The Lamp of Experience

Appendix I: The Saxon Myth Dies Hard

LAMP_201-250.indd 37 5/27/11 1:28 PM APPENDIX I The Saxon Myth Dies Hard For all its inaccuracies, the interpretation of English history presented by the Real Whigs proved remarkably durable. In the mid-nineteenth century Americans were praising Algernon Sidney as "one of the noblest martyrs of that liberty which the progress of civilization and the developments of time seem to point out as the heritage of the Anglo-Saxon race." 1 And another scholar carefully identified the Goths as "the noblest branch of the Caucasian race." "We are," he added, "their children." 2 The crux of the whig view was the concept of Germanic superiority and the peculiarly felicitous capacity of the Anglo-Saxon for democratic ways; these ideas remained popular throughout the nineteenth century. At the Johns Hopkins University, America's first great center of graduate study, Herbert Baxter Adams put forward his germ theory ofAmerican history. Keenly alive to "the possibility of tracing the great stream of American democracy to its earlier English source," Professor Adams asserted that it was from the primitive Teutonic constitution that American democracy derived.3 Woodrow r. George Van Santvoord, Life ofAlgernon Sidney (N.Y., r854), 333· 2. George Perkins Marsh, The Goths in New-England . .. (Middlebury, Vt., r843) , I3I4 · 3· W. Stull Holt, ed., Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876-1901 As Revealed in the Correspondence ofHerbert B. Adams (Baltimore, 1938), II3-I4. 237 LAMP_201-250.indd 38 5/27/11 1:28 PM APPENDIX I Wilson, one ofAdams's many notable students, commented that the only examples he knew of successful democracy were in governments "begotten of English race," and where "the old Teutonic habit has had the same persistency as in England." 4 In Berlin, American historian John Burgess, who received his training under the great Rudolf Gneist, learned of "the great struggle for liberty conducted by the English subsequent to the Norman Conquest ." Burgess in turn preached Saxon democracy and its moral for Americans.5 John Fiske's social Darwinism was in the same vein as the Teutonism ofBurgess,6 and evolutionary thought led to a racist adaptation of the whig concept of the noble Saxon. Imperialists reached back into their past, Josiah Strong proclaiming that "the AngloSaxon holds in his hands the destinies of mankind." Strong believed Anglo-Saxons "a race of unequaled energy," and representative of "the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilizations." In the Darwinian struggle for existence, Strong found the fitter Saxons had survived owing to "their traditions of civil liberty."7 In England, the radical Charles Dilke surveyed his world and forecast that the Anglo-Saxon race was the only one which could maintain its freedom.8 Well-intentioned politicians like Dilke's friend Joseph Chamberlain spoke proudly of "the greatness and importance of the destiny which is reserved for the Anglo-Saxons";9 he sought to cultivate a union of the Saxon Powers-America, Britain , and Germany. America's Mr. Dooley was sceptical: "You an' me, Hinnisey, has got to bring on this here Anglo-Saxon 'lieance." To Mr. Hennessy's enquiry, Mr. Dooley explained that "an Anglo-Saxon 4· Woodrow Wilson, "Democracy;' in Harper's Encyclopedia rif United States History, IO vols. (N.Y., 1902). 5. Rudolf Gneist, The English Parliament .. . , trans.Jenery Shee (London, r886) , 86. 6. See Julius W. Pratt, The Expansionists rif18g8 . . . (Baltimore, 1936), chap. I, for a discussion of the views of Fiske, Burgess, and Strong. See also Edward N. Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875-1925 (N.Y., 1948). 7· Josiah Strong, Our Country . .. (N.Y., r885), 179, 174. 8. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Greater Britain .. . (London, r869), v-vi. 9· Joseph Chamberlain, Foreign and Colonial Speeches (London, 1897), 6. LAMP_201-250.indd 39 5/27/11 1:29 PM The Saxon Myth Dies Hard is a German that's forgot who was his parents." 10 But in Europe, von Treitschke was both certain and proud of his ancestry and wrote at length of the glories he and his nation derived therefrom. Houston Stewart Chamberlain was sufficiently carried away to propose that Jesus Christ must have been of the Germanic race.11 No one factor can explain completely these racial perversions, but apart from the powerful influence of Darwinian thought, some responsibility rests with those major nineteenth-century historians who lent their names to enough ofthe Saxon myth to dignify its degeneration into racial and nationalistic...