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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
This essay focuses on an influential group of New England patrician intellectuals, including Henry Cabot Lodge, James K. Hosmer, and John Fiske. It argues that the New England backgrounds of these men informed their thinking about race, distinguishing them from their Anglo-Saxonist colleagues from other regions. Specifically, the Anglo-Saxonist triumphalism of the Brahmins was undercut by their anxieties about the fate of their race in New England, where they faced a number of daunting challenges. The result was the unique mixture of power and impotence, arrogance and despair, expansionism and defensiveness that distinguishes the Brahmins from other Anglo-Saxonists. The internal contradictions of the Brahmins are particularly evident in their commentary on immigration, an area where, because of their prestige and political influence, they wielded an outsize influence over federal policy.
2 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Certain Accepted Heroes and Other Essays in Literature and Politics (New York, 1897), 97, 98.Google ScholarFor a similar comparison of the expansionist and assimilative capacities of the Anglo-Saxon race and the English language, seeStrong, Josiah, The New Era; or, The Coming Kingdom (New York, 1893), 60Google Scholar.
3 , Lodge, Certain Accepted Heroes and Other Essays in Literature and Politics, 97, 98.Google Scholar
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12 Following British historian Edward A. Freeman, many U.S. Anglo-Saxonists rejected the term “Anglo-Saxon” as historically inaccurate. They preferred the names “English-speaking peoples,” “English-speaking races,” “English folk,” and “English race.” See , Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 68Google Scholar;Fiske, John, American Political Ideas (Boston, 1911), 95–97Google Scholar.
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31 Indeed, John Fiske thought the coming of the Puritans was more significant, given that they repeated “in a new environment and on a far grander scale the work which their forefathers had wrought in Britain.” See The beginnings of New England; or, The Puritan Theocracy in Its Relation to Civil and Religious Liberty (Boston, 1889), 49Google Scholar.
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42 Ibid., 135.
43 Ibid., 107.
44 Ibid., 133.
45 Ibid., 97.
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49 Ibid., 17.
50 Ibid., 18.
51 Ibid.
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54 Ibid., 117–18, 213–17, 285–88.
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65 Congressional Record, 54th Cong., 1st sess., Mar. 16, 1896, 2820.Google Scholar
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79 Ibid., 680.
