Old-World Legacies in America

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AbstractThe phrase ‘American way of life’ seems to have originated through the near monopoly which Hollywood possessed in the film industry during the period between the two world wars. It was reinforced by an assertive nationalistic spirit which, it can be argued, reached high fever points with the ‘red scare’ and restrictions on immigration in the early nineteen-twenties, with the Second World War, and with the subsequent Gold War and McCarthy troubles during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations. More than a century before, however, European writers like Alexis de Tocqueville had been referring to Americans as a people or race apart and distinct from the folk of the ‘Old World’. In fact ever since the premonitory grumblings of the troubles culminating in the political divorce of the eastern and western English-speaking peoples there had been, from the latter, intermittent but quite persistent assertions that they were culturally, even physically distinct, different and superior.