THE AMERICAN TRADITION
I remember a talk in Dublin with an Irish writer whose English prose has adorned our period. It was 1918, and the eve of forced conscription, and his indignation with English policy was intense. "I will give up their language," he said, "all except Shakespeare. I will write only Gaelic." Unfortunately, he could read Gaelic much better than he could write it. In his heart, indeed, he knew how mad he would have been to give up the only literary tradition which, thanks to language, could be his own; and in a calmer mood since he has enriched that tradition with admirable translations from the Irish. He was suffering from a mild case of Anglomania.
Who is the real Anglomaniac in America? Not the now sufficiently discredited individual with a monocle and a pseudo-Oxford accent, who tries to be more English than the English. Not the more subtly dangerous American who refers his tastes, his enthusiasms, his culture, and the prestige of his compatriots to an English test before he dare assert them. The real Anglomaniac is the American who tries to be less English than his own American tradition. He is the man who is obsessed with the fear of "Anglo-Saxon domination."
How many Anglomaniacs by this definition are at large in America each reader may judge for himself. Personally, I find them extraordinarily numerous, and of so many varieties, from the mere borrower of opinions to the deeply convinced zealot, that it seems wiser to analyze Anglomania than to discuss the various types that possess it. And in this analysis let us exclude from the beginning such very real, but temporary, grievances against the English as spring from Irish oppressions, trade rivalries, or the provocations which always arise between allies in war. All such causes of anti-English and anti-"Anglo-Saxon" sentiment belong in a different category from the underlying motives which I propose to discuss.
These new Anglomaniacs, with their talk of Anglo-Saxon domination, cannot mean English domination. That would be absurd, although even absurdities are current coin in restless years like these. At least one Irishman of my acquaintance knows that King George cabled Wilson to bring America into the war, and that until that cable came Wilson dared not act. I can conceive of an English influence upon literature that is worth attacking, and also worth defending. I can conceive of a far less important English influence upon our social customs. But in neither case, domination. That England dominates our finance, our industry, our politics, is just now, especially, the suspicion of a paranoiac, or the idea of an ignoramus.
"Anglo-Saxon domination," even in an anti-British meeting, cannot and does not mean English domination; it can mean only control of America by the so-called Anglo-Saxon element in our population. The quarrel is local, not international. The "Anglo-Saxon" three thousand miles away who cannot hit back is a scapegoat, a whipping boy for the so-called "Anglo-Saxon" American at home.
What is an "Anglo-Saxon" American? Presumably he is the person familiar in "want" advertisements: "American family wants boarder for the summer. References exchanged." But this does not help us much. He is certainly not English. Nothing is better established than the admixture of bloods since the earliest days of our nationality. That I, myself, for example, have ancestral portions of French, German, Welsh, and Scotch, as well as English blood in my veins, makes me, by any historical test, characteristically more rather than less American. Race, indeed, within very broad limits, is utterly different from nationality, and it is usually many, many centuries before the two become even approximately identical. The culture I have inherited, the political ideals I live by, the literature which is my own, most of all the language that I speak, are far more important than the ultimate race or races I stem from, obviously more important, since in thousands of good Americans it is impossible to determine what races have gone to their making. There is no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon American—and so few English Americans that they are nationally insignificant.
An American with a strong national individuality there certainly is, and it is true that his traditions, irrespective of the race of his forbears, are mainly English; from England he drew his political and social habits, his moral ideas, his literature, and his language. This does not make him a "slave to England," as our most recent propagandists would have it; it does not put him in England's debt. We owe no debt to England. Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and ourselves are deeply in debt to our intellectual, our spiritual, our aesthetic ancestors who were the molders of English history and English thought, the interpreters of English emotion, the masters of the developing English mores that became our mores, and have since continued evolution with a difference. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, Wycliffe, Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley, Elizabeth, Cromwell, and the great Whigs, these made the only tradition that can be called Anglo-Saxon, and if we have an American tradition, as we assuredly have, here are its roots. This is our "Anglo-Saxon domination."
But if the roots of this tradition are English, its trunk is thoroughly American, seasoned and developed through two centuries of specifically American history. As we know it to-day it is no longer "Anglo-Saxon," it is as American as our cities, our soil, our accent upon English. If we are going to discuss "domination" let us be accurate and speak of the domination of American tradition. It is against the American tradition that the new Anglomaniac actually protests.
Dominating this American tradition is, dominating, almost tyrannical, for one reason only, but that a strong one, a fact not a convention, a factor, not a mere influence—dominating because of the English language.