In order to understand how woke ideas emerged, it is important to undertake what historians of ideas term an ‘archaeology’ of an idea: the taproots which mingled and combined to lead us toward our modern worldview. The following is from a chapter I was not able to include in my new critical book on woke, The Third Awokening (May 14) , released as Taboo in the UK (July 4).

The Rise of Left-Modernism prior to 1965

Cultural socialism springs from the same Christian and Enlightenment sources as other western ideas. In this chapter I’ll explore how a hybrid of liberal humanism, expressive individualism and egalitarianism coalesced in the early twentieth century into a new ideology I call left-modernism. This is the dominant ideology of our time, gaining influence after the World Wars and collapse of communism.

Figure 1 tries to show how the intellectual parts fit together. You can think of this belief system as essentially ‘equity-diversity’. The ‘left’ part of left-modernism is cultural socialism, which was overshadowed prior to the late 60s by left-modernism’s novelty- and diversity-seeking ‘modernist’ pole, rooted in anti-traditionalist expressive individualism.[1]

Only from the mid 1960s did moralistic cultural socialism eclipse expressive modernism to become the dominant pole within the umbrella ideology of left-modernism. Modernism retains some influence, but only insofar as it doesn’t clash with cultural socialism, as with left-modernism’s continued emphasis on diversity, cosmopolitanism and novelty. When modernist anti-traditionalism collides with cultural socialism’s protective ethos, as on questions of pornography, prostitution, paedophilia and cultural appropriation, modernism is forced to give way.

Left-modernism rose steadily in elite circles from the 1910s, becoming mainstream in the 1960s, and tracking sharply upward ever since. Overall, the wider ideology of left-modernism has been a stunning success, emerging invigorated through two world wars and the Cold War to reach its zenith, after more than a century of existence. Wokeness in turn describes the religion which grew up around the most acute sensitivities of cultural socialism. This sensitivity first emerged around race in the mid-1960s, and what Cass Sunstein refers to as ‘opprobrium entrepreneurs’ began to organise cancellation campaigns based on the race taboo by the late 1960s. The definition of wokeness I use is therefore highly specific, referring to the sacralisation of historically marginalized race, sex and gender groups.

These sacred categories prompt the faithful to demonise oppressor groups and those seen to be profaning sacred totems – principally disadvantaged race, gender and sexuality groups. Wokeness should not be confused with phenomena that share a family resemblance on some dimensions, such as orthodoxies around covid-19, the NHS, free trade or climate change - these stem from similarly strongly-held views (many of which I endorse!), but lack the same power to assassinate character or generate outrage mobs howling for an individual’s professional scalp.

Figure 1.

The story begins with several building blocks. Christianity emphasises that each individual is worthy of compassion and respect, and that the weak and dispossessed must be cared for. Positive liberalism embraces the notion that individuals should strive to break free of constraints and prejudices imposed by groups, roles and traditions. Socialism was an offshoot of liberalism, and introduced the idea of equality of outcome. Anarchism, a version of socialism, emphasizes personal liberation and seeks to level power hierarchies.

Some of the above would command wide assent. However, as the logic of each idea unfolds through history, some innovators push their beliefs in the direction of extremism. When this occurs, humanism and liberalism spawn radical offshoots which produce negative social outcomes. As with many ideas, these forces are at their social optimum when the dial is set at around 5 out of 10. When enthusiasts twist the dial to 11, negative consequences soon follow. This is especially true when radicals are able to seize the minds of the most powerful people in society.

This chapter will argue that compassionate humanism, liberalism and socialism helped propel the West ahead, raise the condition of the least fortunate and greatly improve society. But when taken to an extreme, they have also produced baleful – even catastrophic - effects on our collective wellbeing. I would argue that the marginal return to left-modernism has declined substantially since the late 1960s, despite a few successes such as greater attention to overt sexual harassment in the workplace, moderate police reform or gay rights. Today, with the dial on cultural socialism turned to 11, it is doing considerably more harm than good.

Those of us growing up in western liberal societies have been taught about the excesses of right-wing movements, notably nationalism. Yet most westerners know little about the excesses of utopian socialism and liberalism. There is thus a bias against particularism in favour of universalist creeds even though systematic studies of genocide show that universalist creedal exclusivism is just as deadly as ethnic and racial exclusivism.[2]

The truth is that socialism and liberalism, while contributing much, have also repeatedly overreached throughout history. Unfortunately these lessons are either unknown or ignored. Our brains tend to remember facts when they are linked to images and stories that stir the emotions. This means that symbol and narrative are arguably more important than statistical patterns and logic in determining the success of an ideology.[3]

Can you name a movie about socialist atrocities and suffering that is as well-known as a film like Schindler’s List? A story about the Chinese cultural revolution with the cultural impact of To Kill a Mockingbird? George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the closest we have to a powerful story of the dangers of illiberal progressivism, but it lacks the sacralising punch that is carried by narratives highlighting the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism.

Evocative narratives and images fleshing out pointy-headed rationalist, liberal or nationalist critiques of left utopianism are unusual compared to the many which mainstream right-wing atrocities such as the Holocaust, trans-Atlantic Slave Trade or conquest of Native people. The fact westerners know so little about socialist genocides such as the Holodomor in Ukraine, liberal atrocities such as the Terror in France, or ethnic genocides and slave trades in non-western parts of the world, is because these have been ignored or downplayed by the left-liberal intellectuals and educators that have dominated the culture of the postwar West. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, the crimes of socialism are fresher, thus society is better inoculated against utopian movements drawing on equality rhetoric and techniques that recall the dark days behind the iron curtain.

Cultural Liberalism

At an earlier stage of history, the struggle for individual liberty and equal treatment largely overlapped. The normal political form prior to the English (1688), American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions was aristocratic rule by courts such as that of Louis XIV in France, backed up by a religious establishment. These revolutions, especially that of France, replaced hierarchical religio-aristocratic rule with liberal-egalitarian nation-states. In reality, the new nations had a long way to go before liberty and equal treatment were a reality. Non-property holders, religious minorities like Catholics in Britain, nonwhites, women and homosexuals only gradually acquired freedom and equal treatment through a process of political struggle.

In the battle for liberty and equality for cultural groups - religious, ethnic, gender and sexual – the driving force was liberalism. Socialism, an early nineteenth century offshoot of liberalism, took a back seat in these struggles or actively opposed them, and was almost entirely concerned with the material relations of society. Capitalists and workers, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, were its categories, with questions of ethnicity, religion, and to a lesser extent gender, occupying a peripheral sphere in which proponents of socialism held a variety of views. Furthermore, orthodox Marxism held that societies moved through stages, from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist and then to the highest stage, socialism. This meant that societies at earlier stages of evolution were considered too backward for socialist revolution. As a corollary, ethnic groups who immigrated from societies at earlier stages of development were deemed likely to delay the onset of the socialist stage. This meant that socialist attitudes to questions such as race, colonialism, immigration and eugenics were generally illiberal and inegalitarian until the middle decades of the twentieth century.

In what follows, I will largely but not exclusively consider American developments because many of the issues that are central to cultural socialism in the West today, notably race and multiculturalism, were important in nineteenth century America but only emerged in Europe after the mid-twentieth century.

Illiberal Socialists and Anti-Socialist Liberals

Prior to the left-liberal fusion of the present, socialism and liberalism ran along substantially different tracks. Liberals devoted considerable attention to equal rights for minorities while socialists generally focused on workers, economic redistribution and utopian revolution.

Radical liberal and socialist movements in America, much like religious cults such as Mormonism or Adventism, were founded in the early nineteenth century. Most set up as utopian communal experiments in what was a westward-moving rural society. A few utopians experimented with communal childrearing, free love and interracial relationships, while a numerous others ploughed ahead with implementing socialism.

Two broad strands are identifiable. First, radical liberal-anarchist movements such as Fourierism, which included the famous Brook Farm colony in Massachusetts where leading Transcendentalist (Romantic Individualist) writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson briefly resided. Another example is Frances Wright’s Nashoba colony in Tennessee that practiced inter-racial relations. These concentrated on personal and cultural liberation (and sometimes freedom from taxation) and were generally more interested in race and gender equality than the socialist communes.[4]  

Second were utopian socialist experiments such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana settlement concentrated on collective ownership and sharing the fruits of people’s labour. Both anarchist-liberal and utopian socialist experiments tended to focus on eliminating power hierarchies between those in authority and ordinary citizens. The anarchist goal of spontaneous harmony and community animated the radical liberals and many of the socialists.

The overwhelming majority of communes failed over time due to the excesses of their expressive-individualist and egalitarian philosophies. How so? First, human nature is too selfish to give up private property and the prioritization of our spouse and children over strangers. Forcing people to do so leads to free riding, jealousy and resentment. Second, communities which abolish formal hierarchy tend to descend into either chaos or authoritarian rule.[5] We learned the first lesson during the Cold War, but the second is only just dawning on us. We’ll revisit these examples of left-liberal overreach later.

Liberalism, Socialism and Race in Antebellum America

Since race and diversity are pivotal to the modern progressive temper, let me begin by examining how liberals and socialists approached this question.

Progress towards racial equality in America began with the anti-Slavery movement. Anti-Slavery consisted of a more pragmatic wing, represented by politicians such as Abraham Lincoln, and a marginal but intellectually-important wing known as the radical abolitionists. Radical abolitionists were often anarchist, opposing power hierarchies, which in many cases extended to decrying unequal gender relations in the traditional family. They thereby supported women’s equality and their right to vote.[6] They often backed a liberal immigration policy against the forces of restriction during the periods of heavy Irish immigration in the 1840s and 50s and again during the debate over Chinese immigration which resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. On this score, their concerns are highly modern and they are recognizable heirs to the civil rights and feminist movements of the twentieth century.

But radical abolitionists were often anti-socialist liberals. On the question of capitalism and private property, they typically supported the market. For instance, the leader of the American radical abolitionist movement, William Lloyd Garrison, had this to say about the new European buzzword of ‘wage slavery’ and oppressed workers: ‘I cannot feel any heartrending emotions…in contemplating the condition of a people [workers] who are not under despotic or dynastic sway...who enjoy the right to assemble, whenever or wherever they please, to seek redress for real or imaginary grievances, who are free to make their own contracts and sell or employ labor according to the law of supply and demand.’[7] As for the pragmatic abolitionists represented by Lincoln’s Republican Party, they backed both anti-Slavery and business interests as part of a free labour philosophy, remaining relatively hostile to unions and Irish immigrants.[8]

The economic left, by contrast, were often illiberal socialists who cared little about minority rights. The labour movement and the rising ranks of industrial workers in the growing towns and cities were generally conservative on racial equality. The Democratic Party was supported by Irish immigrant labourers in the North, who viewed their class privileges as threatened by blacks, and had backed southern slaveholder interests in the period leading up the Civil War. Unions like the Knights of Labour or American Federation of Labour were at the forefront of immigration restrictionist movements, be these against the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese in the 1880s or Southern and Eastern Europeans in the 1890-1925 period. Indeed, Denis Kearney’s, Workingmen’s Party, which campaigned for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act cutting off immigration from China, was considered the most important labour-based political movement to date.[9] During the Great Migration of blacks northward after 1920, northern unions feared the use of black labour to undercut white wages, evincing little interest in their plight.[10]

None of this means there was no humanitarianism on the left. A strand of romantic reformist socialism, with roots in utopian and Christian humanism, nourished mutualist and anarchist forms of socialism in the nineteenth century. Mentions of ‘humanitaire’ in French exploded between the 1830s and 1850.[11] This liberal socialism ran alongside a Christian socialism and syndicalism (union-led reformist socialism) which was more comfortable using state power to alleviate suffering and social problems. Christian and reformist socialists were often denounced by Marxists. As early as 1848, Marx and Engels lampooned ‘bourgeois’ reformers for propping up the capitalist state and forestalling revolution: ‘humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics [and] hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.’[12] This reformist left-liberal tradition, alongside aspects of Marxism, is one of the sources of today’s cultural socialism.

Despite Marx, reformist socialism, which was more acceptable to capitalists, carried the greater weight in western countries. By the late 1880s, a Christian socialist critique of the dominant laissez-faire ‘divine providence’ ethos was gaining the upper hand among American cultural elites. The new Progressive movement, centred on ‘Social Gospel’ Protestantism, believed that the inequality and ills of the modern industrial economy, especially the city, needed to be addressed with concrete social and policy intervention. Its reformist platform could be lifted, almost verbatim, from the ‘hole and corner’ bourgeois reformers satirized by Marx and Engels’ biting critique in the Communist Manifesto.

The Progressives’ egalitarianism, however, did not extend to race. To modern progressive eyes, this ‘blind spot’ of 1890s Social Gospel reformers is glaring. Writing in 1963, Thomas Gossett lamented: ‘Some of the most advanced thinkers among the clergymen of the time [turn of the century] betrayed a curious attitude toward race. At the worst, we find a tremendous blind spot in the sympathies of figures like Horace Bushnell, Theodore Parker, and Josiah Strong, who are justly renowned for their willingness to champion unpopular causes and to speak out for the weak and helpless…the fact that the Social Gospel did not produce even one opponent of Strong's racist ethic is significant. Whereas the Social Gospel ministers spoke out openly and fearlessly against other injustices of society, they said nothing with real meaning about racial justice.’[13]

In terms of membership, secular socialism had its American heyday at the turn of the twentieth century, when large-scale immigration from Catholic (and to a lesser extent Jewish) sources was in full swing. The two most prominent American socialists of the period were Socialist Party of America (SPA) leaders Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger. Writing in 1908, Hillquit opined that ‘The majority of American socialists side with the trade unions in their demand for the exclusion of workingmen of such races and nations as have not yet been drawn into the sphere of modern production, and who are incapable of assimilation with the workingmen of the country of their adoption, and of joining the organization and struggles of their class.’[14] Berger and other SPA socialists such as Jack London held to the predominant Social Darwinian, evolutionary, conception of Marxism that viewed minorities and women as likely to impede the emergence of the class consciousness needed to realise socialist revolution. In Mark Pittenger’s words, ‘American socialist thought before 1900 had no strong tradition of racial egalitarianism, as the cases of Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Fabian John Preston have shown, and the Socialist party's failure to appeal to blacks has been amply documented.’[15]

Unlike racial justice, support for women’s right to vote spanned both the anarchist-liberal and socialist camps. Of the two, the anarchist-liberal current, with its roots in radical abolitionism and Protestant Christian humanism, was more influential on the American mainstream. However, suffragettes, many of whom were well-educated Yankee Protestant women from upper-middle class backgrounds, often opposed the interests of minorities. Pioneering suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, were aghast when African-American men received the vote while white women did not. For Anthony, writing in 1873, ‘An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but surely this oligarchy of sex, which makes the men of every household sovereigns, masters; the women subjects, slaves…cannot be endured.’[16]

Frances Willard of the mass-member Women’s Christian Temperance Union brought anti-Catholicism, immigration restriction and women’s rights together into a common platform, calling for a ‘stringent immigration law prohibiting the influx into our land of more of the scum of the [mainly Southern and Eastern European] Old World.’ Many suffragettes felt that poorly-educated immigrants from less developed countries - who possessed the vote while they did not - imported patriarchal mores. These retarded the emergence of a forward-thinking gender-egalitarian society.[17] This was reflected in legislation of the early 1920s, which outlawed the sale of alcohol (disproportionately affecting Catholic immigrant groups) and gave women the vote (1920) and heavily curtailed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (1924).[18]

Meanwhile in Europe, socialists of the First (1864-1876) and Second (1889-1916) Internationals generally supported western imperialism. In subsequent decades, they often backed eugenicist ideas about selective breeding extending to sterilizing those deemed mentally unfit or racially inferior.  Sweden’s Social Democratic governments sterilized 60,000 people between the 1935 and 1976. Jonathan Freedland comments of British socialism that: ‘Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman, even, lamentably, the Manchester Guardian. Nearly every one of the left’s most cherished, iconic figures espoused views which today’s progressives would find repulsive.’ The desire to improve or remove the lower classes through measures spanning improved nutrition, greater use of contraception and the use of forced sterilisation animated leading British socialists as late as the 1930s.[19]

The Rise of Cultural Left-Liberalism

The radical abolitionist strand of anarchist liberalism spawned several important offshoots. Radical liberals such as Wendell Phillips backed crusades for black and women’s voting rights, for instance. Black men acquired the vote in 1870, though this could only practically be exercised in northern states. The anarchist-liberal tradition was connected to freethinking atheism, embodied in the Free Religious Association and Ethical Culture Society. Both supported the philosophy of Pluralism (not initially about ethnic diversity), a kind of proto-relativism which accepted that there were a diverse range of ethical systems which deserved respect. A critical step in the birth of today’s dominant ideology of left-modernism occurred as the Pluralist liberal tradition cross-fertilised with elite institutions of para-church Protestantism., notably the Federal Council of Churches (FCC, later WCC). In the first decade of the twentieth century, this produced two related movements, Liberal Progressivism and Ecumenism.

The linchpin holding together the social Christian reformers and anarchist liberals was a shared humanitarianism. Recall that Marx had, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, sneered at bourgeois Victorian reformers seeking laws to prevent cruelty to animals and improve the condition of children and workers. This liberal Christian humanism included both empathetic caring aspects and an enthusiasm for immigration restriction, temperance, Sunday closing, repressive sexual mores, and, later, eugenics. Over time what occurred is that the Victorian ideas rooted in the communitarian moral foundations of purity (i.e. over sex or alcohol), respect for authority (i.e. religious precepts) and group loyalty (WASP and national identity) fell away, leaving only the egalitarian, care/harm and liberty foundations. That is, morality became limited to what Haidt terms ‘individualizing’ moral foundations, with the ‘binding’ communitarian moral foundations losing force.[20]

Consider that the highest body in American Protestantism, the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), had, by the 1930s, lost interest first in sabbath desecration and temperance, then in overseas missions. Its advocacy for open immigration and ethnic and religious toleration dated from the 1910s, but with the demise of its other moral foundations, these increasingly came to define the totality of what mainline Protestant morality was about.[21]

The anarchist liberals adopted egalitarianism from the Progressives while the successors to the Victorian Progressives (who were egalitarian humanists) dropped their religion and nationalism and came, early in the twentieth century, to embrace expressive individualism. This secularisation and individualisation of public morality represents a stripped-down ethic, concentrating the zone of sacredness only on care/harm and equality, a much narrower set of values than had previously been held sacrosanct.

The Liberal Progressives represent the first flowering of this minimalist egalitarian-humanist moralism. A largely secular movement, its key figures were social entrepreneur Jane Addams and philosopher John Dewey. They synthesised ideas from liberal romantic socialists such as William Morris and John Ruskin and Pluralists like William James, applying this to the multicultural conditions they found in East Coast immigration gateway cities. They fused aspects of liberalism, humanism and socialism together, embracing an empathy for ethnicity and gender as well as class. Their movement linked the Social Gospel’s left-wing emphasis on social reform, humanitarianism and the poor with anarchist-liberalism’s penchant for cosmopolitanism and equal rights for minorities. This opened the door for socialism and liberalism to infuse each other along a cultural plane. The Progressive outlook of the 1890s would confound a 2020s progressive but the Liberal Progressive worldview of 1905 is almost completely modern.

The physical nexus for Liberal Progressive activities was the Settlement House, a Victorian educational philanthropic movement which began in Britain in 1884 at London’s Toynbee Hall. Settlements typically brought university-educated elite Victorians into contact with the urban poor where volunteers engaged in educational and cultural activities. Though founded by an Anglican vicar, thee goal was not to proseltyise, but for elite educators to learn and receive as much as to give instruction.[22]

In major US cities, this encounter involved volunteers from mainly New England WASP backgrounds interacting with largely Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. By 1910, there were over 400 Settlement houses in the United States.

At the sprawling Hull House in Chicago, Jane Addams, lionised as a ‘saint’ in the media, emphasised the need to cherish immigrant customs and cushion those of foreign background from the shock of their new society. A ‘Labour Museum’ featured immigrant arts and crafts. In a series of articles published between 1904 and 1912, Addams called for a new internationalist American nationhood forged from the cross-cultural understandings nurtured in polyglot Hull House. This model of cooperation was to provide a beacon for world peace. However she also considered educated WASPs to be a ‘better element’ that needed to guide the newcomers toward a humane form of assimilation into the new cosmopolitan version of America.[23]

The new Americanism was to be based on equal cultural contributions from all ethnic groups and two-way interaction between immigrants and the host society, rather than the one-way ‘100 Per Cent’ Anglo-Americanisation being promoted by the government, schools and media at the time. Pluralist philosopher John Dewey drew inspiration from Addams, developing a proto-multiculturalist conception of the nation in which ‘neither Englandism nor New Englandism’ would furnish more than one note in the ‘vast symphony’ of America.[24] This despite the fact the country’s population at the time was just over half Anglo-Protestant in ancestry.

The Liberal Progressives came to greatly influence the ecumenical movement in American mainline Protestantism. Between 1905 and 1910, the FCC, the institutional embodiment of trans-denominational Protestantism, turned away from Progressive concerns with immigrants, ‘the saloon’ and anti-Catholicism, toward Liberal Progressivism’s cosmopolitan humanism. Instead of conceiving of ecumenism as a way to bridge different Protestant denominations to unite against the threat of Catholicism, the new FCC envisioned ecumenism as transcending Protestantism entirely to reach out to Catholics, Orthodox and others. This was an epochal transformation in American Protestantism.

The new ecumenical spirit gave birth to the emerging Interfaith and Goodwill movements which de-centred Protestantism in favour of a tripartite Protestant-Catholic-Jewish construct, beginning with the interfaith chaplaincy of the American army during World War I. These ecumenical initiatives, as well as those promoting the League of Nations and later United Nations, had entrée into the top levels of the East Coast WASP establishment, breaking bread in leading resorts like Mount Deseret Island, Maine.[25]

 Reflecting the relativist thrust of Pluralism, mainline Protestant overseas missionary activity, which had once been a mass effort, declined after World War I. Mainline Protestant elites came to question ideas of western superiority and the morality of converting foreigners to Christianity, sapping the will to proselytise. As a result of this left-liberal influence in mainline Protestantism, fundamentalist Protestants seceded from the FCC, taking up the reigns of the missionary activity abandoned by the liberal denominations.[26]

Liberal Progressivism and mainline Protestant ecumenism combined a left-wing approach to class issues with a progressive outlook on ethnicity and gender (and, later, race) and a humanist-egalitarian conception of American nationhood. This fusion of socialist and liberal ideas created a left-liberal seedbed for cultural socialism. The common denominator was a moral-emotional outlook centred on liberal humanitarianism and openness to change. The new zeitgeist was rooted in empathy for the weak – whether defined in class, ethnic, religious or gender terms - and a new questioning of the established Anglo-Protestant ethnoreligious tradition.

At the same time, in the growing secular universities, a more humanistic egalitarian philosophy began to emerge, displacing evolutionary socialism. Figures like Franz Boas in anthropology, John Dewey and William James in philosophy and Robert Park in sociology broke with evolutionary thinking to propound a more relativist ‘blank slate’ view of human behaviour. This ‘New Social Science’ perspective drew on William James’ Pluralism to reject the Social Darwinian thinking that influenced Marxism and eugenics.

Boas, for instance, measured the craniums of American immigrants and their American-born progeny to argue that differences in skull size between Anglo-Americans and South or East Europeans were the result of the American environment, not heredity. The eugenicists’ contention that Southern and Eastern Europeans had smaller brains than Anglo-Americans was erroneous. Boas used his studies, in vain, to contest the 1911 Dillingham Commission report which claimed that new European immigrants from non-‘Nordic’ backgrounds were inferior and that immigration should therefore be controlled on the basis of national origin. Boas, of German-Jewish immigrant extraction, was able to empathise with the immigrants, extending the remit of humanitarianism to encompass them and to resist the eugenic ideas which were fashionable among both socialists and nationalists.[27]

New Social Science relativism began to infuse American socialism, drawing attention away from classical Marxist understandings of history and social change. A key transitional figure is William English Walling. After an ugly anti-black lynching and race riot in Springfield, Illinois in 1908 which saw 16 black people killed, Walling became a founder member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Walling was also an SPA member who was influenced by the Liberal Progressivism of New York’s University Settlement, where he served, as well as by the New Social Science ideas of Dewey and others. Walling decried the SPA’s immigration restrictionism and its minimal attempts to recruit blacks, calling this a right-wing plot to split the labour movement. Interestingly, Walling traced his ideas to French and American liberalism rather than to European Marxism. The SPA response to Walling’s intervention reveals the boundaries between socialist and liberal traditions in the early 1900s: his anti-racist ideas concerning ethnic and racial equality were denounced by the SPA as bourgeois concerns.[28]

From Left-Liberalism to Left-Modernism

Though rebuffed by the SPA, events would come to favour Walling’s humanitarian left-liberalism and that of the Liberal Progressives more generally. In the following decade, left-liberalism morphed into what I term ‘left-modernism,’ which is readily recognisable as the dominant ideology of western societies today. The ‘modernist’ side of the left-modernist equation heralded a newfound emphasis on anti-traditional aesthetics, which was grafted onto Liberal Progressivism’s left-liberal ethical system.

Daniel Bell describes modernism as an iconoclastic, ‘antinomian’ cultural sensibility that values the shock of the new over reflective contemplation of an artwork in the context of its interpretive tradition. Though there are collectivist forms – fascist and socialist art, for instance – modernism in the West has been closely tied to expressive individualism. This outlook in the arts began with post-impressionism in Europe in the 1880s, developing into a more avowedly abstract form in the 1900s. Modernism displaced the classical, romantic and vernacular traditions in western art, literature and music. Many of its practitioners were bohemian intellectuals who styled themselves a cultural avant-garde. They believed they possessed a more creative and advanced aesthetic sensibility than classical artists, to say nothing of the traditional middle and working classes. They disdained both the establishment and the traditional culture of the masses. At the heart of western modernism stood an expressive individualism that constantly sought out the new and different. For Bell, modernism gave rise to a wider ‘adversary culture’, or counterculture, among the avant-garde bohemians that would spread to the rest of society in the 1960s.[29]

Among the earliest expressions of left-modernism is the writing of Randolph Bourne, considered an avatar of the youth culture of his day. Like most of his coterie, Bourne sprang from a New England WASP background. However, unlike them, his face had been deformed by the improper use of forceps at birth and he suffered from a severe hunchback caused by a bout of spinal tuberculosis he contracted at the tender age of four. His outsider’s sensibility shaped his outlook on the world, expressed in a then-shocking 1911 essay on life as a disabled person.[30] Importantly, Bourne’s intellectual lineage is to the New Social Science and Liberal Progressivism: he was a student of Franz Boas and John Dewey at Columbia.

While the avant-garde in both Europe and America was firmly anti-bourgeois, the polyglot environment of the urban eastern seaboard gave American left-modernism a distinct flavour from the more ethnically homogeneous cities of Britain. For it was in the new bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village in diverse New York that young WASP writers began to actively repudiate their own ethnicity and tradition. What Roger Scruton terms the West’s ‘culture of repudiation’ - of its ancestry and culture - was born here, as the anti-bourgeois sensibility of western culture was turned against an ethnic majority tradition within a diversifying country.[31]

In a landmark essay entitled ‘Trans-National America,’ published in 1916, Bourne argued that the WASP tradition was ‘stale’ and ‘ingrowing’ while that of European immigrants was liberating and interesting. He urged his fellow Anglo-Protestant Americans to find the ‘cosmopolitan note’ and surmount their ‘tight little’ provincial society, while calling on immigrants not to assimilate lest they become ‘cultural half-breeds’ melted into the ‘indistinguishable dough’ of Anglo-Saxonism.[32]

Bourne’s essay majored in modernist more than leftist elements, concentrating on the apparently soulless and confining aspects of WASP culture and society. But there was also a more subdued left-wing critique in which Bourne called for an end to the Anglo-Protestant cultural domination of minority peoples and assailed WASP Americans’ attempt to assimilate newcomers into the Anglo melting pot. Bourne also urged America to give outsiders equal weight in fashioning the nation into a ‘cosmopolitan federation for international colonies’ (an idea pinched from Horace Kallen). His main thrust was liberation, linking him to previous waves of anarchist-liberals, but his defense of the downtrodden immigrant and calls for all groups to have equal cultural power is an early form of multiculturalism, which has become a mainstay of the cultural left.

Bourne is the first exponent of what I elsewhere term ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism,’ a belief system which values minority but not majority ethnicity, and has in my view become the dominant paradigm in western high culture.[33] His anti-WASPness prefigures the anti-whiteness of today’s cultural socialists. Bourne’s left-modernism is an important aspect of contemporary cultural socialism. Only the illiberal, therapeutic and ‘systemic’ pieces of the cultural socialist puzzle remained to be filled in. As Christopher Reardon correctly observed in the Guardian, ‘[Bourne’s] progressive politics would have made him a great millennial.’[34]

In New York’s Greenwich Village, a small clique of left-liberal intellectuals came to champion modernism. Their grand entrance was the pathbreaking Armory Show of modern art in 1913. The lifestyle of these ‘Young Intellectuals’ of Greenwich Village in the 1912-17 period included experimental theatre and poetry salons, going ‘up to Harlem’ to watch the new black jazz, ‘slumming’ in immigrant neighbourhoods and taking drugs. It found its voice in a number of journals, including Seven Arts, the Masses and the New Republic.[35]

The new left-modernist ideology crystallised in the 1910s. In the 1920s, the prohibition of alcohol, surge of anti-Catholicism, and enactment of immigration restriction led some American intellectuals to leave for Europe, creating a ‘Lost Generation.’ The tribulations of the conservative 1920s helped deepen the left-modernist sensibility. Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920) sold an astounding two million copies within a few years of its release, becoming a literary sensation. Its lead character, Carol Kennicott, bemoans the narrow WASP provincialism of her midwestern town, echoing the notes first played by Bourne a few years earlier, describing the (Anglo) townsfolk of the fictional midwestern town of Gopher Prairie as people of "standardized background…scornful of the living…A savourless people, gulping tasteless food…and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."[36]

H. L. Mencken, an atheist-libertarian (and Kaiser sympathizer) of German descent let his ethnic resentment loose in a 1923 piece, where he raised the anti-WASP volume to a new level: ‘ “The Anglo-Saxon American[‘s] is a history of… blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him… The normal American of the ‘pure-blooded’ majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar [ethnic minorities] under the bed… His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of esthetic feeling…Educate him… and he still remains palpably third-rate.’[37] Though Mencken’s words are those of the outsider rather than the self-hating insider, his prose fell on fertile oikophobic soil that had been deposited by self-repudiating WASPs like Bourne and Lewis.

Tensions Between Materialist Socialism and Cultural Left-Modernism

The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia altered the landscape of socialism, giving rise to the Third International. In contrast to the First and Second Internationals, Moscow-led socialism was anti-imperialist and internationalist. By the early 1930s, many western intellectuals came to be attracted to the Soviet Union, looking to its state socialism as a utopian example that would herald a new age. However, the tension between liberalism’s emphasis on equal treatment for identity groups and socialism’s focus on class struggle rose to the surface among the ‘lyrical left’ bohemians of Greenwich Village. For Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, their individualist ‘bourgeois hearts’ were in constant tension with their ‘socialist heads.’ Dell confessed that his unconscious was drawn to sensuousness and luxury, viewing the class struggle as arid, materialistic and mundane. Even John Reed, a dedicated communist who participated in the Russian Revolution, told Eastman that ‘this class struggle plays hell with your poetry.’ Tensions between cultural left-modernism and materialist socialism, that is, between art and politics, were significant.[38] Cultural socialism, dating from the mid-1960s, can be seen as a successful solution to this conundrum of uniting art and politics, emotion and ethics, the personal and the political.

By the early 1930s, the children of the substantial Jewish wave of immigration to New York (as well as descendants of mid-nineteenth century German Jewish immigrants) had begun to blend with the Anglo-Saxon Village radicals to form an influential new movement known as the New York Intellectuals. This avant-garde, coalescing around journals such as Partisan Review, the Nation and the New Republic, was torn between its political commitment to socialism and its aesthetic modernism. During the Great Depression of 1929-33, the Soviet Union’s comparatively better economic performance compared to the West enticed many New York Intellectuals (despite the reality of Stalin’s genocide in Ukraine).

Yet for the left-modernist avant-garde, the romance proved short-lived. In 1936, news of Stalin’s Show Trials and purges reached the West, leading to disgust, especially among many Jewish-American intellectuals in the rising Partisan Review circle. So much so such that, by 1937, Partisan Review broke from the American Communist Party. While the Soviet Union was initially receptive to modern art and artistic experimentation, this commitment began to wane as the USSR sought out an art form that would appeal to the masses and legitimate the state. In 1938 the USSR enshrined socialist realism as the official aesthetic and banned artistic experimentation. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 sealed the estrangement between western left-modernism and Soviet communism. Behind the split lay a fundamental divide between the left-modernists’ cosmopolitan-individualist ethos and the coercive, collectivist and materialist dictates of state socialism.[39]

Anti-Fascist Cancel Culture

The New York Intellectuals’ break with communism reinforced their support for American left-modernist cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the fascist menace engaged most of their energy. While opposing the Nazis and Mussolini as war clouds are looming on the horizon is perfectly understandable, the Partisan Review circle began to overreach, accusing liberal-nationalist American artists working with vernacular American motifs of fascism.

In the 1930s, realist ‘American Scene’ artists like Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and Steuart Curry drew inspiration from the American landscape, national history and rural folk culture to found a new Regionalist art movement. Regionalism was avowedly provincial and rural where modernism was based in the large cities. While modern art had only limited penetration into the American consciousness of the time, Regionalism proved highly popular. Regionalist art and murals came to be strongly supported by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and featured widely in Time and Life magazines as well as in the popular Associated American Artists' series of lithographs.[40]

The left-modernist New York Intellectuals had witnessed Hitler ban abstract art as degenerate and Stalin end artistic experimentation in favour of socialist realism. In addition, many New York left-modernists were Jewish. In this context, it is not surprising that they were suspicious of romantic nationalist themes. Indeed, by the late 1930s, the left-modernists were assailing Regionalism as reactionary and fascist. Thomas Hart Benton was already a dissident in the left-modernist art world of the early 1930s. In 1937, Meyer Shapiro, a Jewish member of the Partisan Review clique, castigated Benton’s ‘unhistorical elevation of the folk [and] his antagonism to the cities’ and questioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s colleague Baker Brownell’s ‘Nazi enthusiasm and vagueness about the folk.’ Foreshadowing contemporary callout culture, with its accusations of ‘dogwhistling,’ Shapiro asserted, ‘we have good reason to doubt [Benton’s] professed liberalism.’ Stuart Davis, a WASP left-modernist, went further, accusing Benton of fascism and racism.[41] After World War II, Regionalism lost influence and a number of its practitioners, including Jackson Pollock, abandoned it for modernism, the undisputed dominant aesthetic of the postwar era.

Accusing liberal nationalist Americans of fascism and racism and questioning their liberal bona fides may be understandable in the context of the late 1930s, but it transposed the intellectually dishonest ‘cancel culture’ of socialism (labelling someone ‘bourgeois’ smeared their reputation without having to engage with their arguments) to the cultural sphere. By the late 1930s, therefore, many of the features of cultural socialism – anti-whiteness, cancel culture, asymmetrical multiculturalism and the belief in the superiority of urban diversity – were in place. In sections of the high culture, the shift from the 1910s negative liberal equal treatment of minorities had shape-shifted into an intolerant positive liberalism which viewed urban diversity and cosmopolitanism as superior to a retrograde majority tradition. Political candidates were not above wielding this new tool for selected audiences, as with Democratic presidential candidate Harry Truman accusing his opponent Thomas Dewey of being a fascist whose GOP congressmen were instigating a campaign of Nazi-style hatred against ‘Catholics, Jews, Negroes and other minority races and religions.’ While his diverse Chicago audience may not have been nationally representative, Truman’s use of this smear echoed the proto-cancel culture rhetoric of some New York Intellectuals.[42]

Intellectuals Shift to the Liberal Left

The exact moment when liberals and the left took over intellectual life is in some dispute. Daniel Bell, a New York Intellectual who came to intellectual maturity in the 1930s, using western Europe as his canvas, argues that ‘in the first four decades of the twentieth century, intellectual life in most European countries was usually dominated not by the Left but by the Right.’ Right-wing intellectuals shared an anti-bourgeois orientation with their leftist colleagues, but did so from the stance of romantic nationalism, religious anti-materialism, the machine aesthetic or aristocratic traditionalism. ‘In the Anglo-American world there was Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and the notable school of “Southern Agrarians”. ‘ In other European countries, Catholic, fascist, elitist and romantic nationalist currents were prominent. Only after the war do we find the ’collapse of any major right-wing, reactionary, or protofascist influence in the intellectual community.’[43]

Bell arguably overstates the intellectual dominance of the right in the interwar period – at least in numerical terms. By the 1910s, modernism in art was often, though not always, aligned with utopian leftist ideology. While there was a right-wing version of modernism in the work of Ezra Pound and the Futurists, who developed fascist art in Italy, the period after World War I witnessed a growing connection between left-wing politics and cultural modernism in both Europe and the United States. Interwar artistic movements such as surrealism, dada and cubism, for instance, all leaned to the political left, with many embracing communism.[44]

Others argue that the shift, even in the Anglo-American world, came with World War I. In western Europe, an important post-World War I development was the decline of intellectual nationalism. Prior to World War I, many intellectuals were openly patriotic, especially historians. The slaughter of 1914-18 led to a major rethink, an understandable response. In Britain, historians of the anti-imperialist Union of Democratic Control (UDC) found a ready audience for their left-liberal output after the Great War. Works by these anti-nationalist historians, according to Paul Kennedy, were ‘widely read and accepted almost completely in the English and American universities’. The anti-nationalist approach was also promoted by pan-European and League of Nations societies which enrolled hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic members in the interwar period. In Britain, the League of Nations Union promoted UDC texts for use in schools between the wars.[45] As a result, George Orwell would remark in 1941 that ‘It should be noted that there is now no [English] intelligentsia that is not in some sense “Left”,’ a process Orwell argued was complete by around 1930.[46]

In the 1940s and 50s, left-liberal ideas and modernist aesthetics began to achieve wider penetration in government and society. In the US, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union, had begun to shift in a less nationalistic, left-liberal direction under the influence of John Dewey in the 1920s. In the 1930s, the NEA oversaw the steady replacement of texts like David Saville Muzzey’s American History (1911), which privileged the contributions of ‘colonial stock’ (WASP) Americans, with Liberal Progressive-influenced works such as Harold Rugg’s An Introduction to Problems of American Culture (1930).[47] From the 1950s, textbooks featuring European immigrant contributions and the (post-1930s) reinterpretation of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon to immigrants had become common, even though inclusion in the historical narrative did not yet extend to nonwhites.[48] On the policy front, Harry Truman and other liberal Democrats pushed for a dismantling of the national quota-based immigration law of 1924. Though unsuccessful in 1952, they managed, by 1953, to secure support for partially circumventing the quotas, which would soon permit large numbers of Hungarian and Cuban anti-communist refugees to arrive.[49]

More intellectuals began to write about the problem of American race relations in the 1940s and 50s, and the first Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions (EEOCs) were established in northern states to combat racial discrimination in employment.[50] President Truman lifted the bar on Chinese immigration in 1946 and ended racial segregation in the American military in 1948. The movement for black civil rights soon began in the South when Rosa Parks refused to make room for a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. As we’ll see in the next chapter, there was a gradual shift in public opinion on race taking place in the 1940s and 50s.

While these developments were consonant with negative liberalism, a more coercive positive liberalism was at work on the modernist left. There the anti-WASP countercultural tradition continued to flourish. Left-modernist writers such as the Beatniks or Norman Mailer in his White Negro (1957) poured scorn on ‘square’ white middle America which they contrasted unfavourably with what they saw as hip, urban, jazz-dancing black America.

The left-modernist sensibility of the 1950s was not, however, fully coterminous with today’s cultural left. Mailer was a macho male chauvinist, and aesthetic liberation prevailed over finger-wagging moralism. Even homosexuality for the Beats was about liberation rather than victimhood and oppression. Cultural appropriation, even exoticism and primitivism, continued to be de rigeur. The brief upsurge of anti-fascist cancel culture in the late 1930s proved redundant after the war since left-modernism had thoroughly vanquished romantic conservatives such as the Regionalists and Southern Agrarians. Left-modernists’ take on politics was pro-civil rights, but remained within the ambit of negative liberalism, supplemented by support for the social democracy of the New Deal. White guilt and theories of systemic racism or patriarchy had yet to take root - even as 1950s left-wing intellectuals embodied the reflexive anti-WASP culture of repudiation of their Young Intellectual and New York Intellectual forbears.

[1] For the canonical book on modernism as a cultural movement, see Bell, Daniel. (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York, Harper Collins.

[2] Harff, B. (2003). "No lessons learned from the Holocaust? Assessing risks of genocide and political mass murder since 1955." American Political Science Review 97(1): 57-73.

[3] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[4] Johnpoll, B. K. and L. Johnpoll (1981). The Impossible Dream: a Century and a Half of the American Left. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, pp. 34-6, 80-97.

[5] Ellis, R. J. (1998). The dark side of the left: Illiberal egalitarianism in America, University Press of Kansas.; Sosis, R. and E. R. Bressler (2003). "Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion." Cross-Cultural Research 37(2): 211-239.

[6] Ibid., p. 19

[7] Garrison, William Lloyd. [1868-79] 1981. The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. VI: To Rouse the Slumbering Land, 1868-1879, edited by Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press), p. 389.

[8] Foner, E. (1970). Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York, Oxford University Press.

[9] Gyory, A. (1998). Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press.

[10] Lantz, H. R. (1958). The People of Coal Town, with the assistance of J. S. McCrary. New York, Columbia University Press.

[11] Andrews, N. J. (2020). "the romantic socialist origins of humanitarianism." Modern Intellectual History 17(3): 737-768.

[12] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones

(New York, 2002), 252.

[13] Gossett, T. F. (1963). Race, The History of an Idea in America. Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press, pp. 196-197.

[14] Laslett, J. H. and S. M. Lipset (1974). Failure of a dream?: essays in the history of American socialism, University of California Press, p. 251.

[15] Pittenger, M. (1993). American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 179.

[16] Wikipedia entry for Susan B. Anthony, accessed July 25, 2022.

[17] Knobel, D. T. (1996). 'America for Americans': The Nativist Movement in the United States. New York, NY, Twayne, p. 211

[18] Gusfield, J. R. (1963). Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.

[19] Freedland, Jonathan, ‘Eugenics and the master race of the left,’ Guardian, 30 August, 1997

[20] Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, Vintage.

[21] Kaufmann, E. (2004). The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, ch. 6.

[22] Macartney, Anne (1984). Toynbee Hall: the first hundred years. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

[23] Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, p. 102

[24] Ibid., p. 102

[25] Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, ch. 6; Kraut, B. (1989). A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics, and the Protestant Goodwill Movement. Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960. W. R. Hutchison. Cambridge & New York, Cambridge University Press: 193 - 230.

[26] Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, ch. 6.

[27] Hyatt, M. (1990). Franz Boas: Social Activist. New York and Westport, CT, Greenwood Press.

[28] Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, pp. 178-85, 244; Hyatt, Franz Boas, p. 110.

[29] Bell, D. (1996 [1976]). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York, Harper Collins.

[30] Reardon, ‘Randolph Bourne's 1911 essay on disability shocked society. But what's changed since?,’ Guardian, 9 January, 2018eardon, ‘Randolph Bourne's 1911 essay on disability shocked society’

[31] Scruton, R. (2014). How to be a conservative, A&C Black, p. 140.

[32] Bourne, R., ‘Trans-National America,’ Atlantic, July 1916

[33] Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, p. 293; Bourne borrowed this term from Jewish-American writer Horace Kallen, but, unlike Kallen, singled out the WASPs for criticism and implicitly excluded them from being considered as an ethnic group worth preserving.

[34] Reardon, ‘Randolph Bourne's 1911 essay on disability shocked society’.

[35] Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, ch. 7

[36] Lewis, S. ([1920] 1994). Main Street, with an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury. London, Vintage, p. 247.

[37] Mencken, H.L., ‘The Anglo-Saxon’, Cosimo 1933 [1923]

[38] Aarons, D. (1961). Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 50, 57; Fishbein, L. (1982). Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911-1917. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, pp. 197, 201, 203.

[39] Cooney, T. A. (1986). The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 595-6.

[40] Doss, E. (1991). Benton, Pollock and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, pp. 156-62, 170-75.

[41] Ibid., pp. 118-25.

[42] Leviero, Anthony, ‘President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascists' Tool,’ New York Times, October 25, 1948.

[43] Bell, D. (1980). The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960-1980. Cambridge, MA, ABT Books, pp. 148-9.

[44] Shapiro, T. (1976). Painters and Politics: The European Avant-Garde and Society, 1900-1925. New York, Elsevier Scientific; Egbert, D. D. (1967). "The Idea of “Avant-garde” in Art and Politics." The American Historical Review 73(2), pp. 359-60

[45] Kennedy, P. M. (1977). "The Decline of Nationalistic History in the West, 1900-1970." Journal of Contemporary History 8, p. 92; Pegg, C. H. (1983). Evolution of the European idea, 1914-1932. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, pp. 5, 8-10, 42, 93.

[46] Orwell, G. (2018). The lion and the unicorn: Socialism and the English genius, Penguin UK.

[47] O’Leary, C. E. (2001). To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, pp. 162, 177.

[48] FitzGerald, F. (1979). America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century. Boston & Toronto, Little, Brown & Company, pp. 79-82, 175.

[49] Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, p. 184.

[50] Gerstle, G. (2001). American Crucible. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, p. 1070.