Woodrow Wilson himself was forward in the thickening of this atmosphere, taking a leading part in “Liberty Loan” rallies and attacking “slackers” in the argot of Tom Brown. But those, like Sir Gilbert Parker, who watched this with satisfaction were missing a point. It might be true that hysteria would extend even to the banning of a film called The Spirit of ‘76, on the finding that its portrayal of the redcoats was “calculated to make us a little bit slack in our loyalty to Britain in this great catastrophe.” And it might equally be true that the once powerful Irish and German populations had been stymied or eclipsed. But what was actually in formation was an American, not an Anglo-Saxon, nationalism.
In a memo to the British War Cabinet in late 1917, Sir Robert Cecil kept up the great tradition of his family’s arrogance by writing: “If America accepts our point of view . . . it will mean the dominance of that point of view in all international affairs.” He added that “though the American people are very largely foreign, both in origin and in mode of thought, their rulers are almost exclusively Anglo-Saxons, and share our political ideals.” It might seem unfair to make someone even as senior as Cecil into a representative figure (when cautioned by the American ambassador to remember the Boston Tea Party, he replied with composure that he had never been to Boston, nor graced a tea party in that fair city), but he was not unrepresentative either. In his regard for the trinity of blood, ruling class, and empire he took a standard Anglo-Saxon position.
Wilson had a due regard for the disillusionment that came with peace, even as he was helping to repress and deport those who gave political voice to that disillusionment. He had been stung by accusations of being England’s pliant servant, and he had the experience of Pershing’s armies and the weight of American credit with which to negotiate. Welcomed after victory at a banquet in Buckingham Palace in December 1918, he behaved with pronounced understatement and later warned King George V:
You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the United States. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language. No, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests.
Compare this with “The Swarming of the English.” By mutation through war and overseas commitment, the old Anglo-Saxondom had in fact turned into a whitish version of “America First,” with a generally less sentimental attitude toward “the old country” except when rhetoric might by occasion demand otherwise. Even Senator Albert Beveridge, who had thundered about the tie of blood before the First World War, now began to stress the unique and distinctive Americanness of the white destiny.
Wilson, as ever, tried to be on both sides of the argument. He had with some misgiving allowed the Palmer Raids to go ahead and the criminalization of “foreign anarchists” to proceed apace. In 1919 the Ku Klux Klan revived, as Baltzell points out, “no longer as a White conspiracy to keep the Negro in his place, but as a Protestant crusade against the un-Americanism of Catholics and Jews.” Though Wilson would have been far too fastidious to countenance any such scurrility, he did make an explicit connection between race theory and subversion in a conversation with his physician, Dr. Cary Grayson. Grayson records that Wilson was much exercised by news of socialist upheaval in Germany:
He said the American negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America, For example, a friend recently related the experience of a lady friend wanting to employ a negro laundress offering to pay the usual wage in that community. The negress demanded that she be given more money than was offered for the reason that “money is as much mine as it is yours.”
If matters went on in this way, said Wilson, there would soon be workers on the boards of American businesses. Not even the “great gangs of cheery negroes” could be relied upon anymore.
However, when the newly Republican Congress proposed a quota bill which would have favored immigrants from Northern Europe only, Wilson discreetly withheld his support from anything so explicit. He allowed the bill to die by failing to sign it, though he never gave any explanation of his conduct and was by that time very near to death. Some biographers have speculated that he felt bound by the promises he had made to the immigrants in the 1912 election. However that may be, the bill was reintroduced after the inauguration of Harding and passed by an almost unanimous vote. Later legislation, introduced in 1924 by Senator Reed and Representative Johnson, established “national origins quotas” that were based on 2 percent of each foreign-born group in the United States and depended upon their proportion as of the 1890 census. This negation of the Emma Lazarus principle was, writes Baltzell with emphasis, “the last surge of active nativism in this country to be led and strongly supported by the old-stock Eastern upper class.”
Yet the ambiguities of language, and its relationship to racial “stock” and social standing, extend back as far as the early days of the revolutionary period. According to an eyewitness account by George Washington’s friend the Marquis de Chastellux, there was much talk of a new official language in which the business of the newly emancipated colonies could be conducted. One active suggestion was for the use of Hebrew, and as Chastellux put it:
The proposal was, that it should be taught in the schools and made use of in all public acts. We may imagine that this project went no farther, but we conclude from the mere suggestion that the Americans could not express in a more energetic manner their aversion to the English.
Interestingly, Charles Astor Bristed records that the Continental Congress also discussed the possibility of adopting Greek as the American language; the proposal being eventually rejected on the ground that “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek.” This must be the earliest example of America trying to be Greece to the British Rome, and serves as a good illustration of what Sir Stephen Spender in another context has called “Love-Hate Relations.” A committee of the Continental Congress, as early as 1778, recommended that “the language of the United States” be employed in all replies or answers to the French minister. Though it remained the national language, in other words, English was rebaptized as American wherever possible and became a proper subject for cultural nationalist debate. As late as 1795, the House of Representatives narrowly defeated a motion that all its documents and proceedings be printed also in German. The tie vote was cast by the Speaker, one Friedrich Muhlenberg.
It was in this context that Noah Webster evolved his plan for a distinct grammar of American English. He conceived this idea in 1783, feeling it essential to nationhood that the tongue of the rejected “mother country” be superseded. In one of his favorite pamphlets it was asserted that “America is an independent empire, and ought to assume a national character.” Appealing to the New York legislature to allow him copyright for his American Spelling and Grammar, he described the book patriotically as “designed particularly for the youth in the American Empire.”
Most of these efforts to dilute or qualify the place of English were unsuccessful, and as the thirteen colonies began to expand across the entire North American continent, it was English they took with them across the mountains. Of course, there were habits of speech and developments of slang and pronunciation which made the American accent or accents identifiable anywhere in the world, but these were variations on an English theme. Nineteenth-century travelers and visitors from Britain never tired of making fun of these barbarisms. Mrs. Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens both observed what can be still be observed today—the tendency of Americans to speak in a more pompous and convoluted fashion, especially on official or decorous occasions, than their reputation for informality or ease would warrant. (G. K. Chesterton would later write a poem mocking the American fondness for abbreviation and economy�
��the substitution of “elevator” for “lift,” say, or “apartment” for “flat.” We could now add “transportation” for “transport.”) Captain Marryat, who came to the United States with the announced purpose of “doing serious injury to the cause of democracy,” was also enabled to rouse many an easy laugh among his more polished and superior readers across the foam.
All the subsequent revivals of the language question have been connected either to political Anglophobia, to immigration, to American “expansionism,” to the battle for “Anglo-Saxondom,” or to some combination of these. It is significant that Theodore Roosevelt, whose attachment to alliance with Britain was chiefly a function of his expansionist ideology, tried to carry on Webster’s imperial work by issuing an executive order in 1906. The order concerned “Simplified Spelling” and mandated the Government Printing Office to employ three hundred new usages such as, most famously, the word “thru.” For many years, the defense of Simplified Spelling was the emblem of the anti-British patriots in American society. The staunchest defender and practitioner of the scheme was the bristling Colonel Robert McCormick, whose Chicago Tribune was for decades the beating heart of Anglophobia. It was also a loud and persistent voice for “anti-imperialist” American imperialism; isolationist in point of Europe and raucously interventionist in point of the Pacific and the Caribbean. It later became the mouthpiece of the “neutral” America First campaign, and was the bane of the suave young men who were sent to staff the British propaganda and information departments. Its general ethos could be summarized in the celebrated Chicago mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, who swore to punch King George V “in the snoot” if he ever dared set foot in that democratic bailiwick. Not even the stoutest speechifier at the Watertoast dinner in Martin Chuzzlewit (“ ‘Bring forth that lion!’ said the young Columbian. ‘Alone, I dare him! I taunt that lion’ ”) could match him. The Tribune did not abandon the Simplified Spelling dogma until 1955, long after it had been ridiculed and neglected in general.
In 1923, another McCormick, Representative Washington Jay McCormick of Montana, introduced a bill into the House which would have made “the American Language” the official language of the United States. In The Nation he offered a glimpse of the blend of literary and national emotions which went to make up the energy of the language question:
It was only when Cooper, Irving, Mark Twain, Whitman and O. Henry dropped the Order of the Garter and began to write American that their wings of immortality sprouted. Had Noah Webster, instead of styling his monumental work the American Dictionary of the English Language, written a Dictionary of the American Language, he would have become a founder instead of a compiler. Let our writers drop their top-coats, spats and swagger-sticks, and assume occasionally their buckskin, moccasins and tomahawks.
Twain would have derived hilarious relish from that last sentence, as would H. L. Mencken. But the preceding ones make very plain the resentment of England for, and moreover the subliminal identification of England with, the images and stereotypes of class and class superiority. The notion of the American as rough-hewn and honest, and of the Englishman as a drawling, affected, effete snob, is an essential part of Anglo-American love-hate relations, and has not been quite extinguished even today.
McCormick’s bill failed to catch any legislative tide, but in the same year an Illinois legislator named Frank Ryan managed to have a very similar one enacted by the state legislature. In its preamble, which might have been drafted by the Chicago Tribune, there was an emphasis not just upon class but upon race:
Whereas, since the creation of the American Republic there have been certain Tory elements in our country who have never become reconciled to our republican institutions and have ever clung to the tradition of King and Empire; and Whereas, the assumed dominance of this Tory element—in the social, business and political life of America—tends to force the other racial units, in self-defense, to organize on racial lines . . .
There followed a mandate for American-as-she-is-spoke. These initiatives, which of course were sponsored by men who had never echoed Twain for his anti-imperialism even if they praised him for his authentic Americanism, also occurred at a time when mass immigration was not a fighting matter, and when the need for “Anglo-Saxon” or “white” solidarity was to that extent correspondingly less. They also occurred during a period of reaction against foreign entanglement, when “isolationism” was chiefly directed at the sort of British influence bragged about by Sir Gilbert Parker. Two widely separated counterexamples may help to illustrate the ironies of this aspect of the relationship.
In the same year, 1890, as those Shakespearean starlings took wing over Central Park, William Dean Howells’s character Basil March, in the novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, found that the East Side of New York was not at all, or rather no longer, to his taste. He noticed:
What must strike every observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant race . . . The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare cue-filletted skulls of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese, the furtive glitter of Italians, the blond dullness of Germans, the cold quiet of Scandinavians.
This was fairly comprehensive, and also fairly typical of its kind and time. Only a few years later, in The American Scene, Henry James registered the disgust of “a sensitive citizen” on viewing the teeming sheds at Ellis Island and feeling the indignity of being thus compelled “to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien” (italics mine). On the Lower East Side he detected “the hard glitter of Israel.” More than this, he winced at the accents and vernaculars employed, and described the Yiddish cafés as “the torture rooms of the living idiom.” This had already become his major preoccupation when he contemplated the arrival of new migrants. An America which had spent much of the nineteenth century trying to originate and copyright an individually American style in speech and writing now found itself defending the purity of English and the allied concept of manners and mores that English implied. Two years before he published The American Scene, James had given a graduation address to the young ladies of Bryn Mawr College. Entitled “The Question of Our Speech,” it argued for both “a coherent culture” and “a tone standard.” That the two ideas were inseparable in James’s mind, and inextricable from other and related considerations, is not to be doubted:
The vox Americana is for the spectator one of the stumbling blocks of our continent. It has been, among the organs of the schooled and newspapered races, perceptibly the most abandoned to its fate.
It’s noticeable that James alludes to “races” rather than classes in this connection. Not that the idea of class distinction is altogether absent from the discourse:
To the American common school, to the American newspaper, and to the American Dutchman and Dago, as the voice of the people describes them, we have simply handed over our property—not exactly bound hand and foot, I admit, like Andromeda awaiting her Perseus, but at least distracted, dishevelled, despoiled, diverted of that beautiful and becoming drapery of native atmosphere and circumstances which had, from far back, made, on its behalf, for practical protection, for a due tenderness of interest.
Who ever said that James chewed more than he bit off? In a few sentences, he has derogated the new immigrants, displaced to the shoulders of “the people” the vulgarisms with which he slyly describes them, and cloaked both of these two subconscious appeals in the apparel of chivalry, while upholding the purity of the tongue!
Within a few years, all of this was to strike James as having been in the nature of a rehearsal. Not only did he feel English, in reaction to the mongrelization and vulgarization of America, but he actually was English. In a little-known essay written just after the onset of the Great War, and published by the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organisations in London, he addressed himself to “The Question of the Mind.” He had had to confront, so he wrote,
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br /> the fact that the social characteristics, the elements of race and history, the native and acquired values, the whole “psychological” mystery marking the people of Great Britain, were so abruptly thrust into the critical smelting-pot for a citizen of another country, a country up to the present speaking formally neutral, who had spent long years of his life on English soil and in English air.
In prose which must have baffled the hearty patriots who were nonetheless always gratified to publish a committed neutral, James worked himself round to the idea of a British “genius”; a will and intelligence and spirit that existed almost unknown to its possessors—“the genius that had somehow kept acting and impressing just in proportion as so few pains were taken about it.” The answer lay, thought James, in something he termed the British incorrigibility:
To grasp even in so absurdly delayed a manner the perception that there was one’s golden key made the whole certitude come on with a rush. It was incredible and impossible that a people should be so incorrigible unless they were very strong—no people without a great margin could for any period at all afford to be; and with that constatation everything was clear. It didn’t matter if they were strong because good-natured, or good-natured because strong: the point was to that extraordinary tune in what they could afford.
To an astonishing degree, this analysis ministered to the English self-image, to the long-cherished idea of a people polite and slow to anger, yet formidable when roused; a people who did not start wars but who could finish them; a people who lost every battle but the last. Kipling (of whom James had once said: “almost nothing civilized save steam and patriotism . . . and such an uninteresting mind”) strove more crudely to touch the same nerve in his gruesome poem “When the English Began to Hate,” published at about the same time:
It was not part of their blood
It came to them very late
Blood, Class and Empire Page 16