"Furthermore, it is significant that the marked characteristics of this race are being here emphasized most"
About this Quote
The line condenses Josiah Strong's larger argument that the United States served as a providential crucible for the Anglo-Saxon people. By calling it significant that the marked characteristics of this race are emphasized here, he points to the way American conditions sharpened traits he prized: individualism, self-government, entrepreneurial energy, and Protestant missionary zeal. The vast frontier, democratic institutions, a dynamic market economy, voluntary churches, and public education all, in his view, magnified those qualities and prepared a people fit to lead modern civilization.
Strong wrote in the 1880s, when industrialization, immigration, and urbanization were unsettling older cultural certainties. He belonged to the Social Gospel movement, urging Protestants to address social ills, but he coupled reformist concern with a racialized teleology: history was selecting, refining, and positioning the Anglo-Saxon for a world mission. That mission, as he framed it, was to civilize and Christianize, and he treated America's accentuation of racial traits as evidence of divine intention. The sentence functions as a hinge in that logic: if the best features of the race are most vivid in America, then America must be the chosen instrument for global uplift.
Today the language of race and the essentialist assumptions behind it stand out sharply. Strong drew on the era's social Darwinism and scientific racism, envisioning a competition of races with an Anglo-Saxon destiny. His rhetoric helped sacralize expansionist policies, from overseas missions to imperial ventures after the Spanish-American War, and it buttressed assimilationist projects at home. Yet the same moral urgency that fueled activism for temperance, education, and labor reform also intertwined with a hierarchical worldview that excluded and subordinated others.
The sentence thus captures both the confidence and the blind spots of Gilded Age Protestant nationalism: an earnest belief in moral progress and civic duty merged with a conviction that one people, shaped by American life, had a special right to define and direct the future.
Strong wrote in the 1880s, when industrialization, immigration, and urbanization were unsettling older cultural certainties. He belonged to the Social Gospel movement, urging Protestants to address social ills, but he coupled reformist concern with a racialized teleology: history was selecting, refining, and positioning the Anglo-Saxon for a world mission. That mission, as he framed it, was to civilize and Christianize, and he treated America's accentuation of racial traits as evidence of divine intention. The sentence functions as a hinge in that logic: if the best features of the race are most vivid in America, then America must be the chosen instrument for global uplift.
Today the language of race and the essentialist assumptions behind it stand out sharply. Strong drew on the era's social Darwinism and scientific racism, envisioning a competition of races with an Anglo-Saxon destiny. His rhetoric helped sacralize expansionist policies, from overseas missions to imperial ventures after the Spanish-American War, and it buttressed assimilationist projects at home. Yet the same moral urgency that fueled activism for temperance, education, and labor reform also intertwined with a hierarchical worldview that excluded and subordinated others.
The sentence thus captures both the confidence and the blind spots of Gilded Age Protestant nationalism: an earnest belief in moral progress and civic duty merged with a conviction that one people, shaped by American life, had a special right to define and direct the future.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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