At the turn of the last century, when the United States was emerging as the world’s most dynamic and successful power, many of America’s premier intellectuals were profoundly pessimistic. Although their young, vibrant, industrializing country was growing up all around them, they were convinced that “Anglo-Saxon civilization” was in an advanced state of pervasive and perhaps irreversible decline. Brooks Adams’s bestseller, The Law of Civilization and Decay, argued that the explosion of liberal capitalism in fin-de-siecle America represented the penultimate “economic” stage of a civilization’s development — a phase in which the creative spirit and ” barbarian” martial virtues that had brought success in the past gradually gave way to an “effete” stagnation, a loss of productive energy leading to a final stage of rot and destruction.
Adams’s pessimism combined in equal measure a fear of the rising strength of other cultures and a deep insecurity about his own, an insecurity that bordered on self-loathing. This view was shared in varying degrees by Adams’s brother Henry and influential political friends like Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, and Henry Cabot Lodge. They worried that other “civilizations” — perhaps “the Slavs” — in a less advanced stage of development might retain enough “barbarian” blood in their veins to allow them to conquer the world while an increasingly decadent America and Great Britain lost the will to resist.
