The US "Culture Wars" and the Anglo-American Special Relationship

Abstract

The notion that Americans and Britons were united in racial brotherhood also begs the question why the United States did not immediately rally to the Allied cause in the First World War. David Haglund attempts to solve this riddle in his recent book, The US “Culture Wars” and the Anglo-American Special Relationship. According to Haglund, the Anglophobic reaction of Irish and German Americans to the outbreak of the war unintentionally roused the larger population to reappropriate their British heritage and identity and mobilise in support of US military intervention. As he concludes, Americans descended from England overcame ‘their own political prejudices against the mother country, thereby opening a path for fundamental transformation, eventually, in the Anglo-American relationship’. This is a persuasive claim although one that needs further empirical evidence than Haglund’s heavily theoretical analysis offers.