1
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,1 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. According to historian
John Lukacs, Stead’s Americanization of the World is “the most direct and eloquent
proposition of a union of the English-speaking nations. . . .” He captured “what people
were thinking.”2 A century ago, Stead’s name was known to the public on both side of
the Atlantic and to every prominent official in Europe and America. This outsider’s
vision of America’s redemptive empire reveals to a degree the odd mix of ideals and
policies that comprised at least part of America’s self-understanding and image in the
1
W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World, or The Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York:
Horace Markley, 1901). The book was also published in Britain, and was issued again in 1902.
2
John Lukacs, A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004). First published as Outgrowing Democracy in 1984 by Doubleday.
2
world circa 1901, long before anyone experienced firsthand what the “American
Century” would be like.
Prior to working on this presentation, I had encountered Stead only as a figure
linked to the Social Gospel movement in America by way of his sensational expose, If
Christ Came to Chicago! John Lukacs’ A New Republic, however, introduced me to
Stead’s Americanization of the World, written six or seven years after his attempt to
rescue Chicago. As it turns out, Stead was one of the most prolific, eccentric,
controversial journalists of his age, a founder of what Matthew Arnold scorned as the
“New Journalism” and a crusader for every imaginable cause and a few unimaginable.
Stead was born in 1849, placing him in the same generation as Teddy Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson.3 His father was a Congregationalist minister in a small town on
the River Tyne in northern England. The stamp of nonconformist Protestantism
remained impressed on Stead the rest of his life, even as his dissenting spirit took him
further and further form Christian orthodoxy. He was educated by his father and then
sent to a boys’ school (Silcoates) for two years. The dramatic campaigns of the
American Civil War found their way into the students’ geography and history lessons.
Stead experienced a religious conversion during a religious revival that swept his school,
and he joined the Congregational Church. Of the Congregationalists, Stead later
remarked that they were “the heirs of Cromwell and Milton and the Pilgrim Fathers, and
the representatives of the extreme Democracy which knows neither male nor female, and
which makes the votes of the whole Church the supreme and only authority in the
Church.”4 Stead’s revolutionary zeal and fusion of Christianity and social democracy ran
deep in his heritage.
By his own account, Stead’s mind was shaped by the books of his childhood. As
a youth he read Fox’s Book of Martyrs and the American poet James Russell Lowell, to
whom he gave the credit for inspiring him with a passion for expansive service to
humanity. His imagination was also fired by theologian Jonathan Edwards, the Unitarian
minister William Ellery Channing, the liberal American evangelical preacher Henry
Ward Beecher, novelist Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Charles Spurgeon, the Bible,
Shakespeare, and the historian Thomas Carlyle.5 Carlyle’s Life of Cromwell was a
favorite, and the Puritan revolutionary leader held a lifelong fascination for Stead. G. K.
Chesterton, who knew Stead, said that he kept one of Cromwell’s pistols in his editorial
office. In 1899, Stead wrote the following tribute to Cromwell with all the fervor of an
evangelical conversion testimony:
The memory of Cromwell has from my earliest boyhood been the inspiration of
my life. . . . My devotion to the Apostles and the Evangelists was but tepid
compared with my veneration and affection for the uncrowned king of English
Puritanism. Nay, I can to this day remember the serious searchings of heart I
experienced when I woke up to a consciousness of the fact that I felt a far keener
Most of the following biographical details are drawn from the two volumes of Frederic Whyte’s The Life
of W. T. Stead (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925). This is the standard biography, though Whyte goes
too far in his apologia for Stead. Whyte provides a mountain of detail, anecdotes, and commentary from
Stead’s contemporaries, but oddly omits any discussion of The Americanization of the World. I do not
know whether this absence means that the book had become an embarrassment by 1925 or that it had
become too irrelevant to bother with.
4
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I:15.
5
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 17-18, 21, 281; Stead, Americanization of the World, 268.
3
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and more passionate personal love for Oliver Cromwell, than I did even for the
divine figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Cromwell was so near, so human, and so real.
. . . The execution of the Man of Blood [i.e., King Charles I] made the 30th of
January a red-letter day in my calendar, and to this day I fell a thrill of gratitude
and pride whenever I pass the banqueting house at Whitehall.6
The Banqueting House in London, a Jacobean monument to divine right monarchy, was,
of course, the site of Charles I’s execution. In 1901, Stead claimed, without specifying
further, that Cromwell “was instinct with the conviction of the reality of the providential
mission of the English-speaking race.”7
While still a young man, Stead became a warrior for social justice as writer and
editor for the Northern Echo, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Review of Reviews, and other
lesser-known and meteoric publishing ventures. One person aptly characterized him
in1885 as a mixture of Don Quixote and B. T. Barnum.8 He publicized such social evils
as prostitution and alcohol abuse, and demanded legislative action to ameliorate the
condition of the common man.
As early as about 1870, in the immediate context of German unification, Stead
advocated union between the British empire and the United States and came to defend
what he called a “true Imperialism” aimed at the peace, security, unity, and humanitarian
uplift of the world.9 In 1884 he campaigned for a larger Royal Navy. He wrote an article
for the Pall Mall Gazette entitled “The Truth about the Navy,” attempting to provoke
enough alarm over Britain’s vulnerability and Germany’s growing navy and colonial
adventures to get Parliament to appropriate the necessary funds for a modern navy.10
Reading Sir John Seeley’s Expansion of England (1883) about this time inspired him
with the idea of imperial federation. The scheme further expanded in his mind to bring
the United States into an Anglo-Saxon union, reversing the blunder of George III. This
proposal was similar to the campaign for Anglo-Saxon unification (or re-unification)
waged by Stead’s friend Cecil Rhodes who famously said that he wanted to “paint the
map red” with Britain’s empire. Other sympathizers included the industrialist Andrew
Carnegie..
Stead’s conception of unification fitted into a larger framework of a vaguely
applied Darwinism that made progressive development inevitable: old institutions and
doctrines had to perish if they were not fit to survive. “Evolution,” he wrote in 1884, “is
the greatest of all revolutions, for it is a constant factor in the progress of the race. Our
creeds and our institutions perish or pass, not because we will, but because they must.”11
“Long ago,” he wrote ten years later, “Darwin’s Descent of Man, gave me a . . . sense of
the immanence of God. . . . Darwin made me see that the creative work is going on today
as much as at any previous time in the history of the world, for we stand in the very work
shop in which the Eternal is from day to day fashioning the world in which we live.”12
6
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I:18.
Stead, Americanization of the World, 421.
8
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 104.
9
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 24, 37.
10
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 145f; I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749, 2d
edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 99.
11
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 111.
12
If Christ Came to Chicago (Chicago, Laird & Lee, 1894) 262.
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Among the world’s inevitabilities was the global dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race
with youthful America in the vanguard. Indeed, Darwin himself had claimed in the
Descent of Man (1871) that the “wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the
character of the people, are the results of natural selection” – a tendency accelerated by
the self-selection of “energetic, restless, and courageous” immigrants. In the same
passage, Darwin endorsed the view of another author that the triumph of the AngloSaxon race gave fulfillment and meaning to the achievements of Rome and Greece.
American missionary expansionist Josiah Strong (in his bestselling book, Our Country)
cited this very section from Darwin as a sure prediction of America’s inevitable
fulfillment of Anglo-Saxon destiny. Stead operated within a similar mental paradigm.
Along with his bold naval program and ideology of racial superiority, and without
any evident sense of paradox or conscious hypocrisy, Stead saw himself ultimately as an
antimilitarist and an advocate of world peace. Indeed, he devoted much of his booming
energy to arbitration projects like the Hague conference and to various disarmament
proposals. He saw no inconsistency between a powerful Britain within an expanding
federation, armed with a navy second to none, and the achievement of world peace. The
future had to be made secure by an armed peace. The soldier, he said, would be replaced
by the international policeman.13 Stead was a peace advocate but certainly not a pacifist.
He operated in the prophetic mode, and held on simultaneously to both ends of
paradoxes14; he waged militant holy war but did so for the sake of permanent, universal
peace and an end to evil. He was an active interventionist who advocated a concert of
European power wielded on behalf of security and at times exercised to liberate subject
peoples (such as Bulgaria from the Turks). He distinguished between two kinds of
imperialism: on the one hand an “Imperialism of Responsibility” – which he defined
quaintly as “an Imperialism plus common sense and the Ten Commandments” – and on
the other hand a raw Jingoism – “the Imperialism of pride and avarice.”15 Imperialism in
the hands of good and wise and powerful people was a blessing to the world. In the spirit
of Kipling, but without the poet’s gifts of irony, ambiguity, and subtlety, Stead
acknowledged imperialism as a burden of service, a benevolent agent of progress,
civilization, and humanity. Listen to Stead in 1880 regarding Britain’s mission: “To
maintain the European Concert – that germ of the United States of Europe – against
isolated inaction; to establish a Roman peace among the dark-skinned races of Asia,
Polynesia, and Africa; to unite all branches of the English-speaking race in an AngloSaxon Bund, and to spread Liberty, Civilization and Christianity throughout the world.” 16
Like Oscar Wilde’s concern about Socialist reformers, this doesn’t leave many free
evenings.
By the time Stead came to write The Americanization of the World in 1901, he
had already devoted a book three years earlier to the prospect of a “United States of
Europe.”17 Stead wrote in the afterglow of Czar Nicholas II’s call in 1898 for an
13
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 155.
For the prophet as cultural type, see O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004).
15
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 157-58.
16
Stead, The United States of Europe ( 1899)
17
W. T. Stead, The United States of Europe on the Eve of the Parliament of Peace. Introduction by Sandi
E. Cooper (New York: Garland, 1971). Originally published in 1899 by Doubleday & McClure. The book
14
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international peace conference at the Hague, Netherlands, and in the stir caused by the
United States’ victory over Spain that same year. Stead toured Europe to promote
arbitration and even met with the Czar himself. He considered the Czar’s “Holy War
against War,” as he called it, to be sincere, thoughtful, workable, and necessary.18 He
saw the United States as a model of successful federation that maintained peace and unity
without militarism, despite the messy interruption of the Civil War that had served only
to strengthen America. In its role as active peacemaker, the U.S., he hoped, would even
end Ottoman “misrule” and fly the Stars and Stripes over Istanbul after a quick replay of
its victory over Spain.19 His exuberance for the famous Hague Conference mimicked
Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam”20: “And now this far-off, unseen event, toward which
the whole Continent has been moving with slow but resistless march, has come within the
pale of practical politics, and on the threshold of the twentieth century we await this latest
and greatest new birth of Time.”21
Once across that threshold of the new century, Stead turned more insistently to the
United States as the inevitable leader in Anglo-Saxon dominance. The twentieth century,
he predicted, correctly, would belong to the United States, but its success meant in truth
the triumph of British culture. America was a “reincarnated” Britain.22 America’s
success was really Britain’s success. The combined English-speaking world would be
formidable indeed; it would unite a massive population, dominate the seas, control the
world’s resources, and expand in wealth, commerce, and technology. In the age of
rational and efficient business Trusts, he asked, why couldn’t an imperial J. P. Morgan
organize “the greatest combination of all”?23
Like so many of his time, Stead was drawn to quantity and mass and energy. But
more than power was at stake. The highest goals were world peace, world liberty, “free
democracy,” and humanitarian uplift. America’s war with Spain had proven the nation’s
capacity as a humanitarian and “liberating Power.”24 Stead predicted (and clearly
desired) America’s eventual annexation of Canada and Newfoundland.
At one level, the process of the world’s Americanization took the form of the
domestic cultural assimilation of countless immigrants to the U.S. While Stead
acknowledged this fact, and noted the contribution of energetic immigrants to America’s
dynamism, he was, however, more interested in the process of the external
Americanization of the rest of the world. Given the determinism of history, Britain and
Europe could either cooperate with the inevitable or wage a losing battle and end up
Americanized against their will and without their consent. Germany and the Papacy
seemed the most resistant to the Americanization of Europe. But the Kaiser’s bluster was
was written late in 1898. Stead attended the Hague Conference in 1899 and co-authored a history of the
event.
18
Stead, United States of Europe, 444-5, 462.
19
Stead, United States of Europe, 424-427.
20
A few lines from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” were quoted endlessly by peace advocates and social
gospelers in the later nineteenth century: “Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were
furled/ In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world” (lines 127-128).
21
Stead, United States of Europe, 53.
22
Stead, Americanization of the World, 26.
23
Stead, Americanization of the World, 12.
24
Stead, Americanization of the World, 17, 26, 46-47.
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as pointless as Canute’s command to the tide.25 And the Papacy’s skepticism and
objections would be overcome: “the supreme Pontiff will recognize that the principles of
Americanism are part and parcel of the sacred deposit of truth which it is the duty of the
Church sedulously to preserve and to disseminate among the nations of the earth.”26
Europe will be “revolutionize[d]” by “American principles” whether it wants to be or not.
And America’s revolutionary principles were those of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the
Puritans, and the Mayflower. The Islamic Ottoman Empire, too, would be regenerated
and transformed by the “leaven” of “the Declaration of Independence and the
fundamental doctrines of the American constitution.” From the day of its “exodus” from
Europe, America had been a “dissolvent of Old World Ideas.” 27
That a British observer of America like Stead could hold to such an exaggerated
view of America’s mission is a reminder that the American identity has been formed to a
degree by outsiders. One of Shakespeare’s characters (a clown, in fact) says that “some
are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.”28
America’s world-redemptive identity is a product of all three: it was with us to a degree
at our birth; it has been achieved over time; and it has been thrown upon us by foreign
observers, both admirers and critics. This pattern reaches back to English radicals like
Richard Price and French philosophes like Turgot. Even H. G. Wells’ plans for a World
State was patterned on the U.S. According to Chesterton, Wells “propose[d] almost
cosmic conquests for the American Constitution,” omitting, of course, the fundamental
constitutional principle of decentralized, limited government.29 That Stead and others
held such hope for exporting the Declaration of Independence, given its abstract,
ahistorical, and universal claims about equality and rights, is easier to comprehend than
their enthusiasm for “cosmic conquests” for the Constitution.
Sadly, according to Stead’s view of the world circa 1901, America’s humanitarian
imperialism was misconstrued by some to be something other than the civilizing force
and “beneficent dominion” that it truly was. The intended beneficiaries misunderstood.
Imagine a worldview in which the follow statement by Stead was not intended ironically:
“three years of intermittent warfare [in the Philippines] waged by land and sea have not
yet induced the Filipinos to recognize the brotherly love and benevolent intentions of the
invaders.”30 In light of these regrettable circumstances, Stead welcomed Kipling’s poem,
“The White Man’s Burden,” which provided soothing relief, he said, “to the uneasy
conscience of men who were keen to persuade themselves that, while apparently
following in the footsteps of predatory Empires, they were in reality humbly accepting
onerous duties imposed upon them as instruments of Divine Providence.”31 Like AngloSaxon union, the ultimate purpose of the “Americanization of the World” was peace and
enforced security. The dangers of imperial hubris were real, Stead warned, and the
United States and Britain should strive to dominate the world by ideas and the “force of
example.”32 But the risks inherent in the temptations of power were worth it to Stead
25
Stead, Americanization of the World, 162-3.
Stead, Americanization of the World, 275.
27
Stead, Americanization of the World, 177, 189, 191, 263, and passim. See also 381-82f.
28
Twelfth Night, Act V, scene 1.
29
What I Saw in America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922) 231.
30
Stead, Americanization of the World, 202.
31
Stead, Americanization of the World, 203.
32
Stead, Americanization of the World, 437.
26
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because such an alliance would produce much good in the world. The goal was nothing
less than the Kingdom of God on Earth. Near the end of the book, Stead drew freely
from a few lines of James Harrington’s utopian Oceana, a prophecy about to be fulfilled:
What can you think but, if the world should see the Roman Eagle again, she
would renew her age and her flight? If you add to the propagation of civil liberty
the propagation of the liberty of conscience, this empire, this patronage of the
world, is the Kingdom of Christ. The Commonwealth of this make is a minister
of god upon earth, for which cause the orders last rehearsed are the buds of
empire. Such as that the blessing of God may spread the arms of your
Commonwealth like a holy asylum to the distressed world, and give the earth her
Sabbath of years or rest from her labors under the shadow of your wings.33
Despite this millennial expectancy, Stead ends with an unexpected note of caution:
America is too materialistic, restless, and discontent. America must look to its higher,
nobler calling.
No portrait of William T. Stead’s sanctified imperialism would be balanced
without some indication of the larger context of the reforms and causes he promoted. His
scope was remarkable. He edited a collection of hymns; wrote a book calling for reform
of the House of Lords; an account of the evangelical revival in Wales; a biography of his
close friend General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and another of Mrs.
Booth; an odd book on the Passion Play at Oberammergau (“The Story that Transformed
the World’); an expose of seedy New York politics; and a book called The Last Will and
Testament of Cecil John Rhodes. In 1902 he took up the cause for Esperanto, a proposed
international language. Back in 1885 he served just over two months in prison having
been convicted of abducting a thirteen-year-old girl in a cloak- and-dagger scheme to
expose the seedy underworld of prostitution in Victorian London and guarantee passage
of reform legislation then pending in Parliament. He enlisted the help of Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Salvation Army, carried out his plan, and
wrote a series of sensational, titillating articles. Stead’s defenders included Charles
Spurgeon, and some compared his efforts to those of William Lloyd Garrison against
American slavery. In his spare time, Stead started communicating daily with the dead by
means of automatic writing, serving as a spiritual amanuensis for a dead woman named
Julia Ames – in life a close friend of Francis Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU). In 1897 he wrote (or, merely compiled, I suppose) a book
of his “Letters from Julia,” comforting himself and his readers with the certain reality of
life after death. The full title was Letters from Julia, or Light from the Borderland,
received by automatic writing from one who has gone before. As a busy editor, Stead
had to limit his letter-writing to thirty minutes a day, but over the years, the earnest man
claimed to receive messages from Prince Albert, Lord Tennyson, and his own dead son.34
He also introduced atheist and socialist Annie Besant to Theosophy througt the books of
Madam Blavatsky – a story in itself. For a time, they co-edited a weekly called The Link.
Besant compared Stead to Cromwell, and the two cooperated to build the “true
commonwealth” of the “Church of the Future” and to advance “social righteousness.”
33
34
Stead, Americanization of the World, 438.
Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead, I: 249-54.
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Stead’s crusade for social and religious reform in the name of this “Church of the
Future,” or the “Civic Church” as he also called it, reached its farthest advance in 1894
with the publication of If Christ Came to Chicago! 35 (The title page of the original
edition includes an exclamation mark. The subtitle is “a plea for the union of all who
love in the service of all who suffer.”) Stead visited Chicago in 1893 for the World
Columbian Exposition and was overwhelmed by the city’s energy, potential, and squalid
conditions. He predicted that the Windy City would one day be not only the inland
capital of the United States, but perhaps even of the Anglo-American federation. He
visited Jane Addams’ Hull House settlement,36 and preached twice to mass audiences at
the Central Music Hall about the Gospel of Humanity and the power of “applied
Christianity.” He boasted of the fact that a Socialist and a convicted anarchist joined him
on the platform.
If Christ Came to Chicago! is typically situated by historians in the context of
America’s social gospel movement. This placement is correct, although some historians
seem to think that Stead was an American and a clergyman.37 If Christ Came to
Chicago! belongs grouped in particular with Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896),
the popular novel which asked the famous question now current again among evangelical
youth, “What would Jesus do?” In His Steps was one of the most significant vehicles
used to popularize the Social Gospel movement. Stead’s book asked only a slightly
different question, and Stead was every bit as confident what Jesus would do the first
moment he got to Chicago.
By the name “Christ,” Stead did not have in mind the theological, Scriptural Jesus
of the Incarnation and Atonement or even the historical Jesus of ancient Palestine. For
Stead, Christ was an “ideal,” an inspiration and a standard of human sympathy. Whether
he ever existed in flesh and blood, in time and space, was not the point. He came and
continues to come in a different way. Faithfulness to this ideal of service required
applying Christ “to the actual circumstances of the civic life of Chicago.”38 Stead
described his impassioned book as “an attempt to illustrate how a living faith in the
Citizen Christ would lead directly to the civic and social regeneration of Chicago.”39
What followed was a lengthy indictment of the city’s treatment of the homeless,
prostitution, intemperance, materialism, grinding poverty, inequitable taxation, rampant
political corruption, and the scandal of a disunited Church powerless to redeem the city.
Christianity was not doctrine, or ritual, or membership, but humanitarian “acts of
mercy.”40 Around this goal, the churches of Chicago ought to unite their resources and
energies. The Church is an agent of social reconstruction. Stead presupposed a visibly
relevant, socially transformative Christianity – appealing to all kinds of evangelicals,
whether liberal or more conservative. He essentially asked why, if Jesus came to redeem
the world, was the world still such a mess after nearly 1900 years.
35
The following account is summarized from Whyte, Life of W. T. Stead and Stead, If Christ Came to
Chicago! (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1894).
36
See Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, with and introduction and notes by James Hurt (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1990) 95-96; Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago!, 410-419.
37
John Milton Cooper, Jr., Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1990) 137.
38
If Christ Came to Chicago!, 13.
39
If Christ Came to Chicago!, 16.
40
If Christ Came to Chicago!, 135-6.
9
In March, 1912, Stead received a telegram from the United States inviting him to
speak at a convention at Carnegie Hall of the National Men and Religion Forward
Movement. The Men and Religion Forward Movement was a sort of early twentiethcentury version of Promise Keepers intended to get men and boys back into what some
saw as a dangerously feminine church. The movement gained the attention of the Federal
Council of Churches which tried to bring the organization under its ecumenical and social
reform umbrella.41 The announced topic of the event in New York was world peace;
featured speakers were in include President Taft, James Bryce, William Jennings Bryan,
and Booker T. Washington. Stead eagerly accepted the invitation, hoping the men’s
movement signaled a step toward his ideal of the “Civic Church.” On April 10, 1912, he
set sail on the Titanic, doomed to be one of the nearly 1500 who drowned. In a piece
entitled “The Great Shipwreck as Analogy,” G. K. Chesterton summed up William Stead:
The case of Mr. Stead, which I feel with a rather special emotion, both of
sympathy and difference, is very typical of the whole tragedy. Mr. Stead was far
to great and brave a man to require any concealment of his exaggerations or his
more unbalanced moods; his strength was in a flaming certainty, which one only
weakens by calling sincerity, and a hunger and thirst for human sympathy. His
excess, we may say, with real respect, was in the direction of megalomania; a
childlike belief in big empire. Big newspapers, big alliances – big ships. He
toiled like a Titan for that Anglo-American combination of which the ship that
has gone down may well be called the emblem. And at the last all these big
things broke about him, and somewhat bigger things remain: a courage that was
entirely individual; a kindness that was entirely universal. His death may well
become a legend.42
Many of his contemporaries, friend or foe, expected Stead’s legend and legacy to
continue. His biographer devotes a brief final chapter to a consideration of “Stead’s
place in history,” wondering for which of his causes the internationally famous crusader
would be best remembered – not considering for a moment the possibility that Stead
would nearly vanish from the history books. History’s ironies can be cruel. He did not
live, of course, to see the catastrophe of the Great War that burst upon Europe little more
than two years after his death. The United States joined with Britain in that fateful war,
Britain was soon reduced nearly to “the status of an English-speaking Belgium” as Stead
thought it might43, the twentieth century became the American Century, American culture
continues to dissolve and revolutionize every other culture, and the U.S. now finds itself
if not with its flag unfurled over Istanbul then certainly at war with Islamic terrorism.
The world has been Americanized to a remarkable degree, and some speak of nation’s
mission to universalize the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as
birthrights given by God to all people. Some have even claimed that these efforts,
especially the war in Iraq, are essential to America’s spiritual health.
The “Americanization of the World” was predicted a century ago and realized in
that intervening century. But which America has been globalized? Materially, we see
41
C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898-1918 (Princeton
University Press, 1972) 348.
42
The Illustrated London News, 11 May 1912.
43
Lukacs notes the fulfillment of Stead’s fear in A New Republic, 208.
10
evidence – like Coke and Levis and popular music – too obvious to catalog.
Ideologically, we may detect the spread of the American creed outward from the “nation
with a soul of a church.”44 But exactly which affirmations of the American creed are
being exported (actively or simply by example)? The American creed has been a jumble
of political doctrine, not entirely consistent or even compatible. As we consider the
benefits and risks of the “Americanization of the world” – benefits and risks to others and
to ourselves – we have to face just which America we are talking about. We have been
and continue to be many things. We have been Puritans and Cavaliers, Federalists and
Antifederalists, Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, revivalists and confessionalists,45
Yankees and Rebels, expansionists and isolationists, centralists and decentralists,
cosmopolitans and localists, progressives and traditionalists, heterodox and orthodox,
optimists and pessimists. But optimism and pessimism, to return once more to the
wisdom of Chesterton, are both sins – the sins of extremes, the sins of presumption and
despair. No successful empire or republic can afford to be guilty of either.
Fatalism or Hope?
A Response to Richard M. Gamble’s “The Americanization of the World”
Richard Gamble has brought a thoughtful and very timely contribution to the
discourse of American History, in particular the history of American International
Relations with this paper and his book The War For Righteousness. In recent times
modern, rational and materialist hegemony on academic history has had its grip loosened
by scholarship that takes faith seriously.
In specific the reader is taken with Gamble’s use of William T. Stead as a stand
in, an icon, a symbol of the Progressive Era as it headed toward its own “titanic”
shipwrecks in the Marne, Ypres, Versailles and Nuremberg. Stead was a larger than life
figure beloved by and, sometimes, deeply troubling to those who knew him. Woodrow
Wilson’s friend Albert Shaw, who had recently taken up a position as the American
editor of Stead’s paper Review of Reviews, was denied a chair in Economics at Princeton
when members of the University board read the first edition put out under his editorship.
They were troubled by the article written by Annie Besant whom Professor Gamble has
mentioned and Stead’s enjoyment of controversy.46 Shaw responded to the disappointing
news he had received from Wilson with a spirited defense of Stead that adds to our
temptation to see him as a stand in for the whole American progressive era.
As For Mr. Stead, let me tell you my dear Wilson, that he is the man of all
men I have ever known who is most fearlessly and unselfishly devoted to
the service of God and of truth. Men of his intense personality and
peculiar temperament some times make mistakes, and they almost always
make the correct and conforming world feel uncomfortable. . . . But Stead
impresses me as a better Christian than any of these Reverend Doctors.
He is ready to sacrifice even his reputation and standing among his
44
Chesterton, What I Saw in America, 11-12.
See D. G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
46
Woodrow Wilson to Albert Shaw, June 26, 1891, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol 7, 225. Arthur Link,
ed. Princeton University Press.
45
11
Christian brethren for the love of truth. . . . and yet at times we should
have to classify him as a crank.47
William Stead’s final publication of Review of Reviews, also referred to in
Professor Gamble’s paper, spoke of the hope he placed in the development of a Civil
Church. As Charles Long recently said in a talk delivered at Michigan State University,
the idea of Civil Religion is a typically American one. When we speak of other places
and countries, Iraq for instance, we speak most often of developing a Civil Society, then perhaps - we may also give a nod to the development of a Civil Religion. But when we
speak of America it is quite natural to speak of a Civil Religion. What kind of religion
remains contested but we do indeed fit the description of a “nation with the soul of a
church.” This is, in great part, the cultural legacy of the Progressive Era and men like
Stead.
Stead had a very specific idea about how this Civil Church should look. He had
spent time with Leo Tolstoy and had embraced his deeply syncretic views of religion.48
Stead encouraged everyone in this Civil Church to; Be a Christ. . . . He went on to say,
Even if you doubt whether He ever really lived, God Incarnate in mortal flesh, the more
imperative is your duty to endeavor so far as you can, to realize in your own person that
supreme embodiment of love, in order that now, if never before, there may be on earth a
Messiah of God who is Love among men who are perishing for want of love.49 By
unhooking the missionary impulse of Christianity from the need for an actual faith in
Christ, Stead gave even the most secular progressives a tool to use in advancing
American democratic ideals with missionary zeal and methods.
Now we must inevitably come to the questions raised by Professor Gamble’s
paper. We begin with an age old question that is begged by this critique of the
Progressives; How then shall we live? The final line of Stead’s last publication reads, “I
expect to leave by the Titanic on April 10th, and hope I shall be back in London in May”50
The word in this last sentence that we should consider the most important is not
the word “Titanic” which leaps up and grabs the attention and emotion of the reader
(often with moving music playing in the back of the mind). The word that matters most
here, most to Stead, most to the Progressive Era leaders and most to us - I would argue is the quieter word “hope.”
Let us now begin a process of free association of ideas as we interact with
Professor Gamble’s paper. Richard Gamble has warned us of the twin dangers - no - sins
- of presumption and despair. He then abruptly ends the narrative with these
presumptuous persons dead or in despair at our feet, victims of a Titanic tragedy of their
own making. This seems to consign us to the hell of fatalism. Idealism leads to
presumption, which leads to tragedy, which leads to despair. Better let well enough alone
- could be the moral of this narrative.
American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, himself disillusioned by the
presumption of his age, described the America that had been under the leadership of
Woodrow Wilson, the president who most disappointed him, as a nation in its infancy.
America had to grow up, to get beyond its fascination with righteousness. For Niebuhr
47
Shaw to Wilson, July 1, 1891, PWW Vol. 7, 230.
William Stead, The Truth About Russia,(London, Cassell & Company, 1888) 437-452.
49
Excerpted from W.T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago! (Chicago, 1894), pp. 443-445
50
W. T. Stead, The Review of Reviews, April, 1912
48
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this infantile presumption had been dealt with by two world wars. In his “Irony of
American History” he despairs of any “War for Righteousness.” This cold and sinful age
will only produce greater and lesser sins and the best we could do was to promote the
cause of lesser sins. Niebuhr’s “Civil Church” was cold and, he would say, “realistic.”
But who would want to attend?
We as a nation are producing a population that remains in adolescence years
longer than previous generations. Are we also returning to an adolescent foreign policy?
Are Paul Wolfowitz, Carl Rove and the Neo-Conservatives simply playing Peter Pan
with Progressive Era dreams? Are they the newly incarnated William T. Steads? If so
then what are we to do? If we avoid the twin sins of presumption and despair how then
will we live? Can we as human beings ever promote idealism in youth or a nation
without these dangers? Does not all longing for a good or better world lead inevitably to
a sense of mission? Won’t any mission be seen as presumptuous to those being
evangelized or being improved? In the dialectic between presumption and despair where
is the synthesis? Where is the place where we can live and still hope for and dream of a
better world?
On Woodrow Wilson’s last Armistice Day, November 11, 1923, a crowd gathered
outside the house on S Street. Looking weak and old, the former president, who 30 years
before had told Shaw of his loss of a job at Princeton because of his association with
Stead, who had then as president of the United States tried to make Stead’s world a
reality, was helped onto the steps where he stood to make his final public address.
Breaking down with emotion repeatedly he spoke about the triumph of the mission that
he believed God had called him to accomplish. He closed his speech with a continued
determination that Providence would yet vindicate him. “I am not one of those that have
the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools
resist Providence before and I have seen the destruction, as will come upon these again –
utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.”51
Is this where hope for a better world will always end? Does the broken Wilson in
his final months warn us of the absurdity of hope? I return to Stead’s word “hope” which
springs up even in the deeply disillusioned Niebuhr’s “Irony.” Niebuhr wrote; Nothing
worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope.52
Having escaped the sins of presumption and despair how do we as historians - or more
importantly as a people and a nation - keep ourselves from falling into the existential hell
of raw fatalism? In other words how can we - without danger - imbue our own national
narrative with hope? Or is danger simply inevitable for those who would work for a
better world?
51
52
PWW Vol. 68, 469.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, Scribners, 1952, p.63.