[7] Historian Barbara Yorke, who specializes in the subject,[8] has similarly argued that the earlier self-governance oriented Anglo-Saxonism of Thomas Jefferson's era had by the mid-19th century developed into "a belief in racial superiority".
The theory supposed that American and British democracy and institutions had their roots in Teutonic peoples, and that Germanic tribes had spread this "germ" within their race from ancient Germany to England and on to North America.
Within the U.S., future president Woodrow Wilson, along with Albert Bushnell Hart and Herbert Baxter Adams were applying historical and social science in advocacy for Anglo-Saxonism through the theory.
[20] Edward Augustus Freeman, a leading Anglo-Saxonist of the era, promoted a larger Northern European identity, favorably comparing civilizational roots from "German forest" or "Scandinavian rock" with the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome.
[21] American scholar Mary Dockray-Miller expands on this concept to suggest that pre-World War I Anglo-Saxonism ideology helped establish the "primacy of northern European ancestry in United States culture at large".
[23] Amongst others, Goldwin Smith, a devout Anglo-Saxonist,[24] believed the Anglo-Saxon "race" included Lowland Scots and should not be exclusively defined by English ancestry within the context of the United Kingdom's greater empire.
[26] Historian Richard J. Finlay has suggested that the Scots National League, which campaigned for Scotland to separate from the United Kingdom, was a response or opposition to the history of "Anglo-Saxon teutonism" embedded in some Scottish culture.
[29] A persistent "Anglo-Saxonist" idea, Albert Venn Dicey believed in the creation of a shared citizenship between Britons and Americans, and the concept of cooperation, even federation, of those from the "Anglo-Saxon" race.