ABSTRACT
In the title of his 1901 bestseller, The Americanization of the World, the prolific British journalist W. T. Stead put a common European perception into a ringing phrase. Like the world as a whole, America itself was being Americanized around the time Stead wrote his book. One of the chief protagonists in the effort was, of course, Theodore Roosevelt, who would ascend to the presidency in the year the book appeared. In his thinking, at least, the meaning of America as symbol was closely tied both to domestic Americanization and to a more prominent American role in the world. When Werner Sombart visited the US during Roosevelt's presidency, he was surprised, or professed to be surprised, that the most highly developed capitalist country lacked a large, radical workers' party that could agitate for socialist reform. A global vision centered on or derived from preexisting constructions of America shaped the representation of new global relations.
