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Book Reviews
Anglo-Saxons (Briefly) All
| KOHN, EDWARD P. This Kindred People: Canadian-American Relations and the Anglo-Saxon Idea, 1895–1903. Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2004. viii + 258 pp. Introduction, illustrations, bibliography, index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7735-2796-6.
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In 1895, as the United States and Great Britain verged on war over Venezuela's boundary, Theodore Roosevelt characteristically looked forward to getting into the "muss." "They'll have to employ a lot of men as green as I am even for the conquest of Canada," TR gleefully wrote, as Edward Kohn notes in This Kindred People (13). Four years later, having instead charged south into Cuba, Roosevelt reacted to another boundary dispute—this time over the line between Canada, a dominion of the British Empire, and the American territory of Alaska. Most uncharacteristically, he brushed off Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier's reference to war as one way the matter could be settled. "Two years ago this would have provoked frantic retaliatory denunciation on our part," Roosevelt wrote in 1899. "Now it is for the most part dismissed...with the good-humored remark that there is to be no interruption of the friendship between England and America." (156–57). |
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Within a remarkably short time, Roosevelt and people like him on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border came to accept, even celebrate, their countries' coexistence as part of a larger rapprochement between America and Britain. How this happened, and how a shared Anglo-Saxon racial ideology shaped the outcome is the subject of Kohn's study. Following the Venezuela crisis, American and British officials came to an understanding that allowed for American hegemony in the western hemisphere and, paradoxically enough, greater security for Canada. The Anglo-American rapprochement, Kohn writes, was driven by power politics. The United States sought hemispheric hegemony as a rising world power, while Britain, faced with threats to its empire elsewhere, saw the United States as guaranteeing the status quo in the Americas. This new international reality, however, emerged in the face of old, cross-border animosities: loyalism, anti-Americanism, and British imperialism on the Canadian side, and anglophobia and annexationist impulses among Americans. |
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To accommodate each other, Kohn argues, many Americans and Canadians drew on Anglo-Saxonism. Their rhetoric portrayed peoples on both sides of the border as belonging to a superior Anglo-Saxon race, bound together by blood, language, and forms of government. Through this "ideological device" (12), the Dominion was recast in American eyes from an "unnatural" fragment of a European empire to a self-governing state with a right to its own existence (4). Anglo-Saxonism likewise differentiated Canada from the allegedly "backward" Latin American republics that the United States was seeking to dominate (203). English Canadians began to craft an early "Anglo-Saxon version" of the "linchpin" theory—the notion that Canada, as a living link between Britain and the United States, had a special role to play in promoting Anglo-American friendship, an idea usually seen as emerging several decades later (9). |
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Kohn posits a brief career for this cross-border use of Anglo-Saxon ideology. He traces its manifestations in public opinion and among intellectuals, diplomats, and politicians, from the Venezuela crisis of 1895–96 through the Spanish-American War, the South African War, and a series of negotiations over Canadian-American matters. Kohn works from a strong base of evidence, including American and Canadian newspapers and the papers of public figures, as he delineates the limits as well as the reach of "North American Anglo-Saxonism." English Canadians, for example, who initially suspected American motives in the Spanish-American War, ended up cheering Rudyard Kipling's call for the United States to "take up the White Man's burden" by annexing the Philippines. Yet Canadians and Americans largely dropped the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric when their interests clashed during the Alaskan boundary dispute. Kohn sees the resolution of that dispute in 1903 as the end of Anglo-Saxonism as the predominant rhetoric of Canadian- American relations. |
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