“Uncle Sam is to be sacrificed”:

Anglophobia in late nineteenth century Politics and Culture

Stephen Tuffnell1

Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Abstract:

The language of Anglophobia has been widely accepted as the coin of American politics

throughout the nineteenth century. However, the grand-narrative of Anglo-American

rapprochement in the final quarter of the century has diverted attention away from the many forms

and purposes bestowed upon Anglophobia. The discourse of Anglophobia fit hand and glove

within debates regarding American nationality and citizenship. For this reason a variety of ethnic,

social, and political groups deployed anti-English sentiments for the purposes of mobilising the

electorate and as a surrogate for attacking other social and economic elites. What follows is an

examination of the panoply of Anglophobias that existed in Gilded Age America. Utilising its

protean and malleable nature, Anglophobia was a lens through which Americans refracted,

reformulated, and refined the concepts of national identity, domestic policy, and American

interests abroad.

Keywords:

‘Is there no limit to the quiet sufferance of those affronts by a proud and powerful nation?’

This was the penetrating query of the Gladstonian Liberal intellectual and Anglo-Saxonist

Goldwin Smith to the transatlantic audience of the May 1890 North American Review. The

‘affronts’ he spoke of was the ‘mischief’ of American Anglophobia. The phenomenon had

struck him on his first visit to the United States in 1864 and had continued to determine his

interpretation of Anglo-American relations. Hatred of England, he charged, ‘stands seriously

1
Email: stephen.tuffnell@history.ox.ac.uk
in the way of any attempt to effect a reunion of the English-speaking race’; instead, it brought

about an ‘odious’ prospect: ‘the danger of war.’1

The essay provoked a fierce reaction that owed much to Smith’s esteemed reputation

as the former Regius Professor of History at Oxford University and to the high journalism he

practiced in numerous journals. In a symposium the following month entitled ‘Do Americans

Hate England?’ one opponent claimed that Smith simply ‘wanted something craggy to break

his mind against.’2 The disingenuous claim of this response lies not simply in the fact that the

author felt compelled to respond to Smith’s apparently inconsequential remarks, but in his

own failure to grapple with the nuanced and complex nature and role of Anglophobias in late-

nineteenth century politics explicated by Smith’s article. Historians of Anglo-American

relations have likewise struggled to come to terms with and to explain Anglophobia in the

late-nineteenth century. The mushrooming of U.S. commercial prosperity and industrial

capacity evoked powerful responses in terms of national self-awareness. International

rivalries and the exigencies of U.S. domestic politics meant that Americans could subsume

Anglophobia and powerful countervailing tendencies within their ideologies and institutions.

This ambivalence is further reflected by the apparently simultaneous increase in both

cordiality and competition in Anglo-American relations. The need to explain such

dichotomous trends has, so far, led to a privileging of rapprochement over discord, elite

action over public opinion, Anglophilia over Anglophobia.

Historians of American foreign policy have eschewed detailed analysis of

Anglophobia in the late-nineteenth century in favour of the grand narrative of diplomatic

appeasement. Bradford Perkins’ The Great Rapprochement has established an interpretive

framework that minimizes the role of Anglophobia in the politics and diplomacy of the

closing decade of the century. The year 1895 is the last flashpoint of major antipathy between

the two nations – from then on, he writes, ‘the almost instinctive dislike of England lost much
of its force.’ The rapprochement was not total by 1914, but Anglophobia had greatly declined

in effectiveness. Before Perkins, Harry C. Allen had termed the period 1872-98 as ‘The Quiet

Years’. While Allen is more sensitive than others to the existence and uses made of

Anglophobia, the predisposition towards the “Special Relationship” in the Cold War

historiography of Anglo-American relations leads Allen to neither fully explore nor consider

Anglophobia beyond its relationship to elite political actors. Edward P. Crapol’s America For

Americans, on the other hand, privileges one form of Anglophobia over all others through his

argument that it was expressed primarily in the form of economic nationalism. Allen, Crapol,

and Perkins all assume that Anglophobia was widespread in the last quarter of the nineteenth

century and correctly distinguish it from the diplomatic process of rapprochement. Yet, it is

presented as self-evident and did not lead them towards a sustained and careful study of its

forms and manifestations.3

Anti-British sentiment had a long pedigree in the republic. Antebellum Anglophobia

centred chiefly upon geo-political fears of suspected British neo-imperialism. These fears

reflected anxiety amongst American statesmen over the vulnerability of the union – fears

born of the imbalance of power between the two nations. American political culture was

consequently characterized by a deeply rooted antipathy to Britain twinned with a

hypersensitive, defensive-minded posture toward imperial realpolitik, perceived or otherwise.

In every instance of territorial acquisition before the Civil War, expansionists utilized an

argument stressing the need to pre-empt a British plot to wrestle control of territory from the

United States.4 Anglophobia manifested itself in regionally specific forms, however.

Conspiratorial interpretations of British imperialism took a peculiarly southern form in

regards to slavery. Slaveholders across the south suspected abolitionists of being the agents of

British emancipation and part of a treasonous plot to sow slave insurrection.5 Antebellum

Anglophobia, then, was viewed through an ideological lens that mixed domestic national
security concerns with the perceived geo-political threat of a British imperial strategy seeking

to stifle American economic and territorial growth, even to integrate the U.S. into a British

informal empire.6

Anglophobia did not simply dissipate with a postbellum thaw in Anglo-American

relations, nor did it become the mere bogeyman of demagogues. As a concept, Anglophobia

held too prominent and potent a place in the demonology of American politics to be simply

dispensed with. The arguments in the North American Review at the height of its popularity

attest to the concern that contemporaries still attached to it as late as 1890.7 Anglophobia’s

deep roots in American society and political culture ensured its endurance as the primary

negative reference point of American nationalism until the close of the nineteenth century.

Anglophobia was a capacious, politically contingent language that acted as a crucible in

which American nationalisms were forged. Its lexicon and iconography not only catalyzed

debate, but also served as critical markers of social and political membership at the height of

the United States nation building project.

“The Fourth of July treatment of history”: The use and abuse of Anglophobia

The ‘traditional’ sense of Anglophobia is the manifestation that Goldwin Smith

professes to be primarily concerned with in his 1890 essay. ‘Genuine’ Anglophobia, he

writes, is rooted in ‘traditional versions of historical grievances.’8 Smith felt it to be an

‘absurdity’ in ‘going so far back, but,’ he admitted, ‘the angry stories about this period also

are continually reappearing and tell on sentiment.’9 According to Smith, this was the ‘Fourth-

of-July treatment of history.’10 In so labelling Americans’ interpretation of past events, Smith

uncovers the role of Anglophobia as a marker in the self-determination of American national

identity. Smith’s analysis goes further, positing that Anglophobia was a psychological

disposition of American culture, suspecting that ‘something is due to the sensitiveness of

Americans who, when they visit England, fancy that English society is prejudiced against

them and secretly contemptuous.’11 The secretive, conspiratorial element of Anglophobia

described by Smith is a vital element of its continued potency in late nineteenth century

America. Its central strength as a concept lay in its protean nature. It allowed Americans to

define themselves against Britain and British policy, in the process articulating a more

positive vision of American nationality and branding those unsympathetic with their vision as

unpatriotic.

Anglophobia was central to the process of self-definition, a fact that even Smith’s

opponents could not escape. Whilst attempting to mitigate Smith’s claims, the Unitarian

author Thomas Wentworth Higginson suggested that, ‘whatever antagonism exists between

Americans and Englishmen is generic, not individual; and one might say abstract rather than

concrete.’12 What Americans dislike ‘is that invisible and traditional Englishman who stands

in their imagination for the race; something never to be seen or identified, and therefore never

to be disproved.’13 What Higginson does not explicitly say is that this chimerical John Bull

acted as a critical reference point for Americans’ own national identity. Dislike of such an

‘invisible’ stereotype allowed Smith’s respondents to hide behind the cipher that ‘the most

abiding and deeply-rooted aversion felt by Americans,’ according to Civil War cavalry

officer General James Harrison Wilson, ‘is to the English government and the class by which

it has always been controlled.’14

The ‘keynote’ of Smith’s essay was, in Andrew Carnegie’s opinion, that ‘the British

monarchy and the aristocracy must hate the republic, just as the republicans hate a

monarchy.’15 Similarly, Donohoe’s Magazine was representative of many Gilded Age

periodicals and newspapers in its compilation of a list of ‘typical’ British traits, namely, ‘her

bloated Toryism; her institutions of class rule; her monarchical system; her aristocracy ...; her

oppression; her centralized and strong government ...; her political hypocrisy.’16 Suspicion
and dislike of a particular class of Englishman and the institutions they represented was a

central facet of nineteenth-century Anglophobia that continued throughout the final quarter of

the century. It served the ends of self-determination not only by means of supplying a

negative reference point, but also through an appeal to an indigenous liberal-democratic

tradition that had withstood the trial against British monarchical institutions since the

Revolution.

Smith and his opponents thus reached consensus on the existence of a deep-rooted

cultural antipathy towards Britain as the predominant negative influence upon the United

States. Indeed, one ought not to underestimate the habitual element of expressions of

Anglophobia. The irony of the United States’ potency and isolation in the western

hemisphere was its dependence upon British naval dominance to protect it from outside

threats. This often meant that Britain was the only European power it came into conflict with.

Political or historical events fanned the flames of traditional antipathies. Britain’s stance in

the U.S. Civil War, for instance, aggravated the victors and those proud of the restored

Union. Not even the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which included an expression of regret from

Britain over the Alabama claims, mitigated the anger of most citizens and politicians. Both

James G. Blaine and Henry Harrison’s hostility to England was shaped by their

understanding of U.S. Civil War diplomacy. For Harrison it was the ‘expectancy of free trade

with the Confederacy’ that lay at the bottom of England’s duplicitous attitude. For Blaine,

‘England’s hand had been against us, concealed somewhat, and used indirectly, but still

heavily against us.’17

Contemporary political and diplomatic issues ensured that Anglophobia was kept

alive simply by dint of the fact that many of them lent themselves to a conspiratorial

rendering of British motives rather than specific threats to national security as was the case in

the 1840s. Settlement of the outstanding Alabama claims, protracted disputes over the
Canadian Fisheries question, wrangling over control of the proposed Isthmian Canal, and the

Venezuela Crisis of 1895 all lent themselves to, and were interpreted by some, as evidence of

pernicious British interference. Whilst Anglophobia was apt to flare up at such times of

diplomatic crisis, twisting the lion’s tail continued to be a lucrative practice for late

nineteenth century politicians through its powers of inclusion and exclusion. Both

Republicans and Democrats attempted to deploy Anglophobia as a political device. But, in a

reversal of antebellum party tactics, it was the GOP that did so to great effect, tarring its

opponents as unpatriotic. After Grover Cleveland had based his 1888 presidential campaign

on tariff revision, the Republican Party platform explicitly questioned the Democrats’

patriotism: ‘they serve the interests of Europe; we will support the interests of America.’18

The controversy surrounding the dismissal of Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British

minister to Washington, in the last moments of the 1888 election campaign further

demonstrates the potency of Anglophobic sentiment. California Republican George

Osgoodby, posing as a naturalized British citizen, sent a letter to the minster requesting

advice on how to vote in the upcoming presidential election. Insensitive to the ruse,

Sackville-West disingenuously replied Democrat. Republican newspapers leapt into action.

The Bangor Daily Whig & Courier touted Cleveland as ‘England’s candidate,’ while

Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean reported the affair with the headline ‘Grover’s Titled Ally’

splashed across its second page. The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, saw as much more

baneful the proposition of ‘Britain first, the United States of America afterwards’ at work in

the Democratic Party.19 The episode added considerable weight to the Republican argument

that Cleveland was an accomplice of the British. Undoubtedly it was a political lead weight to

all those who had attached their hopes to his star.

“The Power to Remedy”: Anglophobia and Irish American citizenship

 Used as a negative referent, associating the accused with unpatriotic sentiment and

submission to the aristocratic power across the Atlantic, Anglophobia acted as a powerful

tool of political exclusion. Yet, it was a double-sided coin. The flip side was its utility as a

means of inclusion. The GOP exploited this aspect with as much alacrity as they shot

accusations of Anglophobia at their opponents, particularly in respect to the Irish vote. Much

was to be gained through appeals to Irish Americans. Despite increased competition from

southern and eastern European migrants, high levels of Irish immigration continued through

the Gilded Age, and between 1870 and 1890 the Irish population in the U.S. reached more

than 1.8 million people.20 The distribution of Irish-Americans in the late nineteenth century

followed the same trend as that of its antebellum heyday, exhibiting a strong preference for

the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. Two thirds of all Irish migrants inhabited the

Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions between 1860 and 1900, with 35%of the Irish-born

choosing to settle in the states of New York and Pennsylvania. Alongside this regional bias

was a preference for settling in cities – by 1890 New York was the largest Irish settlement in

the world.21 The Irish were able to achieve political dominance in cities simply not merely as

a consequence of sheer force of numbers but because they possessed powerful and

elaborately organized political machines designed to mobilise all possible voters, an

enticement to politicians of both Republican and Democratic stripes as the 1880s began.

Goldwin Smith was quick to dismiss Anglophobic appeals to the Irish vote as

‘spurious’ and ‘put on.’22 Likewise, Sir Lionel Sackville-West paraphrased President Arthur’s

opinion of “twisting the lion’s tail” in respect to the Irish vote: ‘it is always expected that we

must understand that no offence is meant.’23 Yet, regardless of the sincerity of appeals to Irish

nationalists, its existence as a rhetorical trope attests to the potency of Anglophobia as a

means of political mobilization. As Mark Wahlgren Summers has lucidly highlighted in his

study of the 1884 Presidential election, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, the GOP actively
courted the favor of Irish Americans, particularly its labor movement and nationalist elements

such as the Irish National League.24 Irish Catholics had been previously repelled, and actively

discriminated against, by the faction of the Republican Party that backed prohibition, state-

mandated Sunday closing, and that fought tooth and nail against the public funding of

parochial schools. By the mid-1880s, however, the divisiveness of the school issue had

diminished, leading James G. Blaine to believe he could capitalise on Grover Cleveland’s

alienation of Tammany Hall by spreading rumors that his rival was an anti-Catholic bigot and

emphasising the Irish descent of his own mother. Amongst a formidable arsenal for the

campaign, including allegations that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock, the GOP

gained most traction amongst Irish-Americans by attacking British policy towards Ireland.

Blaine’s campaign subsequently presented protection as a striking blow at England – English

gold depended upon Democratic victory. Blaine’s 1884 campaign was unsuccessful,

however, as the Irish simply did not join the revolt as he had hoped. By 1890 the editor of

the Brooklyn Standard-Union, Murat Halstead, felt confident enough to write that ‘the Irish

vote would seem naturally to belong to the Republicans, because they maintain the protective

policy.’25

To understand such a reversal of voting behavior it is necessary to shift the focus of

our attention in relation to Anglophobia. Historians have concentrated upon the uses made of

Anglophobia by elite political actors, which has led to interpretations that rest upon its use in

exploiting the electorate. However, focusing upon the way in which ethnic and social groups

made use of Anglophobia not only makes sense of why politicians made appeals to such

groups, but also adds new insights into the utility of such an ambiguous concept in the

formulation of group and national identities. The Irish community in America was quick to

conflate economic, political, religious, and even racial issues with opposition to England. A

particularly virulent edition of New York’s Irish World and American Industrial Liberator of
April 1894 described not only the need to ‘Keep Anglomania in Check’ but exposed

‘Cleveland’s foreign admirers’ and his connections with free trade; claimed that ‘Uncle Sam

is to be sacrificed that John Bull may have a larger market;’ and finally, ridiculed British

suggestions that the Irish were a ‘dangerous race’ before dismissing American claims to

“Anglo-Saxon” lineage as ‘twaddle’ and ‘bosh.’26

Given the long-established tradition of anti-Catholicism in the Republican party such

transference of party allegiance is significant. Mike Sewell has convincingly argued that the

American response to Irish nationalist agitation changed, as the ‘New Departure’ in Ireland

shifted away from the romanticism of rebellion and towards notions of social revolution.27

Fears for the stability of American society prompted negative reactions towards dynamiters

and politically motivated murder. ‘Will immigration bring to our shores such shocking

depravity?’ wondered one commentator in the North American Review in 1893.28 Just a year

later in the pages of the same periodical Henry Wade Rogers stated that the crimes of Irish

nationalists were ‘not political’ but ‘against humanity.’29 In the face of accusations of abusing

the rights of citizenship, Irish-Americans turned to Anglophobia as the vehicle to exhibit their

patriotic worth to the nation. In the same article that feared the influx of new migrants,

Edward Self suggested this approach as the panacea for Irish infamy, ‘the power to remedy

the abuse of American citizenship’ he wrote, ‘is the assertion of American patriotism.’30

Significant numbers of Irish-Americans would continue to rally around the Irish

nationalist banner of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s “Skirmishing Fund” that devised deadly

means of attacking British politicians, but just as many would not.31 Many Irish-American

nationalists continued to hold the cause of Ireland dear but also began to stress their

contribution to America, particularly the parallels between Irish and American revolutionary

ideology. O’Donovan Rossa may have advertised the “Skirmishing Fund” in the pages of the

Irish World but its editor Patrick Ford mixed a heady brew of labor radicalism with Irish-
American patriotism that pitched the paper to a fundamentally different audience that could

be, at times, strikingly conservative.32 Many Irish-Americans sought to integrate themselves

fully within American society, teaching in the public schools system and muting their

Irishness, especially as they moved into the middle classes. Often termed “lace curtain Irish,”

this less radical group strove for a respectability that distanced themselves from the excesses

of Irish dynamiters. The Irish World’s vociferous Anglophobia was an aggressive claim to

American citizenship though its defence of American ideals against British tyranny. Besides

attacking tree trade and the pro-British sympathies of the Democratic party, the Irish World,

via its ‘Calendar,’ offered an illustrated history of British imposition upon Irish liberty and

Irish-American participation in the major events of the republic.33

The Irish-American community asserted a strong American nationalism by

championing their centrality to the evolution of U.S. national life as part of a shared struggle

for liberty. This was a claim to “Americanness,” and so to “civility,” that was otherwise

denied Irishmen in dominant “scientific” racial typologies. Despite the inclusion of Irish-

Celts in the allegedly superior “scientific” classifications of ethnologists such as J. Aitken

Meigs, Irish-American leaders felt compelled to argue for a more expansive definition of

American citizenship.34 Political cartoonists in antebellum America often made the “Paddy”

character little more than an ape, a tradition that continued in Thomas Nast’s portraits

published in Harper’s Weekly well into the 1880s albeit with the innovation of convict stripes

and shillelagh. Emphasis on the common nationality of Irish-Americans and other white

Americans thus discredited the notion that Americans were simply transplanted Anglo-

Saxons, arguing instead that they were a compound of white Europeans.35 The claims of

Anglophobia in this sense, then, were syncretic. An appeal to America’s revolutionary

tradition fit hand in glove with Anglophobic presentations of how non-British but white-

American the Irish were.

“To praise England at the expense of his country of birth”: Anglomania under siege

It was not just the Irish community that attempted to utilize Anglophobia as a means

of expressing national identity. Widespread criticism of “Anglomania” attests to the latent

Anglophobic impulses in American society at this time. Former Civil War General Horace

Porter was bemused that Goldwin Smith accused Americans of Anglophobia while ‘we are

accusing a large element of our people of Anglomania.’36 Criticism of Anglomania was a part

and parcel of self-definition through the ridicule of cultural stereotypes that aimed to put a

distance between the criticizer and the non-American. Life magazine, founded in 1883,

weighed in from its inception as an opponent of Anglomania. In the 1880s an increase in

British tourism saw, in the bourgeois circles of eastern cities, a popular affection for the

distinctive dress and social customs of English peers. The characteristic Anglomaniac was

everything the American was not. A ‘Code for Anglomaniacs’ published in 1883 outlined the

means for the aspiring Anglomaniac to ‘absolutely and irrevocably set apart as a separate

class’ himself ‘from his saner fellow citizens.’ The author’s suggestions ranged from the need

to ‘repress all enthusiasm’ to an injunction to ‘increasingly ponder the writings of Mr. Henry

James’ and, so as to affect the best possible manner of speech, the necessity to ‘elaborately

reconstruct his delivery, striving steadily always as though his mouth were full of hot mashed

potatoes.’37 Describing the British as ‘effete,’ an article published in Life the following year

asserted that ‘we allow Anglomaniacs to ride rough-shod over our society, our methods of

conveyance, and our hours,’ an opinion visually represented in a long running cartoon

depicting the inappropriateness of British fashions to American life.38

To the architects of “True Americanism,” Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot

Lodge, Anglomania represented a cosmopolitan dilettantism that threatened the “character of

force” of the American nation and people. The Anglomaniac, to Roosevelt, was

‘emphatically a noxious element in our body politic.’ ‘Weaklings,’ ‘second class

imitation[s],’ and possessed of ‘some organic weakness in their moral or mental make-up,’

they were subject to a ‘colonial dependence.’39 Lodge waxed lyrical on the latter point,

positing it as central to the ongoing struggle ‘to make that independence real and complete’

for ‘the work is not yet entirely finished.’40 Those suffering from the ‘colonial malady’ were

‘disfigured and deformed Americans.’ They may ‘flatter themselves with being

cosmopolitan, when in truth they are genuine colonists, petty, and provincial to the last

degree.’41 “True Americanism” then, for all its bluster, projected a defensive interpretation of

American colonial history onto the future, and ongoing, development of national

independence and character.

Throughout the nineteenth century, American nationalists equated political

independence with cultural autonomy. Freedom from the stubborn roots of British intellectual

hegemony was seen to be the prerequisite for a distinctively “American” character and

civilization. Attacks upon Anglomania were thus a feature of protracted attempts to assert a

robust and positive sense of American national identity. Because sufferers were un-

American, such attacks laid claim to the nature of true American character – one that was

decidedly non-aristocratic, masculine, and located outside the colonial satellite of the

northeastern states. The fear that underwrote the spread of the “malady” was the familiar one

of subservience to British power and cultural norms, of being re-colonized – the Milwaukee

Sentinel’s claim that ‘New York noodles raise an umbrella on a clear day because it is raining

in London,’ was a commonplace symbol for the excesses of feared American subservience.42

The Irish World, in a manner befitting its sensationalist tone, suggested that Anglomaniacs

‘would be content to see the land of their birth occupy a subordinate position in a

confederation what would have England at its head.’43 The deployment of the metaphor of

disease, however, is highly significant not only for the implication that the sufferer is in some

way not themselves, but in the sense that the diseased element ought to be removed. ‘Their
denationalization will be no loss,’ wrote one correspondent of the New Orleans Daily

Picayune.44 In a Life cartoon of April 1883, Columbia is depicted handing a monocled

Anglomaniac to Britannia with a pair of tongs. ‘He is a constant mortification to me,’

Columbia declares, ‘and an object of contempt to his brothers.’ ‘That thing is but a cheap

imitation,’ Britannia protests. In the background, another “Dude” is removed from the

republic in the talons of an eagle.45

The denationalizing affect of Anglomania was commonly cited by Irish-American

nationalists as the principal symptom of what they regarded as a social disease. North-eastern

Anglomaniacs were attacked by Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World, as the counterpoint to

Irish citizenship and nationality. Eager to prove the credentials of naturalized Irishmen, the

Anglomaniac became a surrogate “Brit-abroad” who must be ‘held in check’ to safeguard

‘the interest of true Americanism.’46 The Anglomaniac was, Ford editorialized, a ‘fellow

without a country, for he is neither English nor American’; indeed, he had been

‘denationalized’ so as to ‘gratify his desire to praise England at the expense of the country of

his birth.’47 Ford questioned the entwined racial-cultural basis of what he believed

Anglomaniacs aspired to, something he termed, ‘the torch of English civilization.’ Under the

headline of ‘Anglomania Rampant’ the fiery editor recalled America’s former and Ireland’s

current colonial subjection in April 1898 as northeastern Anglophiles sought a closer imperial

alliance with Great Britain as the war with Spain ratcheted up in intensity. Turning the

metaphor of civilization’s torch on its head, Ford emphasized the destructive power of that

flame. ‘That is the torch that lit Cromwell’s march of murder and plunder in Ireland,’ Ford

raged before questioning the Americanness of his victims, for it was also the torch ‘that burnt

our American towns in the struggle of American liberty.’48 In seeking to assimilate the Irish

further within American society, Ford thus included Americans and Irish within a shared
struggle for liberty from British oppression and in the process of doing so questioned the

credentials of Anglomaniacs’ nationality by distancing them from that struggle.

Thus, assaults upon Anglomania were an offensive defense of American society and

institutions. The shibboleth of British influence became a surrogate for attacking other

Americans. Urbane, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie along the northeast Atlantic seaboard were

subject to the satirist’s pen as a result of a perceived need to assert a more resolute sense of

American nationality. Faced with increased immigration from both China and Eastern

Europe, the need to assert a strong cultural and racial identity was felt to be pressing. In this

sense, the impulses of both the Anglomaniac and his critic had a common genesis. However,

the Anglomaniac was easily portrayed as another threat to American social norms that

appealed to deep-rooted hostility to British customs and institutions.

“We Ride John Bull”: Anglophobia as Imperial Rivalry

Anglophobia was twinned with a vision for the future development of the American

nation. In Gilded Age American politics both Democrats and Republicans subscribed to a

belief in the nascent ability of the United States to become the pre-eminent worldwide

commercial power, central to which was a belief in the necessity for overseas commercial

expansion. Nonetheless, within this wider nationalist discourse Democrats and Republicans

could be distinguished from one another by the means through which they hoped to achieve

the expansion of American commerce and power. Crudely rendered, Democrats were the

party of tariff revision, whilst the Republicans were the proponents of protective tariffs. The

Spread-Eagle, Anglophobic rhetoric of nationalists in the GOP was utilized as one of the

primary means of displaying commitment to nationalist protective tariffs.

A new generation of politicians led by Henry Carey propagated a doctrine of

economic nationalism that sought to transform the U.S. into the world’s leading commercial
and industrial power. Carey’s program was rooted in an antebellum desire for freedom from

Old World corruption and consequently the complete economic independence of the United

States from the rapacious appetite for aggrandizement of Great Britain.49 Antipathy to Britain

was thus a natural accompaniment to faith in protection. Since Britain could no longer be

construed as a geopolitical threat, as had been the case in the antebellum decades, greater

emphasis was placed on her free trade policies by Carey’s Republican disciples as the single

most important obstacle to the realization of American supremacy, thwarting American

aspirations at every turn. This conspiratorial thesis, commonplace to Anglophobia throughout

the nineteenth century, shaped Republican party arguments regarding the tariff both in and

outside Congress and was developed successively by Secretaries of State William M. Evarts,

James G. Blaine, and Frederick Frelinghuysen. The tariff, properly applied, would protect

native industries, maintain high wages, and prevent an influx of cheap foreign labor. Against

the backdrop of a recession from 1883 to 1886 in which laborer’s vulnerabilities were laid

bare, the appeal of protection and the Anglophobic conspiracy that lay behind it was

compelling. Yet, the labor movement was just as susceptible to internationalism as it was to

American nationalism. As a result, high tariff men emphasized the benefits of protectionism

to the worker in particular, using Anglophobia as the vehicle for catalyzing laborers’ and

westerners’ suspicions of Wall Street more broadly. However, the labor problem remained a

thorn in the side of protectionists, particularly in the light of increasing government surpluses

which threw considerable weight behind Democratic accusations of the profiteering of

“Boodle Blaine.”50

The Republican party’s establishment of the tariff as synonymous with American

prosperity identified free traders with allegiance to Great Britain and a plot to stifle the

growth of American commerce. The Presidential election of 1888 highlights the degree to

which the GOP had successfully married Anglophobia with tariff reform and the way in
which it acted as means of branding the Democratic opposition as un-American. Republicans

twisted the lion’s tail uncompromisingly. The centerpiece of an Indianapolis parade was a

bull covered in a white cloth carrying the slogan ‘John Bull Rides the Democratic Party and

We Ride John Bull.’51 Pamphlets touting the same theme flooded the nation. Cleveland’s

decision to base the election upon tariff revision in his 1887 message to Congress was a gift

for Republican strategists who sought to tie the image of Democratic subservience to England

indelibly on the minds of voters. In 1892, the charges against Cleveland reappeared. One

cartoon in Judge depicted Cleveland entombed in the ‘Political Catacombs,’ his sarcophagus

emblazoned with the Union Jack and the double charge of ‘Anglomania’ and ‘Free Trade.’52

The association of the Democrats with free trade was an ideology honed by successive

Republican administrations, a fact that undermines the notion that Anglophobia was simply a

tool utilized in the heat of election campaigns. In an era of close electoral victories, the fact

that the GOP felt they could rely upon the strategy in repeated elections attests to the broader

appeal of their message.

Anglophobia acted as the leitmotif for a variety of forms of economic nationalism,

lending itself in particular to the conspiracy-laden rhetoric that was the earmark of

midwestern popular politics. In this context, it also appears strikingly like a language of anti-

globalism, marking opposition to Wall Street, the international gold standard, free trade, and

a coterie of industrial titans, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, seen to be its

representatives. Western and southern farmers repeatedly defined their region as a colonial

outpost of aristocratic financial centers in London and on the Atlantic seaboard, a stance that

inflected their interpretation of the crippling agricultural downturn that epitomized late-

nineteenth century agrarian politics.53 Free-Silverites and, with the incorporation of a free

silver plank in the People’s Party platform in 1892, some Populists hoped that the

remonetization of silver would liberate the American farmer from the grip of the British-
backed gold standard, by inflating prices and ending the nation’s humiliating colonial

dependence on British capital and the foreign markets they were becoming increasingly

enmeshed within.

The sree silver issue suggests the context-specific nature of Anglophobia. The lexicon

and symbols of Anglophobia were just one of a panoply of inherited vocabularies utilized by

Populists. Although the “money power” was often spoken of as the ‘Anglo-American

combine,’ the assault on Wall Street drew from an older, Jacksonian rhetoric that was part of

a much broader assault against concentrated wealth and power.54 In fact, the assault was just

as likely to utilise pervasive anti-Semitic stereotypes widely current in American literature.

Michigan-born Sarah Emery’s Seven Financial Conspiracies (1887) proposed a

conspiratorial thesis of the seven acts of ‘Shylocks Tragedy, by which the government and

this great people were sacrificed.’ Her work was littered with stereotypes associating Jewish

bankers with usury, greed, and gold-hoarding.55 Shylock and the English were used

interchangeably in Populist works with bankers, bondholders, and the “Kings of Wall Street”

as the visible embodiments of a plutocratic Goliath of parasitic wealth. Such rhetoric was

imperative to the process of Populist party building. Populist party operatives faced a

formidable task in forging a coalition from a variety of social, religious, ethnic, and political

backgrounds. It was a task that required a more universal language than the nativist baiting

of foreign foes.

Reformers were the heirs to a variety of antebellum discourses that correlated with the

language of American nationalism and provided a historical rationale for elite behavior and

the imperative of protecting “the people” from their actions. For the Populist governor of

Kansas, Lorenzo D. Lewelling, ‘the shackles of industrial slavery’ threatened rural and urban

producer classes.56 The specter of working-class slavery was a common trope in the

mobilization of reform sentiment, and a particularly powerful one given that the Civil War
and emancipation were within recent historical memory. Such terminology also echoed that

of American republican nationalism that sought to restore the republic to its founding

principles of liberty, equality, and government of the people. Populist leaders such as Marion

Butler and Henry Demarest Lloyd couched these calls as a counterrevolutionary effort to

wrestle the republic back from a powerful monied aristocracy.57 Tom Watson, leader of

Georgia Populism and one of a handful of Populists of national prominence, assaulted the

emergence of a ‘cod-fish aristocracy’ fawning in ‘degrading prostrations’ at the ‘Court’ of the

President, ‘laying the foundation ... for a more brutal and godless and rapacious nobility than

ever rode, lance in rest, over the peasantry of feudal Europe.’58

Such language, despite its overtones of anti-globalization, lent itself to a comparative

view of the United States and the Old World that Populists frequently availed themselves of.

The image of Britain, in such instances, was used, more often than not, as an indictment of

American society. Lorenzo Lewelling’s “Tramp Circular” of December 1893, for instance,

drew a stark analogy between the brutality of American society in the 1890s and of

Elizabethan England.59 More sober comparisons often prevailed. In A Call to Action (1892),

James B. Weaver undertook a comparative analysis of the monetary reconstruction policies

of Britain after the Napoleonic Wars and the United States after the Civil War. In both

instances, Weaver argued, the resumption of specie payments and demonetization of silver

produced ‘dire calamities.’ These were the ‘two great examples,’ he concluded, ‘spanning the

whole page of the century’ that ‘will transform the political economy of the world.’60

Transatlantic affinities also revealed the limits of Populist reformism. Widely held

assumptions about the Anglo-American origins of political democracy and good government

underwrote strong cultural hostility towards not only African Americans but to recently

arrived immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.61

 Populists and the labor movement more broadly could also be prone to incredible

degrees of internationalism. The Chicago journalist and one of the leading intellectual lights

of Populism, Henry Demarest Lloyd, wrote of the movement in the same breath as

developments in England, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. After several visits

to England between 1885 and 1893, Lloyd found himself increasingly radicalized. On a visit

to London in 1891, Lloyd met with leaders of the Fabian Society, and later the leaders of the

London dock strike and exponents of mass unionism Tom Mann and John Burns. More

strikingly, he interviewed Friedrich Engels and the socialist leader Henry Mayers Hyndman.

London, he concluded, ‘is the fermentingest place in the world.’62 The collectivism of Lloyd

continued to be influenced by European radical thought even after his return to his hometown

of Winekta, Illinois. The concluding chapters of his magnum opus, Wealth Against

Commonwealth (1894), in which he outlines the necessity for a new set of social values to

replace the “Bourbon” monopolism of Standard Oil, was indebted to the works of Italian

revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to native Emersonianism and Christian

Socialism.63

Anglophobia was far from the dominant discourse of Populism, but it added grist to

the mill of the movement’s orators. Populists and Republicans alike attacked the “Goldbug”

Cleveland as a symbol of the eastern “money-power.” ‘His policies of silver and the tariff,’

argued the National Bulletin, ‘are true English policies.’64 Hoping to revive their fortunes in

the deeply Anglophobic agrarian South and Midwest, the Democratic convention reversed its

previous stance on silver, sealing the u-turn with the nomination of William Jennings Bryan

in 1896. Bryan’s Anglophobia reached its apogee on the floor of the Democrats’ nominating

convention. The “boy orator of the Platte” galvanized the delegates behind a hard money

platform with tub-thumping rhetoric. ‘It is the issue of 1776 again,’ he declared. ‘Shall we ...

declare that we are less independent than our forefathers?’ Blending the motifs of the United
States’ revolutionary heritage with an aggressive Anglophobia, in his concluding remarks

Bryan added a labor radicalism infused with the Populist staple of Christian socialism. ‘You

shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,’ he warned British

financiers. ‘You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’65 A prominent group of

Populists grasped the nettle of fusion, but the short-term incentive it offered split the reform

coalition intellectually and proved not to be the panacea required for electoral victory.

The “Battle of the Standards” between Bryan and McKinley in 1896 turned on much

more than the fate of the international gold standard. Republicans campaigned with greater

efficiency and a greater degree of elasticity. In the same regions in which Democrats hoped to

revive the party’s future, the GOP committed itself to international bimetallism alongside

their continued opposition to tariff reform, allowing itself greater flexibility on the money

issue and free rein to continue alarmist rhetoric. The Bryan ticket ran up against a powerful

combination of the forces they opposed. Money gathered from Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan,

and the New York Central and Pennsylvania railroad companies financed a Republican press

blitz in the nation’s metropolitan press—itself becoming increasingly corporate—that rallied

behind the gold standard and waved the bloody shirt with impunity. The McKinley campaign

depicted free trade and free silver as “Bryanisms” that threatened the nation’s commerce and

amounted to “anarchy.” Set against the backdrop of riots in Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo

and the march of Coxey’s Army toward Washington, D.C., Republican “sound money”

gained far more traction amongst white, Protestant voters in the North and swept aside the

Democrat’s precarious hold over the Midwest.66 Anglophobia, therefore, must be understood

within the context of wider electoral strategy and not as the trigger of political mobilization

that the fusion ticket hoped it would be.67

For Republicans, the tariff and the money question were a part of a much more

broadly conceived economic nationalism that attempted to secure the dominance of U.S.
power in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, the less than modest success of Republican

administrations in executing that vision has perhaps muddied the waters most amongst

historians’ study of Anglophobia. The apparent disjuncture between political rhetoric and the

failure to “act like an Anglophobe” has led to a sense that Anglophobia was the preserve of

demagogues on the stumps.68 The notion of “acting” like an Anglophobe is a slippery

concept. It assumes that once in office politicians would take on an outwardly hostile stance

towards Great Britain, unrestrained by either diplomacy or military capability. American

politicians viewed national interest through an international, not to mention ideological, lens.

The Anglophobia of American statesmen was rooted in a hard-headed analysis of

hemispheric geopolitics and was subject to the historical contingency of the region’s powder-

keg politics. As Mike Sewell has highlighted, the nationalism of men such as James G.

Blaine co-existed alongside a much more pragmatic approach to foreign policy formation.

Potent symbolic overtures of friendship, such as after the assassination of president Garfield,

existed alongside a more general trend towards a joint championship of shared values of

citizenship and, importantly, of Anglo-Saxon descent.69

In the case of Blaine, anti-British sentiments might also exist alongside a grudging

respect of its commercial success and even an admiration for specific policies. For instance,

in his first term as Secretary of State, Blaine championed government subsidy of the Roach

Steamship line to Brazil so as to bring to an end the triangular trading of American goods on

British vessels. In Congress his Anglophobia took the form of the familiar fear that the

United States would otherwise ‘become tributary to Great Britain,’ but at bottom Blaine was

following what he saw as the successful and proven course of America’s great rival.70

Contemporaries were able to overcome this apparent disjuncture between outspoken

Anglophobia and overtures of transatlantic friendship simply because they did not see a

disjuncture. Post-Civil War politicians subscribed to cultural perceptions shared with their
counterparts across the Atlantic. Racial Anglo-Saxonism strengthened long-standing social

and intellectual Atlantic connections that were complemented by America’s turn towards

imperialism in 1898.

The cult of Queen Victoria, Anglomania, and the past time of searching for British

origins through genealogy engaged in by Samuel Tilden, Levi Parsons Morton, and James G.

Blaine were all symbols of an emerging Anglo-American solidarity based upon a common

heritage, language, laws, religion, and civility.71 In Britain, Anglomania found its counterpart

in the “Americomania” observed by the jurist and social commentator Albert Venn Dicey.72

This was evidence of a much wider re-orientation of America’s image in Great Britain in

which a counter-image of the Revolution was presented as barely revolutionary at all but, in

the words of Prime Minister William Gladstone, a ‘vindication of the liberties inherited and

possessed.’73 Indeed, between January 1893 and September 1894 the North American Review

published an extraordinary series of articles debating practical proposals for an Anglo-

American re-union, even, in Andrew Carnegie’s optimistic assessment a ‘common

citizenship.’74

Optimistic at best, these outward signs of cordiality did not necessarily precipitate

improved feelings and instead raised new ambiguities in attitudes towards Britain. For

Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, for instance, Britain’s diplomatic and consular buildings in

the United States were the only ones not to be lit up in celebration for fear of an Anglophobic

counter-reaction. More strikingly, the Venezuela Crisis exposed how Anglo-American

relations could deteriorate to the brink of war. The rapidity of the climb-down on both sides

of the Atlantic, however, highlights the degree to which the political calculus was influenced

as much by pragmatic assessments of national interest as by transatlantic sympathy. British

acquiescence in appeasement was an ever more important determining factor in this light.

The emerging Anglo-American rapprochement in late-Gilded Age America was sustained by

British concessions to the United States at every turn.75 Recourse to the imprecise, though

capacious mixture of shared cultural and racial heritage embodied in Anglo-Saxonism was

central to this process. Anglo-Saxonism provided a rationale for continued rivalry in addition

to joint imperial ventures. America’s own rise to power and, crucially, Britain’s pre-eminence

(if declining) on the world stage evoked the sense that these were all the natural outcome of

the common pursuit of expansionist capitalism inherent in Anglo-Saxon destinarian

discourses.76

Epilogue: “The Jingoes Anglomania”

Andrew Carnegie was acutely sensitive to the duality of a shared heritage and rivalry

between the United States and Britain and the rapidly altering nature of the respective

commercial power of the two. ‘An eldest son has made a great success since he left his

father’s roof,’ he wrote in response to Goldwin Smith’s accusations, ‘and it is difficult for an

energetic and pugnacious old gentleman to realize that the son has attained his majority.’77 In

the last quarter of the nineteenth century the transatlantic relationship was moving through a

stage of flux that altered the ways in which Anglophobia was utilized by politicians and

groups within American society. As was characteristic of Anglophobia throughout the

nineteenth century it remained a protean concept. Its power as a means of inclusion and

exclusion was utilized on both a national stage and in grassroots politics as a means of

expressing a resolute American nationalism. Republican party strategists used Anglophobia

to hone an economic nationalism over the course of successive administrations that

successfully tarred the Democrats as working hand in glove with a British conspiracy to stifle

American potential.

Irish-Americans, meanwhile, used Anglophobia to highlight both what they were and

were not. Placing themselves in opposition to British colonialism they drew upon the liberal
democratic tradition of Americans’ self-perception to exhibit that they were of America and

not simply in it. Thus, Anglophobia continued to act as a negative referent in the expression

of a positive sense of American nationality. Even while Anglo-American relations were

heading towards rapprochement at the turn of the century, economic rivalry and the tentative

nature of American’s acceptance of being at least one corner of a triangular battle for

commercial pre-eminence ensured that Anglophobia retained some of the bellicosity that

characterized it in antebellum America. Transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism may have legitimized

rivalry, but common blood also came to be perceived as a bond of familial affection that

would ultimately undermine the credibility of appeals to Anglophobia. Yet, Anglophobes and

Anglo-Saxonists were equally ambivalent in their attitudes towards Great Britain.

News of the explosion of the U.S. warship Maine in Havana’s harbor, according to

London’s Daily News sent ‘a pang through every British heart’ because of the ‘community of

race’ that Americans and Englishmen belonged to.78 Described as the ‘apex of Anglo-

Saxonism’ by Stuart Anderson in his Race and Rapprochement, the Spanish-American war

also reveals the ambiguities that concurrent Anglophobic and Anglophilic sentiments had

long exhibited in American politics.79 America’s entrance onto the colonial stage was

celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. Advocates of U.S. imperialism in both Britain and

the United States enlisted the racial exceptionalism and destinarianism offered by Anglo-

Saxonism to legitimise the acquisition of Spain’s former colonies. ‘With us of the Anglo-

Saxon race,’ wrote Edward Dicey in a widely read article in the monthly journal Nineteenth

Century, ‘it is our mission, our manifest destiny, to rule the world.’80 Describing imperial rule

as an Anglo-Saxon ‘birthright,’ the breadth of vision of Dicey’s Anglo-Saxonism conjured

the rehearsed banalities of Anglo-American racial alliance and the spread of civilization and

“free” political institutions that appealed to many Americans’ destinarian republican

nationalism. As Paul Kramer has eloquently argued, from the other side of the Atlantic
Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West legitimized America’s imperial trajectory in

terms of this racial exceptionalism by using the image of the transplanted ‘English-speaking

peoples’ conquering the continent ‘in obedience to the instincts working half-blindly within

their breasts.’81

Anglo-Saxonism was certainly a powerful and appealing explanatory discourse

underpinning diplomatic appeasement. Likewise, the upsurge in American travel, “dollar

princesses”, and exchanges between liberal intellectuals in Anglo-American literary

magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, the North American Review, and Nineteenth Century

testified to wider social and cultural convergence.82 While Anglo-Saxonism was widely

acknowledged at this moment of Anglo-American solidarity, it is important to emphasise that

it was just one of a number of intellectual constructs available to American politicians.

Anglo-Saxonism itself enjoyed only a short career before declining precipitously in the face

of joint Anglo-American opposition to the “Slavic threat” in the Russo-Japanese war of

1904.83 . The imprecision of Anglo-Saxonism provided great explanatory depth for

contemporaries attempting to understand late-nineteenth century nationalism, imperialism,

and racism. The perceived threats posed by intensifying imperial competition, particularly

with Germany, and the influx of new migration from southern and eastern Europe to

American ports were both understood and diminished by appeals to an Anglo-Saxonism that

equated race with nation.84 Because many Americans continued to believe that they were a

special branch of the Anglo-Saxon race, Anglophobia could continue to flourish alongside

Anglo-Saxonism; indeed, its roots were too deep in republican nationalism for it to simply

dissipate.

The Boston Daily Advertiser astutely noted the ambivalence toward Britain

propagated by the competing claims of Anglophobia and Anglophilia in Gilded Age America

with the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. ‘Not the least curious phenomenon attending
the present outbreak of jingoism in the United States’ it observed, was what it termed ‘the

jingoes’ Anglomania.’ The curiosity of this Anglomania lay not in its occurrence but rather in

those ‘individuals and classes of people who are now loudest in their laudation of England.’

‘Until six months ago,’ the Advertiser wryly noted, these were, ‘the very same who habitually

made the air blue with breathing out threatenings and slaughter against Great Britain.’85 The

image of Britain thus continued to be used in versatile, often contradictory, respects in

American politics. Strong support for the Boers in American public opinion and Woodrow

Wilson’s later actions and attitudes between 1914 and 1917 severely strained Anglo-

American affinities.86 As American statesmen sought to secure American pre-eminence in

world affairs vis-a-vis Great Britain, Anglophobia took centre stage in domestic and foreign

policy agendas. The language of race, nation, and empire with which Anglophobia was

saturated was subject to continual reconceptualization under the contingencies of American

diplomacy. Within the context of a rapidly changing international order at the turn of the

twentieth century, Anglophobia retained its potency, albeit in new guises, and would continue

to do so until the advent of the Cold War.

1
Smith, “Hatred of England”, 547.
2
Porter, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 764.
3
Perkins, Great Rapprochement, 5; Allen, Britain and the United States; Crapol, America for Americans. William Reuter’s
essay “Anatomy of Political Anglophobia” is a lonely exception to this rule. Reuter touches upon many of the arguments
raised here but often does not delve far below the discourse of Anglophobias to reach an understanding of the different ways
in which it was employed so as to mobilise ethnic groups and the electorate, or, to its uses beyond that of electoral politics
instead insisting that a ‘general hostility’ to British institutions allowed it to flourish. What is more there are problems with
his chronology, stating that it disappeared abruptly from national politics after 1900, yet, the protean nature of Anglophobia
ensured that it rather manifested itself in a different form. Contra Reuter, John Moser shows that Anglophobia flourished
after the turn of the century, See his Twisting the Lion’s Tail.
4
For an overview of these arguments see: Brauer, “United States and British Imperial Expansion” and Sexton, “The United
States and the British Empire since 1783.” For the Louisiana Purchase and Florida, see: Lewis, American Union and the
Problem of Neighborhood; debates over Texas: Haynes, “Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas”; the Oregon question
is discussed by Howard Temperley in To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty; finally, John Craig Hammond expertly deals with
fears that western territories might ally with the Old World in Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion.
5
Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, pp.181-5; Haynes, ‘Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas’, pp.122-5.
6
Brauer, “United States and British Imperial Expansion,” pp.23-5.
7
Mott, History of American Magazines, 245-55. Smith and his opponents debated in the Review’s pages at the height of its
popularity – by 1891 its circulation reached its peak of 76,000 subscribers from just 7,500 a decade earlier
8
Smith, “Hatred of England”, 548-549.
9
Ibid., p.551.
10
Ibid., p.554.
11
Ibid., p.555.
12
Higginson, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 750.
13
Ibid.
14
Wilson, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 771-2.
15
Carnegie, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 754.
16
Quoted in Reuter, “Anatomy of Political Anglophobia”, 122.
17
Quoted in: Crapol, America for Americans, 171-2.
18
Johnson & Porter, National Party Platforms, 80.
19
Bangor Daily Whig & Courier, 26 Oct. 1888, 1; Daily Inter Ocean, 26 Oct. 1888, 2; Los Angeles Times, 26 Oct. 1888, 1.
20
Historical Statistics of the United States. Accessed 11 July 2009.
21
Kenny, The American Irish, 42.
22
Smith, “Hatred of England”, 548.
23
Quoted in: Sewell, “Rebels or Revolutionaries?”, 726.
24
Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, 210-222.
25
Halstead, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 763.
26
Irish World, 28 Apr. 1894, 4.
27
Sewell, “Rebels or Revolutionaries?”, 723-733.
28
Self, “Abuse of Citizenship”, 551-3.
29
Rogers, “Harboring Conspiracy”, 521-3. See also: Sewell, “Rebels or Revolutionaries?”, 728-733.
30
Self, “Abuse of Citizenship”, 554.
31
Rossa went to extreme but also extremely novel tactics for the cause of Irish nationalism, even managing to fund the
design and building of a submarine known as the “Fenian Ram” to attack the British merchant marine, see, Short, Dynamite
War, 35-77; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 63-85.
32
See the brilliant and lucidly argued chapter, “Ireland Sold for Gold!” in Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, 210-
222. For Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s advertising of the Skirmishing Fund in the Irish World see the 4 March 1876 edition,
which reprinted a letter from Rossa to Ford. As a mark of Ford’s reticence over the course O’Donovan Rossa proposed, it
ought to be noted that he received the letter some three months before finally printing its contents, see: Brown, Irish-
American Nationalism, 69-70.
33
Irish World, 28 Apr. 1894, 4. For example, see: Irish World, 11 Jan & 1 Feb. 1890. In both instances the illustrations
accompanying the calendar directly connected Irish revolutionary nationalism and the struggle against British colonial
aggression with America’s own colonial rebellion. The latter case is particularly vivid, depicting Oliver Plunkett,
Archbishop of Armagh hanged drawn and quartered alongside an illustration of James Duane being installed as the first
Irish-American mayor of New York in 1774, thereby establishing a link between Irish and American revolutionary violence.
34
Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 249-53; Knobel, Paddy and the Republic, 176-82. One ought not press this too far,
however, as Kevin Kenny has convincingly argued that the ‘institutional and associational life’ created through Irish ‘ethnic
assertiveness’ was the ‘primary means through which the American Irish were assimilated.’ Kenny’s stress is one the search
for respectability of both Protestant and Catholic Irish middle classes who often previously had little sense of national or
ethnic identity, achieving either, or both, thus became the driving force for assimilation into American life; see Kenny, The
American Irish, 147-149.
35
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 135-56.
36
Porter, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 765.
37
Life, 26 Apr 1883, 201.
38
See: Life, 1, 8, 15, 22 Feb. 1883, 1 March 1883.
39
Roosevelt, American Ideals, pp.22-4.
40
Lodge, “Colonialism in the United States”, p.332.
41
Ibid., p.361.
42
Milwaukee Sentinel, 9 Jan. 1887, 4. See also: Porter, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 765; and, Life, 30 Jan. 1890.
43
Irish World, 3 May 1890, 4.
44
The Daily Picayune, 17 March 1895.
45
Life, 5 April 1883.
46
Irish World, 28 April 1894, 4.
47
Irish World, 1 Jan. 1898, 4.
48
Irish World, 30 April 1898, 4.
49
For an excellent discussion of the antebellum origins of the Carey school, see Onuf & Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War,
pp.296-302.
50
Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, 227-8.
51
Crapol, America for Americans, 171
52
Judge, 9 July 1892, p.32.
53
Crapol, America for Americans, pp.191-218. Populist anti-Semitism was also a strong current in this conspiratorial
discourse, positing the existence of an international “gold ring” of “Shylock” financiers (specifically the Rothschilds)
locking the United States in colonial subservience. See: Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp.78-9; Postel, Populist Vision, p.152;
Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual”, pp.154-56.
54
James B. Weaver quoted in: Pollack, Populist Mind, p.142. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, pp.27-46.
55
Emery, Seven Financial Conspiracies, p.25.
56
Lewewlling quoted in: Pollack, Populist Mind, p.6.
57
Kazin, Populist Persuasion, pp.33-4.
58
Watson quoted in: Ibid., p.25.
59
See Pollack, Populist Response to Industrial America, pp.32-35.
60
Weaver quoted in: Pollack, Populist Mind, pp.145, 147.
61
Kazin, Populist Persuasion, pp.35-6.
62
Destler, Empire of Reform, pp.249-250.
63
Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth, pp.510-536.
64
National Bulletin, 22 Oct. 1892.
65
Bryan, First Battle, p.206.
66
Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp.521-9.
67
Crapol, America for Americans, pp.213-215.
68
This has been particularly the case with James G. Blaine who has been misleadingly caricatured as being demagogic and
‘excessively political’, see: Sewell, “Political Rhetoric and Policy-Making”, 61-84; Crapol, America for Americans, 67-87,
166-186.
69
Sewell, “‘English-Speaking Race is in Mourning’”, 668-72, 68-686.
70
Crapol, America for Americans, 72-3. A similar case has been made for the arch-nationalist Henry Cabot Lodge, see:
Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge, pp.81-4.
71
Sewell, “‘English-Speaking Race is in Mourning’”, 681-2; Prochaska, Eagle & the Crown, 82-108.
72
Dicey, “Americomania in English Politics”.
73
Gladstone, “Kin Beyond the Sea”, 185. On late nineteenth century attitudes towards America in Britain, see Tulloch,
“Changing British Attitudes”, 825-840; and Butler, Critical Americans, 224-232, 243-248.
74
Carnegie, “A Look Ahead”, 690.
75
Crapol, “Anglophobia to Fragile Rapprochement”, 22-28.
76
Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons”, 1315-35.
77
Carnegie, “Do Americans Hate England?”, 758.
78
Quoted in Campbell, Revolution to Rapprochement, 191.
79
Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 112-130.
80
Dicey, “New American Imperialism,” 489.
81
Quoted in Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” 1325. “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons” is keenly
sensitive to the many forms that Anglo-Saxon manifested itself in and to the internal contradictions between its British and
American expressions, pp.1320-1335.
82
For transatlantic liberal and intellectual connections see Butler, Critical Americans; Kelley, Transatlantic Persuasion. For
connections between social reformers see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. On transatlantic marriage see Brandon, Dollar
Princesses; and, Montgomery, ‘Gilded Prostitution.’ For a synthesis of the importance of these connections see Kramer’s
excellent analysis in, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons,” 1326-1328.
83
For Anglo-American cooperation in the Far East see Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 148-74.
84
On late nineteenth century migration to the United States see Bodnar, The Transplanted. For a treatment of American
reactions to these migrants see, Higham, Strangers in this Land; and, for an illuminating discussion of Boston’s
Immigration restriction League see, Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, particularly chapters 5-7 & 10.
85
Boston Daily Advertiser, 24 Nov. 1898, 4.
86
On the Boer problem see Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 130-147; and Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-
Saxons”, 1335-1344. For Wilson’s attitude before World War I see Parsons, Wilsonian Diplomacy. In Twisting the Lion’s
Tail John Moser highlights how after World War One a diverse collection of interest groups – Republican conservatives,
liberal anti-imperialists, Midwestern progressives, German-Americans, Irish-Americans – used Anglophobia to foster
domestic political agendas. He adeptly illustrates how it was utilized in the assertion of US interests abroad, chiefly
Britain’s inability to payback war loans from the First World War, and, as the Second World War approached, through the
claim that the US would not “pull British chestnuts out of the fire” again.

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