Anglo-Saxonism in the 19th century

Anglo-Saxonism is a cultural belief system developed by British and American intellectuals, politicians, and academics in the 19th century. Racialized Anglo-Saxonism contained both competing and intersecting doctrines, such as Victorian era Old Northernism and the Teutonic germ theory which it relied upon in appropriating Germanic (particularly Norse) cultural and racial origins for the Anglo-Saxon "race".

Predominantly a product of certain Anglo-American societies, and organisations of the era:[1]

An important racial belief system in late 19th- and early 20th-century British and US thought advanced the argument that the civilization of English-speaking nations was superior to that of any other nations because of racial traits and characteristics inherited from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain.

In 2017, Mary Dockray-Miller, an American scholar of Anglo-Saxon England, stated that there was an increasing interest in the study of Anglo-Saxonism in the 19th century.[2] Anglo-Saxonism is regarded as a predecessor ideology to the later Nordicism of the 20th century,[3] which was generally less anti-Celtic and broadly sought to racially reconcile Celtic identity with Germanic under the label of Nordic.[4]

Background

In terminology, Anglo-Saxonism is by far the most commonly used phrase to describe the historical ideology of rooting a Germanic racial identity, whether Anglo-Saxon, Norse, or Teutonic, into the concept of the English, Scottish or British nation, and subsequently founded-nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

In both historical and contemporary literature however, Anglo-Saxonism has many derivations, such as the commonly used phrase Teutonism or Anglo-Teutonism,[5] which can be used as form of catch-all to describe American or British Teutonism and further extractions such as English or Scottish Teutonism. It is also occasionally encompassed by the longer phrase Anglo-Saxon Teutonism, or shorter labels Anglism or Saxonism, along with the most frequently used term of Anglo-Saxonism itself.

American medievalist Allen Frantzen credits historian L. Perry Curtis's use of Anglo-Saxonism as a term for "an unquestioned belief in Anglo-Saxon 'genius'" during this period of history.[6] Curtis has pointed toward a radical change from adulation of Anglo-Saxon institutions in the 16th and 17th centuries towards something more racial and imperialist.[7] Historian Barbara Yorke, who specializes in the subject,[8] has similarly argued that the earlier self-governance oriented Anglo-Saxonism of Thomas Jefferson's era had by the mid-19th century developed into "a belief in racial superiority".[9]

According to Australian scholar Helen Young, the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism was "profoundly racist" and influenced authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien and his fictional works into the 20th century.[10] Similarly, Marxist writer Peter Fryer claimed that "Anglo-Saxonism was a form of racism that originally arose to justify the British conquest and occupation of Ireland".[11] Some scholars believe the Anglo-Saxonism championed by historians and politicians of the Victorian era influenced and helped to spawn the Greater Britain Movement of the mid-20th-century.[12] In 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists decided to change its name due to the potential confusion of their organization's name with racist Anglo-Saxonism.[13]

At the passing of the Anglo-Saxonism era, progressive intellectual Randolph Bourne's essay Trans-National America reacted positively to integration ("We have needed the new peoples"), and while mocking the "indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism" in the context of very early 20th-century migration to the United States,[14] Bourne manages to express an anxiety at the American melting pot theory.[15]

Origins

Early references

In 1647, English MP John Hare, who served during the Long Parliament, issued a pamphlet declaring England as a "member of the Teutonick nation, and descended out of Germany". In the context of the English Civil War, this anti-Norman and pro-Germanic paradigm has been identified as perhaps the earliest iteration of "English Teutonism" by Professor Nick Groom, who has suggested the 1714 Hanoverian succession, where the German House of Hanover ascended the throne of Great Britain, is the culmination of this Anglo-Saxonist ideology.[16]

Teutonic germ theory

Many historians and political scientists in Britain and the United States supported it in the 19th century. The theory supposed that American and British democracy and institutions had their roots in Teutonic peoples, and that Germanic tribes had spread this "germ" within their race from ancient Germany to England and on to North America. Advocacy in Britain included the likes of John Mitchell Kemble, William Stubbs, and Edward Augustus Freeman. Within the U.S., future president Woodrow Wilson, along with Albert Bushnell Hart and Herbert Baxter Adams were applying historical and social science in advocacy for Anglo-Saxonism through the theory.[1] In the 1890s, under the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner, Wilson abandoned the Teutonic germ theory in favor of a frontier model for the sources of American democracy.[17]

Ancestry and racial identity

Germanic and Teutonic

Anglo-Saxonism of the era sought to emphasize Britain's cultural and racial ties with Germany, frequently referring to Teutonic peoples as a source of strength and similarity. Contemporary historian Robert Boyce notes that many British politicians of the 19th century promoted these Germanic links, such as Henry Bulwer, 1st Baron Dalling and Bulwer who said that it was "in the free forests of Germany that the infant genius of our liberty was nursed", and Thomas Arnold who claimed that "Our English race is the German race; for though our Norman fathers had learned to speak a stranger's language, yet in blood, as we know, they were the Saxon's brethren both alike belonging to the Teutonic or German stock".[18]

Norman and Celtic

Anglo-Saxonists in the 19th century often sought to downplay, or outright denigrate, the significance of both Norman and Celtic racial and cultural influence in Britain. Less frequently however, some form of solidarity was expressed by some Anglo-Saxonists, who conveyed that Anglo-Saxonism was simply "the best-known term to denote that mix of Celtic, Saxon, Norse, and Norman blood which now flows in the united stream in the veins of the Anglo-Saxon peoples".[19] Although a staunch Anglo-Saxonist, Thomas Carlyle had even disparagingly described the United States as a kind of "formless" Saxon tribal order, and claimed that Normans had given Anglo-Saxons and their descendants a greater sense of order for national structure, and that this was particularly evident in England.[20]

Northern European

Edward Augustus Freeman, a leading Anglo-Saxonist of the era, promoted a larger Northern European identity, favorably comparing civilizational roots from "German forest" or "Scandinavian rock" with the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome.[21] American scholar Mary Dockray-Miller expands on this concept to suggest that pre-World War I Anglo-Saxonism ideology helped establish the "primacy of northern European ancestry in United States culture at large".[2]

Lowland Scottish

During the 19th century in particular, Scottish people living in Lowland Scotland, near the Anglo-Scottish border, "increasingly identified themselves with the Teutonic world destiny of Anglo-Saxonism", and sought to separate their identity from that of Highland Scots, or the "inhabitants of Romantic Scotland".[22] With some considering themselves "Anglo-Saxon Lowlanders", public opinion of Lowland Scots turned on Gaels within the context of the Highland Famine, with suggestions of deportations to British colonies for Highlanders of the "'inferior Celtic race".[23] Amongst others, Goldwin Smith, a devout Anglo-Saxonist,[24] believed the Anglo-Saxon "race" included Lowland Scots and should not be exclusively defined by English ancestry within the context of the United Kingdom's greater empire.[25]

Thomas Carlyle, himself a Scot, was one of the earliest notable people to express a "belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority".[26] Historian Richard J. Finlay has suggested that the Scots National League, which campaigned for Scotland to separate from the United Kingdom, was a response or opposition to the history of "Anglo-Saxon teutonism" embedded in some Scottish culture.[27]

Mythology and religions

Anglo-Saxonism was largely aligned with Protestantism, generally perceiving Catholics as outsiders, and was orientated as an ideology in opposition to other "races", such as the "Celts" of Ireland and "Latins" of Spain.[28]

Charles Kingsley, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, was particularly focused on there being a "strong Norse element in Teutonism and Anglo-Saxonism". He blended Protestantism of the day with the Old Norse religion, saying that the Church of England was "wonderfully and mysteriously fitted for the souls of a free Norse-Saxon race". He believed the ancestors of Anglo-Saxons, Norse people and Germanic peoples had physically fought beside the god Odin, and that the British monarchy of his time was genetically descended from him.[7]^: 76

Political aims

Expansion

Embedded in 19th century, American Anglo-Saxonism was a growing sense that the "Anglo Saxon" race had to expand into surrounding territories. This particularly expressed itself in the ideology of manifest destiny, which claimed the U.S. had a right to expand across North America.[29]

Shared citizenship

A persistent "Anglo-Saxonist" idea, Albert Venn Dicey believed in the creation of a shared citizenship between Britons and Americans, and the concept of cooperation, even federation, of those from the "Anglo-Saxon" race.[30]

References

Kaufman, Will; Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl (2005). Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, Volume 2. ABC-CLIO. pp. 90–91. ISBN 978-1851094318.
Dockray-Miller, Mary (2017). "Introduction". Public Medievalists, Racism, and Suffrage in the American Women's College (1st ed.). Springer Nature. ISBN 978-3-319-69705-5. This study, part of growing interest in the study of nineteenth-century medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism, closely examines the intersections of race, class, and gender in the teaching of Anglo-Saxon in the American women's colleges before World War I, interrogating the ways that the positioning of Anglo-Saxon as the historical core of the collegiate English curriculum also silently perpetuated mythologies about Manifest Destiny, male superiority, and the primacy of northern European ancestry in United States culture at large.
Luczak, Ewa Barbara (2015). Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. p. 164. ISBN 978-1137545787. Nordicism replaced the older concepts of Anglo-Saxonism promulgated by David Starr Jordan and Aryanism espoused by Charles Woodruff.
Kassis, Dimitrios (2015). Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 28. ISBN 978-1443870849. In the Nordicist discourse, what can be noticed is the attempt to racially unite the English with the Celts, a rather pioneering element considering the earliest theories which were ideologically constructed on a strictly anti-Celtic basis.
Vucetic, Srdjan (2011). The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations. Stanford University Press. p. 40. ISBN 978-0804772259. The more the Germans excelled in industry, commerce, science, and education, the more American and British elites fell under the spells of racial Teutonism or "Anglo-Teutonism".
Frantzen, Allen (2012). Anglo-Saxon Keywords (1st ed.). Wiley. pp. 13–14. ISBN 978-0-470-65762-1.
Horsman, Reginald (1976). Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850 (Journal of the History of Ideas - Vol. 37, No. 3 ed.). University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 387.
"Who was King Alfred the Great?". BBC History. 23 November 2018.
"Alfred the Great: The Most Perfect Man in History?". History Today. 10 November 1999.
"How Can We Untangle White Supremacy From Medieval Studies?". Pacific Standard. 9 October 2017.
Fryer, Peter (1992). "History of English Racism". Aspects of British Black History. INDEX Books. p. 30. ISBN 978-1871518047.
"The empire strikes back". New Statesman. 23 January 2017.
Utz, Richard (October 31, 2019). "Adventures in Anglalond: Angles, Saxons, and Academics". Medievally Speaking. Retrieved October 31, 2019.
"E Pluribus Unum, and Vice Versa". National Review. 10 September 2018.
"Against the Ideal of a 'Melting Pot'". The Atlantic. 12 September 2018.
Groom, Nick (2012). "6. Gothic Whiggery". The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199586790. John Hare had praised English Teutonism as early as 1647, insisting, "We are a member of the Teutonick nation, and descended out of Germany, a descent so honourable and happy, if duly considered, as that the like could not have been fetched from any other part of Europe, nor scarce of the universe.
Lloyd Ambrosius, "Democracy, Peace, and World Order" in y Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2008). Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace. Woodrow Wilson Center Press. p. 231.
Boyce, Robert (2011). The Persistence of Anglo-Saxonism in Britain and the origins of Britain's appeasement policy towards Germany. pp. 110–129.
Rich, Paul B. (1990). "Empire and Anglo-saxonism". Race and Empire in British Politics (Comparative Ethnic and Race Relations). Cambridge University Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-521-38958-7.
Modarelli, Michael (2018). "Epilogue". The Transatlantic Genealogy of American Anglo-Saxonism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138352605.
Lake, Marilyn; Reynolds, Henry (2008). Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Critical Perspectives on Empire). Cambridge University Press. p. 51. ISBN 978-0521707527. Freeman, a pre-eminent English historian of race, went to Oxford as a student in 1841, a time when ... 'the ingredients for the new racial interpretation of Anglo-Saxon destiny were all present' ... By the end of the 1840s, Freeman was writing of 'Teutonic greatness' and, comparing seeds planted in the 'German forest or on...Scandinavian rock' with the legacy of Greece and Rome, was able to declare confidently in favour of the former.
Pittock, Murray (2001). Scottish Nationality (British History in Perspective). Palgrave Macmillan. p. 7. ISBN 978-0333726631. In the late eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries, Scots living outwith the Highlands increasingly identified themselves with the Teutonic world destiny of Anglo-Saxonism and intensified the constructed images of bifurcation and division between themselves and the inhabitants of Romantic Scotland.
Fenyó, Krisztina (1996). Contempt, Sympathy and Romance: Lowland Perceptions of the Highlands and the Clearances during the Famine Years, 1845-1855. Glasgow University Press. p. 4. After the outbreak of the Highland famine ... public opinion firmly decided that the best route for the destitute Gaels lay outside the country ... they belonged to the 'inferior' Celtic race. Such as people was better sent to a remote colonial land instead of being a permanent burden and drain on the 'superior' and developed Anglo-Saxon Lowlanders.
Kohn, Edward P. (2004). This Kindred People: Canadian-American Relations and the Anglo-Saxon Idea, 1895-1903. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0773527966. Chief among the movement's advocates was Goldwin Smith, former Oxford don, founder of the Commercial Union Club of Canada, and devout Anglo-Saxonist. Smith, an anti-imperialist, viewed Canada's connection to a distant colonial powers as unnatural and believed Canada's ultimate destiny was to unite with the United States.
Bueltmann, Tanja; Gleeson, David T.; MacRaild, Don (2012). Locating the English Diaspora, 1500-2010. Liverpool University Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-1846318191. Therefore, it was perhaps for want of the strengthening of Anglo-Saxon superiority that Anglo-Saxonism was not automatically defined as exclusively English. While, for Goldwin Smith, the Irish were certainly excluded, Anglo-Saxonism could be used more inclusively, at times embracing Welsh and (Lowland) Scots.
Frankel, Robert (2007). Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950 (Studies in American Thought and Culture). University of Wisconsin Press. p. 54. ISBN 978-0299218805. Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the first notable Englishman to enunciate a belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, and, as he told Emerson, among the members of this select race he counted the Americans.
Finlay, Richard J. (1994). Independent and Free: Scottish Politics and the Origins of the Scot- tish National Party, 1918-1945. John Donald Publishers. p. 39. People who belonged to the League during this time were, above all, Celtic nationalists and there were many implicit criticisms of Scottish culture which had been tinged with 'Anglo-Saxon teutonism'.
Foster, Anne L.; Go, Julian (2003). The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives. Edinburgh University Press. p. 48. ISBN 978-0-8223-3099-8. Having begun as a British defense of the superiority of the Anglican church and having early confronted Catholic "others" - the "Celtic" race in Ireland and the "Latin" in Spain - Anglo-Saxonism was closely allied to Protestantism and was often said to share its virtues.
Magoc, Chris J.; Bernstein, David (2015). Imperialism and Expansionism in American History [4 volumes]: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection. ABC-CLIO. p. 483. ISBN 978-1610694292. Late-19th-century Anglo-Saxonism was often pressed into the service of the United States' new global self-image as a nation in the vanguard of "civilization" ... By 1898, it provided the powerful racial and hereditary ideology that propelled U.S. statesmen into the acquisition of an empire in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Bowman, Stephen (2018). Pilgrims Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895–1945. Edinburgh University Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-1474417815. Some of these Anglo-Saxonist ideas - including those of legal theorist A.V. Dicey - called upon isopolitan ideas of common citizenship for Britons and Americans ... in particular the belief that, through cooperation and federation, the "Anglo-Saxon" race would help to bring peace, order and justice to the earth.