Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 7

7.

Anglo-Saxon America

In order to understand historical events in their effects, one has to put them in the right perspective. This is easier said than done. Whether one likes it or not, one is always inundated by the events of recent times and, as it were, run over by them. They expand beyond all measure, in space as well as in time, while those further back shrink unduly. This is true not only of antiquity, but even of the relatively recent past. Who realizes, for example, that the United States even today has been a British colony longer than an independent state? What has happened to our perception since the Boston Tea Party, the conquest of the West, the second war with England, the Californian gold discoveries, the Mexican War, the Monroe Doctrine, the fight over slavery, the War of Secession, the war against Spain, America's role in the World War, finally the fantastic dream of the economic power of the USA growing into the clouds, and its abrupt fall. But the nearly two hundred years that lie between the landing of the first settlers and the Declaration of Independence seem to us to converge into such a short span of time that these two events almost follow one another.

If one realizes how long the influence of the homeland was able to affect the British settlers on American soil, one will no longer wonder so much why America has retained the stamp of an Anglo-Saxon country to this day, in spite of the immigrant streams of foreign blood that later passed over its soil. One will not be surprised that the United States is still today a British marked country, alone one will have his doubt how long it will remain so. The English blood has had three centuries to work, the foreign blood partly only as many decades. We must wait and see what the face of America will be like in one or two hundred years; no longer Anglo-Saxon, even if the immigration gates should remain hermetically closed to all non-Britons.

The special character of the Americans as an Anglo-Saxon but non-English people still stems from the fact that, right at the beginning of settlement, a comparatively strong stream of immigrants began, which then ceased rather suddenly. The thirteen colonies, which formed the basis of the United States, were founded within the long period from 1607 to 1733. The oldest colony is thus separated from the youngest by a period of one hundred and twenty-four years. But the decisive foundations, that of Virginia and that of the New England states, crowd into the short span of 1604 to 1687. Just about all of the Puritan immigration that so decisively shaped America's face and character, and continues to do so today, took place in the two decades from 1620 to 1640. All the untold millions of "Yankees" are descended from the twenty thousand Puritans who immigrated at that time. Three times as many Germans immigrated to Pennsylvania alone, but they arrived too late by about a century, besides the fact that they had no leaders and were not animated by an idea nearly as strong and indomitable as the Puritans.

Had these sixty thousand Pennsylvanian immigrants, and the forty thousand or so who emigrated to the other colonies during the same period, come earlier, they would probably have given a different turn of events. But although the Anglo-Saxon character of the United States was preserved and the influence of the Pennsylvania Germans and the ten thousand Palatines who emigrated to the state of New York did not become outwardly apparent, it is still perceptible today, even in those parts where the great-grandchildren of those Germans have long since ceased to speak a word of German, and perhaps do not even know that their ancestors came from Germany.

The Atlantic coast of America is like alluvial land on which many rivers have deposited their sediments, fertile and putrid. It is like a Troy, where one culture, one race built over the other. But modern American civilization has covered everything with standardization of all forms of life as with uniform varnish. Nevertheless, whoever drives in a car with open eyes from Boston to Washington, for example, will be amazed to see that the different origins, the different origins of the individual states and former colonies are still recognizable today. This is true not only for areas with different racial admixture in the colonial period, but even for those into which almost only the British immigrated in the decisive years.

Even today, anyone who wants to understand the history of the United States must go back to the history of the origins of the thirteen colonies. The destinies laid down then still have an effect now into the future.

British North America, the thirteen colonies over which the Union Jack flew for nearly two hundred years, arose from three fundamentally different germs.

The first was the southern colonies with Virginia at its core. On the first ship to dock on the Virginian coast, "masters" and "slaves" were already crossing over. This relationship eventually led to the War of Secession, and it is still determinative today of the fate and future of the entire southern United States; for the spirit of Virginia and the other annexed southern colonies, the two Carolinas, Georgia, and Maryland, has extended over the entire southern part of the United States.

The northern colonies, with Massachusetts as their leader, formed the second part. They were shaped by the Puritans. Today, the Puritans have spread throughout the states. In their place, Italians, Irish, Poles and French Canadians have invaded the farms and townhouses they abandoned. But even today Puritan spirit prevails to some extent, and it has extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The middle colonies were from the beginning the least English, and they have remained so to this day. They were the only ones to receive significant German immigration in colonial times. They remained into the future the main immigration countries with the strongest addition of foreign blood. From here it flowed into the heart of the continent, into the prairie states of the Midwest, which resound as most typically American and which are least English. From here the second great epoch of the no longer Anglo-Saxon, but "American" America will take its beginning.