ABSTRACT
In 1901 the English journalist W.T. Stead published a short tract entitled The Americanisation of the World in which he welcomed the growing power of the United States not only in military and economic terms but also in the area of ideas, values and culture. American energy and vitality, through their relentless involvement in other countries, would restore the strength of the British Empire and ensure the continued triumph of the Anglo-Saxon race. Forty years later, writing on the eve of America’s entry into the Second World War, Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, coined the phrase ‘The American Century’ as part of a determined attack on American isolationism. The twentieth century was ‘baffling, difficult, paradoxical, revolutionary’. If it was to come to life ‘in any nobility of health and vigor, [it] must be to a significant degree an American century’. Like Stead, Luce stressed the importance both of American culture and values. ‘American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, Amer - ican machines and patented products’ were already the ‘only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognise[d] in common’. They must now be joined to a commitment to an inter - nationalism ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’. The United States had a responsibility to spread ‘great American ideals’ and become ‘the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice’. Luce hoped that this kind of optimistic identification of American interests with those of the world would enhance ‘the triumphal purpose of freedom’ and that American internationalism would lift the life of mankind to ‘a level a little lower than the angels’. It became clear, however, as the twentieth century developed, that the debates swirling round the process and impact of Americanisation suggested something much more ambiguous and complex than either he or Stead had anticipated (Luce 1999).
