Twisting the Lion's Tail: American Anglophobia between the World Wars

In 1918, Anglophobia, a permanent fixture of the nineteenth-century American cultural landscape, made a stunning reappearance in American political discourse. Anti-British invective, whether directed against the empire, the monarchy, the aristocracy, or even against Americans suspected of harboring pro-English sympathies, would remain an important determinant of U.S. foreign policy well into the 1940s.

In Twisting the Lion's Tail, John E. Moser roots out the causes and consequences of this resurgent distrust of "perfidious Albion." Through rigorous analysis, Moser shows that twentieth-century American Anglophobia outstrips the two causes which are usually called upon to explain it–isolationist tendencies and the Anglophobia of recent immigrants to the U.S. In addition to these traditional explanations, Moser finds an Anglophobia running far deeper through American culture, rooted in the American national mythology, which continued to cast the British monarchy and empire as antithetical to the ideals of liberty and equality. Twisting the Lion's Tail follows the trajectory of American Anglophobia up to the emerging Cold War–when only the global challenge of Stalin's Soviet Union could persuade most Americans that a long-term association with Great Britain was necessary or even desirable.