Talk, Richard Gamble, ISCC Conference, October 15, 2005

The following is a short talk given at the ISCC Conference in Lansing, MI, October 2005.

Details can be found on the ISCC site.

The Americanization of the World: William T. Stead's Vision of Empire
Conference Paper by Richard M. Gamble

If you had been alive in 1901, would you have greeted the new century with hope or fear? Philosophical optimists and pessimists would have competed for you attention. Ideologies of presumption and despair would have vied for your allegiance. Was Western humanity on the threshold of a secular millennium of enlightenment and civilization, or on the brink of spiritual and cultural catastrophe? By measures of material wealth, power, and technological innovation, there was every reason for optimism. The sparkling Paris Exposition of 1900 had displayed the technological wonders of the age, especially the marvelous applications of electricity. But the mood was also somber. Queen Victoria had died on January 22, 1901, after a remarkable reign of nearly sixty-four years. An unpredictable Kaiser Wilhelm II ruled a rising Germany unified only thirty years before. The elderly Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria since 1848, grieved over his wife's assassination in 1898 by an Italian anarchist. Nicholas II was Czar of Russia; his grandfather Alexander II had been killed by a terrorist's bomb. American president William McKinley died on September 14, struck down by an anarchist's bullet in Buffalo, New York. The whirlwind Teddy Roosevelt now occupied the White House. Just three years ago, the United States had startled the world by gobbling up the last bits of Spain's once vast global empire, and British poet Rudyard Kipling had invited America to "take up the White Man's Burden" - to his mind a thankless task of humanitarian service and liberation of the world's captives. America's bloody war to subdue the Philippines was still underway. Europe pondered why the American republic has taken the plunge. Just what did this departure and transformation portend for Europe's precarious balance of power? Did America grasp an overseas empire for resources, for security, for power, for prestige? Europe buzzed about the menace at home of militarism and armaments. A whole literary genre future wars filled the bookstalls, sensationalist fiction and non-fiction titles predicting likely war between Britain and France, or more presciently between Germany and France.
Into this nervous world, British celebrity journalist and editor William T. Stead launched his best-selling book, The Americanization of the World, subtitled "The Trend of the Twentieth Century" - his prediction of America's inevitable, indeed Providential, military, economic, cultural, and ideological domination of the world. Stead, a tireless champion of Anglo-Saxon expansion, offered his prediction not in fear but in hope. Together, the United States and Britain would rule the world. . . .

(Full Text of Richard Gamble's Remarks and My response)