Old and New New Englanders: Immigration and Regional Identity in the Gilded Age

One. World Conquerors or a Dying People? : Racial Theory, Regional Anxiety, and the Brahmin Anglo-Saxonists

14 one World Conquerors or a Dying People? Racial Theory, Regional Anxiety, and the Brahmin Anglo-Saxonists Although he was best known in his time as a politician and popular historian , Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge also occasionally weighed in on cultural matters, particularly when they touched on his abiding concerns of race, nation, and New England history. In an essay from the 1890s titled “Shakespeare’s Americanisms,” he argued that one measure of the power and mobility of a people was the feasibility of standardizing its language: It is quite possible to have Tuscan Italian or Castilian Spanish or Parisian French as the standard of correctness, but no one ever heard of “London English” used in that sense. The reason is simple. These nations have ceased to spread and colonize or to grow as nations. They are practically stationary. But English is the language of a conquering , colonizing race, which in the last three centuries has subdued and possessed ancient civilizations and virgin continents alike, and whose speech is now heard in the remotest corners of the earth. It is not the least of the many glories of the English tongue that it has proved equal to the task which its possessors have imposed upon it. Like the race, it has shown itself capable of assimilating new elements without degeneration. It has met new conditions, adapted itself to them, and prevailed over them. It has proved itself flexible without weakness, and strong without rigidity. With all its vast spread, it still remains unchanged in essence and in all its great qualities.1 World Conquerors or a Dying People? • 15 Lodge’s distinction between stagnant and growing races—as well as his classification of his own race among the latter—sprang from his background as an Anglo-Saxonist. In an era that saw Anglo-Saxon chauvinism pervade the upper reaches of American scholarly and political life, Lodge was one of his race’s most energetic and influential champions. Like most Anglo-Saxonists, he believed he belonged to the world’s dominant race, one with a special capacity for absorbing other peoples and cultures without losing its purity. Lodge also joined many other Anglo-Saxonists in the belief that the traits of his race extended to its language. He presented English as a tongue uniquely capable of absorbing other languages and adapting to local conditions while remaining “unchanged in essence.” The idea of measuring all the speakers of such a language by the standards of one place (e.g., “London English”) was ludicrous. Lodge insisted that the “only possible standard for English speech” was the “usage of the best writers” and “best educated and most highly trained” speakers throughout Anglo-Saxondom.2 On the other hand, Lodge believed languages such as Italian, Spanish , and French were subject to a different set of racial and cultural forces. He embraced the Anglo-Saxonist view that the Latin race—to which the speakers of those three tongues belonged—was characterized by decadence and lassitude. They were “practically stationary” peoples who lacked the vigor and suppleness to absorb other races and cultures. Lodge believed the inertness of the Latin nations manifested itself in their languages, whose “stiffness and narrowness” was a sure sign that their speakers had “ceased to march, and that expansion for people and speech alike is at an end.”3 At that point it became feasible to hold everyone to the linguistic standard of a single place. Despite his contempt for Latin senescence, Lodge also knew what it felt like to belong to a “practically stationary” people, one whose days of conquest and absorption were long since over. I refer, of course, to the Anglo-Saxons of New England, in particular members of the patrician class to which Lodge belonged, whom Oliver Wendell Holmes had famously christened Brahmins. It was they, not the Castilian Spanish, Tuscan Italians , or Parisian French, who were best known among American ethnic groups for “stiffness and narrowness,” for condemning cultural innovations by inherited standards, and for failing to assimilate new people and ideas. In this chapter I explore how this tension between their racial and regional identities shaped the thinking of Lodge and the other Gilded Age Brahmin Anglo-Saxonists. 16 • old and new new englanders I will be discussing the Brahmin Anglo-Saxonists as a group, but they had professional and ideological differences that must not be overlooked. Although most of them were Mugwumps...