Anglo Term Analysis

This term is a prefix that refers to white, English-speaking persons of British, Irish, or other northern European origins. It derives from the phrase Anglo-Saxon, which refers to the earliest historical manifestation of the English language. In Bell’s novel, steelworkers who self-identify as “Anglo” use the term to denote their alleged cultural superiority over central European immigrants such as Slovaks and other Slavic peoples who speak Indo-European languages and represent the most recent wave of immigration to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.