The “dean” of New York's music critics a century ago, Henry Krehbiel–born in Ann Arbor to German immigrant parents—was emblematic of a vibrant intellectual community that blended Germanic and American traits. As a dominant propagator of a distinctively wholesome American Wagnerism, he embodied both German Kunst and American meliorism. As a self-made critic, he combined weighty scholarly learning and prose with a nose for news and a popularizing bent. During World War I, the German enemy incited no more patriotic response than his. But Krehbiel was increasingly stranded in postwar America. A bearer of genteel culture, he retained his iron criterion of uplift; no such aesthetic anchor would stabilize art in times to come.

This essay focuses on an influential group of New England patrician intellectuals, including Henry Cabot Lodge, James K. Hosmer, and John Fiske. It argues that the New England backgrounds of these men informed their thinking about race, distinguishing them from their Anglo-Saxonist colleagues from other regions. Specifically, the Anglo-Saxonist triumphalism of the Brahmins was undercut by their anxieties about the fate of their race in New England, where they faced a number of daunting challenges. The result was the unique mixture of power and impotence, arrogance and despair, expansionism and defensiveness that distinguishes the Brahmins from other Anglo-Saxonists. The internal contradictions of the Brahmins are particularly evident in their commentary on immigration, an area where, because of their prestige and political influence, they wielded an outsize influence over federal policy.

The intellectual and cultural critic Randolph Bourne originated the concept of a “transnational America” in 1916. More than a mere label, “trans-national America” was the articulation of Bourne's visionary new form of pluralism. This article aims to rethink Bourne's transnationalism as a form of isolationist antiwar idealism, thus helping to bridge his writings on domestic reform and foreign policy. Further, it illuminates an important moment in the intellectual history of isolationism as it assumed a positive, pluralist cast. This analysis also opens new vistas onto the development of a wide-ranging liberal opposition to American entry into World War I. Bourne's potent pluralistic, cosmopolitan ideas and the actions he took—along with those of other antiwar activists, politicians, and thinkers—helped to set the ideological parameters for antiwar thought in the period from 1916 to 1918 as well as for later American dissent, particularly in wartime.