ABSTRACT
Liberals are smart enough to know that the culture wars represent the most important political battles. Throughout the twentieth century, American conservative intellectuals have long considered themselves an embattled minority, out of step with an ever-daunting "age of enormity". The debate over the ratification of the Constitution itself represented a high-water mark in the intellectual life of the United States. Critics of the era from Rutherford B. Hayes to Franklin Roosevelt point to both the Spanish-American War and Woodrow Wilson's insistence that the United States enter World War I as proof that America was not immune from imperial sentiments. When World War I broke out in 1914, the public had no desire for America's participation in that far-off conflict. American troops would serve as bodyguards for an empire it once defeated to gain independence. Taking a stand against mass immigration, it fretted that America's population might someday reach two hundred million, "truly ghastly number".
