Anglo-Saxon as a Race Term
The term Anglo-Saxon as descriptive of Englishmen or Americans, is as incorrect as the use of the word Gothic in differentiation of pointed architecture. Mr. S. D. O’Connell, of the Bureau of Statistics, Washington, in a letter on the misuse of the term, says that among ethnologists the phrase Anglo-Saxon is never used as descriptive of a race, or of English institutions. Hence, he remarks, “no well-educated person of the present generation can be excused for using it descriptively of the English-speaking peoples; because there never was an Anglo-Saxon race nor an Anglo-Saxon institution to impart dominating influences to our civilization. The dominating influences must be traced to some other source than that of barbarian Teutonic tribes, even if we should grant the development of our civilization to the dominating influences of the people of the British Isles, who, in the early settlements of this part of the continent, so largely colonized it. Our British ancestors, after the invasion of the Romans, adopted the civilizing influences of the more civilized peoples of Europe, and whatever dominating influence the English-speaking peoples have to-day is due, to some extent at least, to that civilization, and to the vigor of the people, which no distinct race can claim as its own.
“‘The truth is,’ as the Chicago Tribune has said, ‘that to plume ourselves upon our Anglo-Saxon extraction is ridiculous. Compared with us, the Romans, who first comprised all the vagabonds of Italy, and finally incorporated into the empire all the semi-barbarians of Europe, were a homogeneous race.’ That paper humorously cites Defoe’s ‘True-Born Englishman’ of his day:
“‘A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction—
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction;
A metaphor invented to express
A man akin to all the universe.
Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived,
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns.
The Pict, and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains;
Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed,
From whence your ‘Free-born Englishmen’ proceed.’
“Anything more motley and heterogeneous than the English people, even before the Norman invasion, made up as they were from the veins of ancient Britons, Romans, Picts, Scots, Danes, Angles, and Saxons, it would be hard to conceive. This mixture of races and bloods shows plainly that the idea of an Anglo-Saxon race is sheer nonsense. How much more nonsensical it is to use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in race classification of the American people, when they have compounded and are daily more and more compounding the confusion of its British blood with infusions from the veins of all other nations.
“Of course we have an Anglo-Saxon strain in our blood, as we have the Norman, a mixture of the Teutonic and Celtic, the old British—that is, the Celtic—the Germanic, and the Latin, so called. But which strain is the predominant one it is difficult to say. The best ethnologists incline to the opinion that it is the Celtic.
“Out upon this cant about ‘races,’ and especially the gabble about ‘Anglo-Saxon institutions,’ which we hear so often from persons who know little or nothing of the forefathers and forerunners of the English-speaking people, and less of their own, or of the science which is concerned with the natural history of man.
“The fiction that credits to Anglo-Saxon blood all the enterprise, progress, and best institutions of the centuries past has been the cause of more persecution in the name of religion, and bloodshed in the name of God, than the most malevolent influences that have ever caused brethren to imbrue their hands in the blood of brothers since the first murder. It has created and still sustains the most bitter and unjust and unfounded prejudices against the people of Ireland and their descendants everywhere among English-speaking peoples. Leaders of thought and educators should teach the English-speaking people of this land of liberty and constitutional equality—as the great leaders of thought in Great Britain and Ireland are now doing—that there is no distinction of race or blood or origin among the English-speaking peoples of to-day, nor has there been for long centuries past; that the great landmarks of our civilization were erected upon and the foundations of our political institutions laid in the Christian religion; and that to its benign and dominating influence are to be attributed the greatness and progress of the English-speaking peoples among the nations of the earth.”