The Rise and Fall of Anglo‐America

Abstract

The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America Eric P. Kaufmann. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. The rise and fall of Anglo is a familiar theme in classic American letters. Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of Good (1682), a colonial best-seller, tells with religious trembling of captivity among Native Americans. Though distressed by terrifying Others, she retained enough spiritual discipline to wonder about worthiness of Puritan culture brought over to howling wilderness. Richard Henry Dana's narrative Two Years Before Mast (1840) expresses revulsion at ways of Spanish in California-and then comes to appreciate them, especially after he sees them being defrauded by crude, predatory Yankees. Recent decades have offered books like E. Digby Baltzell's class/caste-oriented The Protestant Establishment (1965), Michael Novak's eloquently irritated The Rise of Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), and Peter Schrag's journalistic meditation The Decline of Wasp (1973). In current year, we have seen Samuel Huntington's alarmist Who We Are (2004), which argues that the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. He believes that Latinos are refusing to assimilate and rejecting Anglo-Protestant values that built American dream. He calls for renewed vigor in Americanizing them to values he sees them rejecting. Victor Davis Hanson, another fearful voice, draws upon personal experience with farm laborers, ethnically mixed family members, and academy in his viscerally passionate Mexifornia (2003). He mourns California's cultural erosion, blaming illegal immigration, corporate greed that craves cheap labor, and academic race-manipulators who exploit young in pursuing separatist identity politics. A timely rebuff to such lamentations about American's browning culture came with satirical film A Day without a Mexican (2004), a gringos-left-behind exploration of sudden disappearance of California's Latinos (now one-third of state's population). Can a British observer calmly enlighten American readers on these contentious issues of ethnic dominance and assimilation? Eric P. Kaufmann, lecturer in politics and sociology at University of London, has earned distinction as an intensely analytic, theory-laden, and well-read commentator on issues of ethnic dominance. In this book, he helps us step back from turbulent present, offering a frame bounded by important ideological developments in period from 1920 to 1960. Countering common wisdom that today's multiculturalism and diversity industries merely extend 1960s civil rights agitation or retaliate against triumph of Reaganism, this book argues that cosmopolitan, universalist ideals first grew out of internecine conflict within Anglo-Protestant soul. They predate more visible response to pressures exerted by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other movements inspired by death of Jim Crow. This book carefully shows us that by 1920, an assortment of ideological actors had begun to chip away at older WASP forms of ethnic dominance, formulating universahst arguments that reflected liberal Enlightenment ideals. They include figures like Horace M. Kallen, Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, and Jane Adams as secular thinkers, in addition to a variety of ecumenical and social gospel church movements that bridged gaps between competing faith traditions linked to national and cultural ethnicities. These thinkers were also joined by modernist movements in arts, and clusters of literary artists like Greenwich Village Bohemians and west coast beats who reveled m their individualities and popularized notion of self-chosen cultural identity. The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, is an important watermark reflecting victory of liberal churches, secular reformers, and artistic movements. …