The Americans

One author describes the desire of Americans in the late 19th Century to emulate English aristocrats, or how they envisiined European aristocrats.

The effects were often striking. In the early 1890's a well-meaning group of Anglophiles called the American Acclimatization Society thought it would be charming if the American fauna included all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. Their imported thrushes, chaffinches, nightingales and skylarks died out. Their starlings did not--hence the losing battle of many of today's cities against the noise and corrosive feces of flocks of millions of starlings and the near wiping out of several species of native birds whose nesting places starlings take over. A few years earlier the Reverend Endicott Peabody, whose strongly Yankee name belied his education in England, had founded in a Massachusetts township (once wiped out by King Philip's Indians) the famous Groton School patterned as closely as his zeal could manage on the aristocratic public schools of England, cold baths and all. He had recently been ministering to the heathen of Tombstone, Arizona, in its most carefree phase. Even so the reaction seems excessive and had anomalous consequences on his manly young pupils' habits of speech and, because of Groton's instills high prestige, on the atmosphere of the most fashionable Northeastern private preparatory schools for boys. That sort of tutelage was limited of course, to the few whose parents could afford-and whose social status justified admission to-such privileges. Almost immediately however, the scope of Anglicization was immensely widened by the publication in St. Nicholas Magazine (already solidly acknowledged the proper reading for the Quality's children) and then in book form of Little Lord Fauntleroy.