>>14296092Yes, that makes sense, I understand that the US economy was huge even before WW1, and they were already starting to exert a huge influence on global pop-culture during the interwar period, when American cinema and jazz music started becoming popular.
I'm just saying that our role in science and academia still had a lot of growing to do at that point. In the early 20th century, academia was still dominated by the German university system, which was originally pioneered Prussian scholars in the early 1800s and popularized over the course of several decades, largely by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was towering figure of late 19th century intellectual culture. Johns Hopkins University, which was the top school in the US at the time, literally hired dozens of academics from Germany, and hired consultant from Germany to help model their university after the German system, and other universities like the Ivy League and University of Chicago followed suit.
Also, like I said the Hilbert Program in Germany and the Vienna Circle in Austria were the dominant intellectual tends at the time, and there were also major intellectual centers in the UK (Russell, Turing, Ramsey, and squad), and stuff in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Hungary (von Neumann, Tarski, Kolmogorov, Renyi, Kuratowsi, etc.).
