interpretation (Goldman 1992: 246). The most widely read American historians of the late nineteenth century -- George Bancroft, William Prescott, John Motley, and Francis Parkman -- helped popularize the myth, as did English literature scholars (Ross 1984: 917; Gossett 1963: 201-203). Nineteenth- and early twentieth century utterances by American elites such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson provide further evidence that the Anglo-Saxon myth was a historicist force in the American conscience collective.

"The fathers followed Boon[e] or fought at King's Mountain," thundered Theodore Rooseelt in 1889. "The sons marched south with Jackson to overcome the Creeks and beat back the British; the grandsons died at the Alamo or charged to victory at San Jacinto. They were doing their share of a work that began with the conquest of Britain, that entered on its second and wider period after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that culminated in the marvelous growth of the United States. The winning of the West and Southwest is a stage in the conquest of a continent" (Roosevelt 1889, I: 26).

Less clear is the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon myth penetrated down the social scale. This is a similar question to that posed by Eugen Weber or Walker Connor: what proportion of the population must hold a particular myth of descent for a category of persons to be considered ethnic. In the American case, although we do not know how many were aware of the Whig formulation of the Anglo-Saxon myth, unless totally isolated from other groups, they were conscious of their WASP cultural markers (White race, "Anglo-Saxon" in speech and surname, Protestant in religion). Furthermore, the Yeoman (independent farmer) representation, which was strongly connected with Anglo-Saxonism, definitely had popular resonance and has been described as "the myth of mid-nineteenth century America" (H. Smith 1950: 135; Hofstander 1955: 24-25).

Finally, many Anglo-Americans were conscious of their descent from the various Anglo-American regional groups Hence we cannot consider the ethnic Americans to be merely etic (other-defined) category like the eighteenth-century inhabitants of Ukraine and Slovakia (A. Smith 1985: 30; 1991: 21). Rather, this was a self-conscious ethnic category whose elite held to an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent.

Some more interesting info here:

"American" Ethnicity Defined

The Anglo-American myth-symbol complex that had arisen by 1820 and had spread widely by 1850 can be summarized as follows. The "Americans" believed that:

They were an elect who shared a covenant with God to spread Liberalism and Protestant Christianity throughout America and the Western Hemisphere, an event that would herald the millennium on earth.
They were destined to spread across the West to the Pacific (at the very least), and theirs was a chosen land, a New Israel that at the same time served to regenerate the freedom of the American people.
Their material and political success showed them to be a chosen people, an elect descended from the pre-Norman, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons described by Tacitus.
They knew themselves by the cultural markers of the white race, [American] English language/surname, nonconformist Protestant religion, and Liberal ideology.
Their founding fathers included the Puritans and the leaders of the American Revolution. Virtually all the main figures in this ethnohistory (that is, John Winthrop, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson) were of English Protestant origin.
They were an egalitarian, independent, self-improving Yeoman people: a grassroots pioneer constituency from which organically flowed the American spirit of democracy and pure Christian morality.
The era of the Yeoman Republic, described by Jefferson in an allusion to both the Bible and King Alfred's Anglo-Saxons, constituted a Golden Age for America, to which it should return.

Here is some more interesting info from a chart which explains how the "American Dominant Ethnicity" came to be replaced by the views of the "New York Avant-Garde Community."

American Dominant Ethnicity

Boundry Symbols: U.S. English language, British surname, North European Phenotype, Protestantism, Liberalism and Egalitarianism, American Landscape.

Communal Narrative/Myth of Descent: Pilgrims, Puritans, Founding Fathers, American Revolution, Pioneers, Settlers.

Territory: United States

Art Form: New England and Appalachian Traditions

Iconic Figures: Yeoman, Pioneer

Myth of Immortality: Communal Eternity

Destiny: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Liberal-Egalitarian Millennium


Avant-Garde Community

Boundry Symbols: Egalitarianism, Modernism, Urban Residence, Cosmopolitan Education/Experience

Communal Narrative/Myth of Descent: Myth of the Outsider in History, Myth of the Avant-Garde (from Socrates and Christ to 1789, 1848, 1917, 1968 and more)

Territory: Scattered Urban Enclaves Worldwide

Art Form: Modernist

Iconic Figures: Progressive Outcast, Revolutionary, Marginalized Masses

Myth of Immortality: Humanity's Eternal Gratitude, World Historical Recognition

Destiny: Expressive-Egalitarian Utopia