Sample Student final exam answers 2016 (2016 final exam assignment) Part 1: Essays: dominant culture overview

LITR 4340     American Immigrant Literature (Model Assignments)

Chandler Barton

Rule, Britannia! The Rise of the Anglo-Saxons and their Cultural Hegemony of the West and the United States

          No other group of people has had quite the impact on world affairs in the modern age than the Anglo-Saxons: the original Germanic peoples that settled and eventually established domain over the British Isles, and at one point, over 23% of the world’s population at the height of the British Empire, the largest empire in human history. Through Great Britain’s various colonial expeditions, such modern states as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States of America have arisen as global powers in their own right, rivaling or even surpassing the influence and power of their mother-state.

The subsequent outgrowth and establishment of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominant culture has therefore become one of the most entrenched, prominent cultures in the west, and in many respects, the entire world. It is the legacy of the first English settlers of virgin America, along with the massive influx of other Britannic folk—Scotch-Irish, for instance—that has firmly planted and sustained the dominant culture in the United States, and served as the template with which all other immigrant cultures absorb, contribute and ultimately assimilate too.

          The forefathers and original permanent settlers of New England and the greater Atlantic coastline came with a variety of peculiar agendas and feelings, ranging from fleeing religious persecution in the case of the Puritans and Pilgrims, to the land-hungry middle English nobility establishing royal colonies and provinces in the name of George III. While the styles, manners, and look of the different “flavors” of WASPs varied depending on community or origin, the dominant culture that emerged from their amalgamation resulted in a distinct look and feel that set the precedent for what immigrants would assimilate too and minorities resist against. Such identifiers include inheriting “plain-style” dress from early Puritan and Pilgrim settlers that would morph and evolve into the business suit style, as well as plain manners of speech; bland, sturdy food originating as a necessity of subsistence by early settlers, becoming a hallmark of modern “Fast Food American” cuisine; rugged individuality, a trait of early pioneers, pathfinders, and frontiersmen becoming the staple trait of American civil identity; and so forth.

          It is often true that necessity breeds convention and ingenuity, and as our brief list shows, the nature and origins of the first English settlers set the “tone” with which dominant culture would eventually shape up to be in modern day America (and the greater Britannic-WASP world, for that matter.) In examining period literature from the 16^th to 17^th centuries originating from authors inside the communities of some of the original settlers, these identifying hallmarks of the dominant culture can be spotted. One of the most prominent works includes William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, a descriptive narrative tracing the origins of the Pilgrim-separatist Christian community in England, their migration to the Netherlands, and finally to settling in the United States. Bradford’s opening invocation of composing in “in a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things” (1.0), sets a straight-forward tone that reflects and reverberates throughout some components of what WASP culture would eventually develop into: a plain style in many different manners of expression.

It is also his retelling of the events and history of the Pilgrim community as it made its way towards America that set the tone for the religious framework of the United States—that is to say, while there is little doubt that America is a secular country and founded on secular lines, there is a discrete and tangible influence of the early religious communities’ beliefs on what would make up a part of American “civil religion” and conservative morality, no doubt a major carry-over from the Puritans and Pilgrims, and to a lesser extent, Anglican and other Calvinistic Protestant immigrants of later migration waves.

John Winthrop and the Puritans offer even more in the way of influence towards the development of American dominant culture. His sermon aboard the ship Arbella, A Model of Christian Charity, seeps heavily with religious connotation and regard, defining both the stringent Christian nature of the Puritan settlers, as well as establishing some noticeable motifs of American identity—exceptionalism and utopianism for instance—that would also develop and evolve into the modern dominant culture.

Both Bradford and Winthrop make heavy use of biblical allegory to parallel their communities with those of ancient Israel and Zion, branding their peoples with a distinction that explicitly links their evolution from an immigrant community to the dominant culture. With “divine blessings”, “providence” and “the guidance of God,” the Puritans and Pilgrims were endowed by their leaders with a sense of prominence and duty to establish themselves as distinct and quasi-superior peoples, and as such, would by their very nature reject any such notions of assimilation or adaptation; instead, as noted before, they would lay the foundation for the WASP-centric paradigm.

The influence of the first wave of settlements in America should not, however, downplay the contribution of later groups of English immigrants. The “Cavalier” migrants of mid-1600’s that followed added crucial components to the dominant culture. Amongst them, and perhaps the most infamous, is slavery and the attempt at eradication of the Native Americans of the continent, which is contrasted with their equally prominent but less diabolical contributions as support for education, establishment of proto-American governance and laws, and eventually the ideals that led to the founding of America as an independent state from Great Britain.

But while the Puritans and Pilgrims had definite sway over the early development of the American dominant culture, the British settlers brought with them significant qualities that facilitated the establishment of minority groups. As mentioned previously, it was the second wave of English that fostered the culture of plantations and slavery, as well as the attempts at subjugating and eradicating the Natives. Whilst the Puritans and Pilgrims were definitely not innocent in their ideological outlook on the Natives—Bradford devoting entire chapters of his narrative to describing the “savagery” and “godlessness” of their kind—it was the eventual arrival of the royal colonialists that put into effect the atrocities of African-American exploitation and expansion at the expense of the American Indian.

It can certainly be said that Bradford and Winthrop contributed and directly influenced the “divine ideal” of their peoples as “chosen by God”, marking them with a staunchly anti-assimilation attitude that morphed their communities from immigrants to the dominant culture, but it was the later waves of English that solidified and executed these ideological principles into a secular, expansionist and exploitative agenda. The influx of Scotch-Irish and the third wave of WASP[1] immigration would solidify the position of WASP culture as the definitive dominant culture of the United States, if nothing else, by boosting their sheer numbers towards the majority, completing the evolution of the WASP as an immigrant community to the predominant demographic.

By the era of the Scotch-Irish/Ulster Scots immigration, the shaping of “America” as an entity began to emerge; in fact, it is not unfair to say that this third wave of immigrants would come to dominate the sub-groupings of WASPs, due in part to their massive numbers. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution both were drafted and written by decedents of British-English landowners and Scotch-Irish immigrants. John Hancock, Robert Paine and even Janes Smith, all prominent architects of American independence, were believed to have been of Scotch-Irish stock[2].

While the different waves of WASP immigrants in their initial phases of arrival to America are very much distinct, it is only a short time later—in the span of a few generations after the Revolutionary War—that the lines between them begin to blur. By the late 1700’s, Puritan, Pilgrim, English, Scotch-Irish all started to converge and combine towards a proto-modern dominant culture that is observed today. This makes the attempt of the modern scholar to isolate and identify these groups nearly impossible from the 1800’s onwards. Only in some cases is there an opportunity to do so, as is the case with the Scotch-Irish communities of the Appalachian Mountains, where geography and historical circumstance have confined them to an area that promoted and facilitated a disconnection from the rest of the WASP dominant culture.

This disconnect becomes so observable, in fact, that author J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy gives a first-hand account of growing up and experiencing the culture, climate, and resultant difficulties of the Scotch-Irish Appalachian/Atlantic isolate group, one that is marred with economic instability, conflicting codes of morality and ethics, rampant deficiencies in public institutions (education, welfare) and all around digression. In fact, Vance’s narrative paints a landscape of magnificent historical irony, as his tale demonstrates the devolution of what was once considered to be a key, core component of the dominant WASP culture into one that is, for all intents and purposes, a minority one, exemplifying and demonstrating all the qualities that tend to be attributed to some African-American and Native-American communities: distrust of government, inclusive community-minded structures, concrete code of conduct and honor, and so forth.

Though Vance’s narrative demonstrates how a subset of a dominant culture can, through circumstance, become a people-isolate, the tendency for the WASP peoples in the modern age has been a development and progression towards a certain type of “invisibility” and “omniscience”, with their influence as the dominant culture taking a more background role. In this manner, in current times, the dominant culture interfaces with minority and immigrant groups on a much more passive level than that of previous centuries. Whereas it was typical for the dominance of the WASP to be projected onto immigrants and minorities, it has now become more of a subliminal influence, though this has not prevented the push-back and historic tensions between the dominant culture and minority groups.

A noticeable effect of this “WASP shift” from a preeminent motif of day-to-day American to a passive one is the way in which different groups, both immigrant and minority, interact with the dominant culture. Though the hostility and tension of minorities with American dominant culture remains fairly consistent, the immigrant experience has radically evolved from one of expedient, expected, and demanded capitulation into one of multicultural substance.

As early as the 19^th and 20^th centuries, immigrants from across the Old World flooded into the United States, bringing with them their unique cultures, languages, religions, and so forth. While traditionally it was the attitude of the dominant culture to exact immediate assimilation into the WASP environment, the shift started to take place where the balance moved more towards absorption and cultural mingling. What this phenomenon has produced—commonly described as the “melting pot” effect—is a WASP dominant culture that is sprinkled and tattered with influences ranging the world over, and even resulting in some overlap and intermingling with minority groups (Chuck Berry and Rock n’ Roll, anyone?). Such wonderful examples of later immigrant narratives showcasing this eventual movement towards a more multicultural landscape include Anzia Yezierska’s Soap and Water, a Polish Jew’s experience, and other “model minority” texts such as Gish Jen’s In the American Society. Even the New World immigrant narrative of assimilation and cultural diffusion—Gary Soto’s Like Mexicans comes to mind—gives a first-hand glimpse at this paradigm shift.

Ultimately, what one sees in all of these literature selections is the evolution of the American dominant culture and society, with its origins in the original waves of Puritan, Pilgrim, English and Scotch-Irish settlers, into a dominant culture that, while still distinctively WASP in tone and appearance, is more malleable to outside influence. All immigrants—almost universally—that arrive to the United States are faced with the prospect and near inevitability to assimilating to this dominant culture, but the nature and outlook of modern society has allowed for the contribution and exchange of cultural ideals that doesn’t just eliminate and replace immigrant customs, but chooses and accepts some while discarding others; a sort of “cultural natural section”, if you would. Even the relationship between the dominant culture and minorities has developed to the point of more mutual exchange and inclusion, with both African-American and Native-American influences finding themselves into the forefronts of the American way of life. In this sense, the WASP world has adapted—not just the United States, but virtually all of the current and former British dependencies—to a landscape of collective eminence. Though the backdrop of the western world definitely remains WASP-inspired, not just because of the English language, American culture, or media, its landscape is, and seems to be set, towards one of a multiethnic flavor.