THE MYTHS OF AMERICAN ANGLO-SAXONISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1981) (Perhaps, despite all their individual and collective flaws, the Founders had a more idealistic and universal notion of equality (as in  the self-evident truth that ''all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights') than the following generations, including twenty-first-century Americans. "The flowering of the new science of man in the first half of the nineteenth century was ultimately decisive in giving a racial cast to Anglo-Saxonism. Scientists, by mid-century, had provided an abundance of 'proofs' by which English and American Anglo-Saxons could explain their power, progress, governmental stability, and freedom. Rather than the eighteenth-century emphasis on the human race, its problems, and its progress, there was in the following century a feverish interest in distinctly endowed human races--races with innately unequal abilities, which could lead either to success and world power or to total subordination and extinction. In western Europe and America the Caucasian race became generally recognized as the race clearly superior to all others; the Germanic was recognized as the most talented branch of the Caucasians; and the Anglo-Saxons, in England and the United States, and often even in Germany, were recognized as the most gifted descendants of the Germans. The scientific study of man provided supposedly empirical proofs for the assertions of propagandists and patriots." Id. at 43-44. "By the middle years of the nineteenth century the simple praise of Anglo-Saxon institutions and freedom, which had assumed such importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had undergone a profound change in England. Rather than emphasizing earlier freedom as a basis for internal reform, the new theorists were envisaging a world shaped to the desires of a supposedly innately superior Anglo-Saxon race. There was a firm and increasing belief that what was good for the Anglo-Saxons was good for the world. In Germany in the early nineteenth century ideas of historic Teutonic greatness were used most frequently to strengthen demands for nationhood. But the English were attracted to the idea of their race as a regenerating force for the whole world, for in Great Britain, throughout her colonies, and in the United States the Anglo-Saxons were apparently completing that march begun in the dawn of history by Aryan tribesmen. It was this aspect of the new Teutonism that also found most fertile ground on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States. There, ideas and dreams indigenous to American history melded with a variety of themes from Europe to transform Revolutionary ideals for human progress into an ideology of continental, hemispheric, and even world racial destiny for a particular chosen people." Id. at 77. "Though the early years of the nineteenth century both religion and science confirmed Americans in the view that mankind consisted of one human species, that the obvious physical differences were the result of environment, and that the vast differences in the human condition and accomplishments stemmed form the same cause. This view was to change radically in western European and transatlantic thought, but the change also came about because of the peculiarities of the American experience. New racial ideas which influenced the whole of Western society in the first half of the nineteenth century fell on especially fertile ground in the United States. Ideas flowed both ways across the Atlantic in the formative years of he new ethnology. The American experience and American conclusions drawn from this experience helped to shape western European attitudes. Racial differences were dramatized in the United States, for white, black and red were thrust together from the earliest settlements. While blacks, of course, were central to the general development of American thought on race, Indians were of particular importance in the development of American racial thought in the context of an expanding and aggressive nation. In dealing with the Indians the United States began to formulate a rationale of expansion which was readily adaptable to the needs of an advance over other peoples and to a world role." Id. at 99-100. Two point, both of which should be obvious but for which Americans are in constant denial. First, notwithstanding "race" being a mere social construct, one cannot understand American history and American politics without appeal to race. For example, Slavery, Jim Crow, Indian Removal, Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico [Non] Statehood, Chinese Exclusion, Gentleman's Agreement with Japan, Eastern European Immigration Restrictions, Mexican Immigration (both legal and illegal), the whole "Model Minority" hype, and so on. Second, there is a significant racial component to American thought and rhetoric regarding the so-called War on Terror. For example, Syrian Refugees. For the most part, the Founders grounded in the Enlightenment. The later generations have steadily moved away from the Enlightenment and embraced the darkness of superstition, racialism, and religious bigotry. That we Americans are an enlightened people(s) is a myth, if not an outright lie. The myth of American Anglo-Saxism has grave consequences.).