Michael J. Turner. Liberty and Liberticide

“We owe a great deal to the free and independent United States of America,” wrote George Julian Harney, formerly a distinguished Chartist leader, in the English radical Newcastle Weekly Chronicle (May 19, 1894). “Though purged of the curse of Slavery, in no other respect has the country commonly called America been reformed or purified; on the contrary,” Harney declared, it exhibited “such a system of corruption, political and social, as can be found nowhere else on the face of the earth.” America's baleful influence, he believed, was evident in Britain's deeply flawed democratic politics, specifically “the caucus,” “the political machine,” and the unscrupulous politicians running it, as well as in “the new journalism ... and its base pandering to our love of scandal and a morbid sensationalism.” Michael J. Turner does not consider Harney in his book Liberty and Liberticide: The Role of America in Nineteenth-Century British Radicalism (oddly, for from 1863 to 1888 this most internationalist of Chartists had lived in Massachusetts, working as a clerk in the State House). But Turner's canvas is a broad one, extending from Britons who acclaimed the Declaration of Independence to those whose faith in American reform movements was tested by the “mugwumps” in the 1880s and 1890s. The result is the most detailed and nuanced account of British radicals' attitudes toward America in the period that we have.

Caucus · Economic history · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies