Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 32

MODERN AGE

FALL 2015

scholarship. Their efforts include pioneering works of American
historiography, such as the essays in Anglo-Saxon law that Henry
Cabot Lodge submitted for the first PhD in history conferred by
Harvard.
But these studies have not aged well, however impressive they
were at the time. Among others flaws, they tend to overestimate
the democratic and individualistic character of Germanic institutions. According to more recent authorities, the Germans were
actually ruled by a kind of military aristocracy that relied on peasants to till the land. In this respect, their culture was more continuous with feudalism than Whigs supposed-a point prefigured by
Montesquieu's famous assertion that limited monarchy was born
in the German forests.
The appeal of the Gothic thesis was also reduced by twentieth-century political considerations. Some of these were contingent and even ridiculous. In particular, the First World War
made unpopular anything that sounded remotely Teutonic. The
era of "liberty cabbage" was unfavorable to ostensibly German
freedom.
Yet the thesis's association with racialism posed a more serious
problem. From the very outset it implied that a considerable portion of the American population was unfit for self-government.
That did not deter Brahmin intellectuals such as Brooks Adams,
but it was a problem for democratic politicians. That's why erstwhile advocates of the Gothic thesis such as Lodge and Theodore
Roosevelt eventually dropped it in favor of a rhetoric of assimilation, at least in their public statements.
By the 1930s, moreover, reference to the Teutonic past or
Tacitus was unavoidably linked to the racial theories of the Third
Reich. When the United States entered the war, the liberty for
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Modern Age - Fall 2015

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