Frederick Newmeyer

I would talk about how before the war, American linguists worked independently of (and were very hostile to) European linguists. That began to change as European refugees took positions in the US. Then -- ironically -- Chomsky took many of his ideas from the Prague School and other European work, yet at the beginning, most European linguists were hostile to generative grammar. Americans drew a great deal from the Europeans. That did happen, but not really until the late 1950s. Before then, there was a great deal of animosity between the two approaches.