Dyed-In-The-Wool History
The Great Rapprochement and Hyphenated Americans
The Americanization of the World
From colonial times America existed in competition with England. More specifically; the northern trading, financial, and manufacturing sectors existed in conflict with England. Lord Robert Cecil expressed this addressing the British parliament 1862 saying, “[T]he Northern States of America never can be our sure friends… because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially. We aspire to the same position. We both aspire to the government of the seas. We are both manufacturing people, and in every port, as well as at every court, we are rivals to each other. ... With respect to the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed…” (1) This adversarial relation took different forms starting with direct restrictions during the colonial period in the Trade and Navigation Acts and other measures then moving on to trade wars and “dumping” and finally the US Civil War (War for Southern Independence) which, from a British perspective, could be seen as a proxy war (2). In the years following the war the situation between America and the mother country didn’t improve. In addition to the threat the British perceived from German unification and a potential American-German cooperation the British, Germans, and Americans were fierce competitors in Latin America when American foreign policy took an aggressive turn towards economic and political expansion abroad (3). Secretary of State Richard Olney (1895-97) stating: “The old isolationism heralded by George Washington’s farewell address is over; the time has now arrived when it behooves us to accept the commanding position…among the Power of the Earth.” (3) Cleveland and Olney actively pursued a policy of using US force to remove British influence from Latin America. An article in Banker’s Magazine in 1894 evaluated the stakes and risks concluding, “If we wrest the South American markets from Germany and England and permanently hold them, this would indeed be a conquest worth perhaps a heavy sacrifice.”(3) In 1895-6 the US came very close to a hot war with England over a territorial dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. President Cleveland openly advocated war and saw it as inevitable. The British were fully occupied in other foreign conflicts at the time, most notably South Africa, and backed down.(3)
Starting around 1895, however, a very significant shift in British long term strategy and foreign policy was starting to take place that was described in the time period in a historically significant book by William Thomas Stead titled “The Americanization of the World” published in 1902 that provided a blueprint for the “Great Rapprochement” (1895 – 1915) (4). The term Rapprochement “describes the convergence of diplomatic, political, military and economic objectives between the United States and Great Britain in 1895-1915, the two decades before World War I” and this concept was given wide spread press advocacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The result of this would play a major role in WWI and WWII and largely shape the world that was to come after WWII. Stead was a very influential British Newspaper editor connected to British aristocracy including Cecil Rhodes who actively advocated for and supported the British Empire but who died aboard the Titanic.
Within British politics there was a political elite that were not entirely like minded in every respect but had generally been able to direct British policies and who’s economic and political interests generally could be considered aligned with the British State and related institutions (4). Their perceived risks and strategies were fairly well documented in academic papers and they saw Britain eventually being unable to maintain parity with larger land based nations and “civilization states” that had specifically been enabled by the railroads that could potentially eclipse English sea power(5). Britain’s global reach was reaching its natural limits but the United States potential was largely untapped. Further the American people, or at least the segment of the American population that was most like them and with which they had been in constant conflict, had a great deal in common with the English elite culturally, religiously, and economically. Leveraging this bond, they sought to make America an instrument of British foreign policy which was to extend beyond England forming an “Anglo-Saxon” empire.
William Thomas Snead was an English newspaper editor who is frequently credited as the originator of investigative journalism. We was considered controversial during his life and was also a social and political commentator. He wrote the Americanization of the World which was to be very influential in shaping the world to follow. He died along with many other prominent people onboard the Titanic.
The picture to the right is of British liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain who gave a well know speech in 1902 referred to as the "Weary Titan". The theme was the need to share the burden of maintaining the empire. This topic was fairly commonly discussed amongst British elite and academics of the time. A few lines of the speech are provided below:
" Gentlemen, we do want your aid. We do require your assistance in the administration of the vast Empire which is yours as well as ours. The weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate. We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us, be very sure that we shall hasten gladly to call you to our Councils. If you are prepared at any time to take any share, any proportionate share, in the burdens of the Empire, we are prepared to meet you with any proposal for giving to you a corresponding voice in the policy of the Empire."
Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1943762-joseph-chamberlain-the-weary-titan-staggers-under-the-too-vast-orb-of/
The Pilgrim Society
The Americans that were most receptive to this were those of Puritan descent predominantly in the Northeast who controlled the newly centralized nation after the failed War for Southern Independence. Rapprochement developed gradually through cultural outreach with the newly formed “Pilgrim Society” acting to facilitate this bonding. The London membership of the Pilgrim Society was limited to 500 people and membership was secretive although there was some general knowledge of the major participants (6 p. 300). Its intent was to “bring together American money and British aristocracy”(6 p. 300) and had a specific goal of linking British and American ambassadors which created administration to administration contacts. The Pilgrim Society was founded in the United States in 1902 and the first general meeting was at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on January 13, 1903. Membership would grow to include most notable British and American political and economic elites but again it must be stressed that in America this was not representative of the population as a whole but was linked to those with a common “pilgrim” or “Yankee” heritage who were referred to as Anglophiles and the Pilgrim Society was generally unknown to most. Elements of the British upper class used the society to actively cultivate the relationship with those in America who shared their religious heritage and ethnic origin for some time prior to WWI roughly aligning with development of elevated tensions with Germany. American membership was made up principally of influential politicians, industrialists, and bankers that sought to develop expanded commercial ties along with a sense of ethnic unity (6 pp. 194-98). This was effective in creating strong support for the British amongst the American political class and in securing American investment in the war but was still faced with some demographic challenges as this was a small and largely regional percentage of the overall US population making movement away from a position of neutrality in WWI a tough sell. (7 pp. 377-390)
The American Pilgrim Society had heavy representation from both the Rockefeller and Morgan dynasties but the relationship of the House of Morgan to the Society and to the British government and British elite was unique. The following quote from the Hidden History of WWI by Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor demonstrated how they owed their existence to the Bank of England:
"In the complex world of investment banking, the Morgan empire owed everything to a Massachusetts-born American, George Peabody, who set up a banking firm in London in 1835 to deal in American railroad securities. He later recruited a fellow American, Junius Morgan, father of J.P. Morgan, as a partner in the venture, but they faced ruin when a run on the banks in 1857 almost bankrupted the company. Though rivals were keen to drive the firm out of business, a massive £800,000 loan from the Bank of England, which would have a current equivalence of half a billion pounds, saw them emerge with an enhanced reputation(8 p. 82). Nathaniel Rothschild had developed a close relationship with George Peabody, and he in turn proved to be a loyal and grateful friend (9 p. 415). The crisis claimed four banks, yet Peabody, Morgan and Company was saved. Why? Who initiated the rescue? The Rothschilds held immense sway in the Bank of England and the most likely answer is that they intervened to save the firm." (6)
Stead’s, “The Americanization of the World” provides more of a blueprint to bring the vision of the Pilgrim Society about that all of the “British Pilgrims” would have been very aware of. In the introduction to the book which gives an overview as to why this dramatic policy shift is needed he states, “If we are affected with national vanity we can console ourselves by reflecting that the Americans are only giving to others what they inherited from ourselves. Whatever they do, all goes to the credit of the family. It is an unnatural parent who does not exult in the achievements of his son, even though they should eclipse the triumphs of his sire as much as the victories of Hannibal threw into the shade the exploits of Hamilcar.” (10 p. 2) He then further explains his proposal positioning America as the heir to British and Anglo-Saxon heritage; “We may lose our primacy in the forging of iron and steel, but no “invasion” can deprive us of the indestructible renown possessed by the land which gave birth to Alfred and Cromwell, to Shakespeare and Milton, to Burns and Scott. And as men will ever think more highly of the City of the Violet Crown with its Groves of Academe, peopled with poets and sages, than the geographically vast expanse of the Asiatic empires, so it may well be the England may be a name worn ever nearer to the great heart of mankind than that of the Continent-covering son of Anak, whose bulk overshadows the world.”(10 p. 3)
From this point he moves on to a racial appeal for unity based on racial superiority making a case for the white Anglo-Saxon being inherently more valuable than other peoples. Stead poses the question, “Has the time not come when we should make a resolute effort to realize the unity of the English-speaking race?” He then addresses the relative value of different people stating, “Populations should be weighed as well as counted. In a census return a Hottentot counts for as much as a Cecil Rhodes; a mean white on a southern swamp is the census equivalent for Mr. J.P. Morgan or Mr. Edison.” Finally he specifically addresses Britain’s long term strategic rival in the “Great Game”, Russia, stating, “A nation which has no illiterates can hardly be counted off against the Russians, only three percent of which can read or write.”
He then concludes his case for unity warning of the danger of further conflict stating, “Between the two sections of the English-speaking race there has been one war a century so far. There is too much reason to fear that the average will be kept up, unless in some way or other the mischievous work of George III, can be undone.”(10 p. 9) Stead sees the American institution as being generally better than their British counterparts and more able to support a global empire and in the rest of the book goes region by region explaining how to “Americanize” them creating global hegemony. This is a different view of global hegemony from Sir John Robert Sealy in his renowned lectures on the “Expansion of England” a couple of decades earlier in that Sealy’s vision had no common cultural elements; “If the United States and Russia hold together for another half century, they will at the end of that time completely dwarf such old European States as France and Germany, and depress them into a second class. They will do the same to England, if at the end of that time England still thinks of herself as simply a European State, as the old United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, such as Pitt left her. It would indeed be a poor remedy, if we should try to face these vast states of the new type by an artificial union of settlements and islands scattered over the whole globe, inhabited by different nationalities, and connected by no tie except the accident that they happen all alike to acknowledge the Queen’s authority.” (11) Stead’s version uses American culture to shape and control the world in Part III of his book which specifically includes religion, literature, journalism, art, science, music, concepts of marriage and society, and sport (10). All of these, of course, came to pass over the next hundred years as core tenets of neo-liberalism globalism but during that time American culture also shifted to be more nihilistic as Sealy’s envisioned.
While the Pilgrim Societies(6 p. 299) were based around voluntary cooperation with the stated goal “to promote good will, good fellowship, and everlasting peace between the United States and Great Britain” the writing of William Stead in the “Americanization of Everything” was more specific and more aggressive. It could be considered overreach but it gives a good conceptual view of the British vision to integrate America into a developing globalist mission. In order for Rapprochement to be possible, however, it required a series of political events that would have seemed to be somewhat improbable.
The picture above is of Morgan and Carnegie reportedly taken at a Pilgrim Society function and the image to the right is from a pilgrim society dinner
A Morgan Man comes to power
Prior to 1896 the Democratic Party was the party of sound money and low tariffs and the Republicans the party of high tariffs and inflation but that all changed when William Jennings Bryan and the populists captured the Democratic Party. Prior to 1896 the Morgan financial dynasty, which was closely associated with the Rothschild’s and England, was linked exclusively to the Democrats while the Republican Party was tied to the Rockefellers and Standard Oil (3). The shift in the Democratic Party caused the Morgan’s to reach out to the Republican nominee for President, William McKinley, through Henry Cabot Lodge as opposed to supporting Bryan. The Morgan’s offered to support the Republican nominee so long as the Republicans pledged to support the gold standard (3). McKinley was from Ohio and was deeply tied to the Rockefeller’s and Standard Oil interests and generally aligned with legacy Republican positions supporting expansionist foreign policies and specifically seeing England as a natural adversary. Also of importance, he held favorable views of Germany especially in comparison to Britain (3). He came from Cleveland which was the original headquarters for Standard Oil. In the 1890’s industrialist Marcus Hanna and John D. Rockefeller saved McKinley from bankruptcy and Hanna became McKinley’s top political advisor and chairman of the Republican National Committee. The Morgan’s got a consolation prize for supporting the Republicans by allocating them the vice president slot to Morgan Man, Garret A. Hobart who was director of several Morgan companies including Liberty National Bank of New York.(3)
Hobart died in 1899 creating a “Morgan vacancy”. Theodore Roosevelt was a candidate but was considered by McKinley and Hanna to be “erratic” and a “madman” but other Morgan men they preferred turned them down. After intense lobbying from Morgan partner George W. Perkins, Roosevelt was given the vice president nomination (3). Following the election of 1900, Roosevelt put on an extravagant dinner for J.P. Morgan. Theodore Roosevelt and the Roosevelt family were deeply tied to the Morgan’s and he married into Boston Brahmin high society when he wed Alice Lee, daughter of Cabot Lee, and Henry Cabot Lodge became Roosevelt’s political mentor(3). All of this might just have been a historical footnote if McKinley hadn’t been shot by anarchist Leo Czolgosz on September 6, 1901 while greeting people at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo New York. For a while it looked like he would recover but, perhaps due to questionable medical care, his situation worsened and he died on September 14th. After ascending to the presidency, Roosevelt created a cabinet of Morgan men and targeted an aggressive anti-trust campaign against Standard Oil and Rockefeller interests giving him the image of being a “trust buster”. Historian and economist Murray Rothbard describes his reshaping of the administration as follows:
“..suddenly Morgan man Theodore Roosevelt was President. John Jay, expansionist Secretary of State who Roosevelt inherited from McKinley, had the good fortune of having his daughter marry the son of William C. Whitney of the great Morgan connected family. TR’s next Secretary of State and former Secretary of War was his old friend Elihu Root, personal attorney for J.P. Morgan. Root appointed as his Assistant Secretary a close friend of TR’s, Robert Bacon, a Morgan partner, and in due course Bacon became TR’s Secretary of State. TR’s first appointed Secretary of the Navy was Paul Morton, vice-president of Morgan control Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, and his Assistant Secretary was Herbert L. Satterlee, who had the distinction of being J.P. Morgan’s son-in-law.” Murray Rothbard(3)
Author Gerald-Schultz-Rhonhof described the abrupt shift in foreign policy that corresponded with Roosevelt becoming President saying: “Until McKinley’s presidency, the relation of the USA with the German Reich was always friendly and balanced. The English-American relationship, on the other hand, up to the is still burdened by the former British colonial rule and England’s colonial wars in America. With the assignation of McKinley in 1901 and the change of the presidency to Theodore Roosevelt a new kind of thinking arises in the USA.”(12 p. 32) The McKinley assignation was one of several instances where a “lone gunman” altered the course of American history and world history. Because it was such a critical event many people have looked for a conspiratorial link here but have not found a solid connection. On the other hand the assassin didn’t have any clear links to anarchist organizations and was tried and executed quickly (13) . The event led to various anti-sedition and anti-conspiracy laws.
Theodore Roosevelt’s Morgan connections were deeply established but he was also a progressive and committed Anglophile and this could well have been nurtured by his relationship with Rudyard Kipling (14). Kipling was a well known writer but is most remembered historically for his poem. “The White Man’s Burden” the full title of which is “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands” which referred to the US takeover of the Philippines as part of the territory transfer of the Spanish-American War. The poem, which was written originally for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and first published in McClure’s Magazine in 1899, can alternatively be seen as a call for white rule or some form of satire. Kipling originally reached out to Roosevelt in 1889 prior to him having any sort of national position urging him to “put all the weight of your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole Philippines..”(14)
Political and cultural shifts during this time certainly smiled on the British but they were further favored by a developing economic alliance in Asia as the American foreign policy emphasis continued to move toward Asia under Roosevelt. America entered the Asian trade immediately after the revolution following the Dutch and British. Because there was a large demand for Chinese goods and relatively little demand in China for imported western goods this created a balance of payments problem that was resolved by the illegal importation of opium into China leveraging native criminal gangs (15). This created a series of wars and conflicts with the Chinese monarchy culminating in the Boxer Rebellion (1900-01) where foreign powers combined to crush what was left of China as an independent nation leaving a failed state that could be compared to a rotting corpse from which the predators could feed. In Asia the British and Americans were competing against the Russians and Germans and formed an alliance with the Japanese who would act as the military proxy of Anglo-American interests in the area and limiting the actions of the Russians and Germans. This also played a significant part in the English abandoning claims to Latin America (3). A major prize in the region was the railroad concession that was pursued by the American China development corporation, founded in 1895 and representing a consortium of American financial interests including, the Morgan’s, the Rockefeller’s and Kuhn, Loeb, and Co (3). The specific objective was a Peking-Hankow rail route across Manchuria. This was ultimately unsuccessful, however, as a Russian and Belgian syndicate backed by France and Russia won the concession for the project. This led to a more aggressive U.S Asian policy where the US helped to push the Russians out of Manchuria. In 1904 the Japanese with encouragement and support from the Roosevelt administration attacked Russia driving them out of Manchuria. The role of Roosevelt and his administration was largely hidden from the Congress and the American people. As a reward for their service the US allowed the Japanese to dominate both Korea and Manchuria with the understanding they would enforce American interests in the region.(3)
The artist's image above is of the McKinley assassination at the Pan American Fair in Buffalo New York after giving a speech in 1901. The assassin was reported to be an anarchist who was rapidly arrested, confessed, tried, and was executed (electrocuted). This was one of a number of times when an American political assassination rapidly and dramatically shifted the course of American and World history.
Theodore Roosevelt was given the Vice Presidential position after Vice President Garrett Hobart died in 1899 and other Morgan Men that McKinley and his staff preferred turned them down for the Vice Presidential nomination. McKinley referred to Roosevelt as “erratic” and a “madman” but eventually succumbed to political pressure to select him.
The Hyphenated Americans
As America became increasingly aligned with England culturally, economically, politically, and militarily Germany and Russia gradually came to be seen as existential adversaries. This also had an effect on the very large immigrant population in America. The alliance that was built between the puritan or Yankee population in New England and the upper Midwest and the massive number of Germanic and Eastern European immigrants that largely settled in and populated the Midwest created a significant demographic advantage for the North in the Civil War but that bond was now breaking rapidly. Immigrant populations didn’t “Americanize” quickly and went to significant lengths to maintain their own cultural and religious heritage. They typically lived in their own communities and spoke their native tongue for generations (16). It wasn’t uncommon to find Missouri Synod Lutheran churches conducting services in German as late as the 1960’s. They didn’t concede that adopting English or Yankee culture was a requirement for living in America or being an American. The Germanic population overwhelmingly favored Germany in the run up to WWI and, perhaps just as troubling to the Yankee, they produced and consumed alcohol.
The term "hyphenated American" was published by 1889, and was common as a derogatory term by 1904. As WWI drew nearer the term was applied to ethnic groups that didn’t enthusiastically support the English and their Anglophile supporters who controlled the United States government and its related institutions, especially German Americans and also Irish Americans. Former President Theodore Roosevelt in speaking to the largely Irish Catholic Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day 1915, asserted that,
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all ... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic ... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” (17)
The phrase and speech has been used frequently in modern social media to argue against mass immigration and, while the objective may be admirable, it is really a convenient misuse of history as the phrase in its correct context was tied generally to the liturgical-pietist conflict and specifically to support for American intervention in WWI.
Rapprochement had created a good deal of support for the English amongst the political and economic elite in America. The Pilgrim Society had been especially effective and comprised an upper crust sort of following made up principally of influential politicians, industrialists, and bankers who had both economic and commercial motives (6 pp. 194-98). They also saw themselves as being ethnically and culturally superior to other ethno-religious groups in America which made the support for England and direct or indirect US involvement in the war a tough sell across the broader population (7 pp. 377-390). The size of the first and second generation immigrant population is shown in the following table:
While immigration in general and German immigration in particular was subsiding, the German, Irish and religiously liturgical populations were a very large minority but, with the political realignments brought about by populism and political progressivism, they had lost political representation. The Democratic Party which at one time provided a home was headed by President Wilson who, like other notable political figures of the time, portrayed the hyphenated Americans as being disloyal. In a broader sense Wilson, who was a pietist progressive Presbyterian, was consistently anti-Catholic. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin Wilson opposed clemency for Roger Casement and he supported anti-cleric President Carranza in Mexico. The New York weekly newspaper Irish World described Wilson as “having done everything for England that an English Viceroy might do.” (7 p. 378)
The hyphenated Americans were not just on the wrong side of the war from the perspective of those with political power but they were also on the opposing side of virtually all issues that the proponents of the war supported which in all respects helped the pietists objectives across the board. Prior to and during WWI, the Germans in particular were subject to intense persecution including being classified as enemy-aliens, sent to internment camps, public humiliation, and in some cases lynching’s and murder by other means (16). The balance of American cultures also became far less German and far more British with loyalty to the new Anglo-American alliance acting as a litmus test for patriotism. Germans, Catholics , Irish would defect from the Democratic Party prior to and during WWI as Woodrow Wilson, a democrat, would champion the English cause.
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