On February 22, 1902, the 170th anniversary of the birth of George
Washington, Frank A. Vanderlip delivered an address to the Commercial
Club of Chicago titled, “The Americanization of the World.” The Chicago
financial editor-journalist, who in 1897 became assistant secretary of
the Treasury in the McKinley administration, had directed the financing
of the war against Spain under the eminent Chicago banker and close
friend and mentor Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage. Vanderlip
was now vice-president of the Rockefeller-aligned National City Bank
of New York, protégé of Wall Street titan James Stillman, and in 1909
would succeed Stillman as the bank’s president. Vanderlip personified an
intersecting of the spheres of intellect, government, and modern business
in US foreign-policy making. On this occasion, he spoke to the assembled
Chicago business, political, and civic leaders about his recent travels for
the bank in Europe and England, and perspectives they cast upon the US
role in world affairs.
Vanderlip reported the belief circulating among the knowledgeable and
powerful across the Atlantic that the twentieth century would see “the
Americanization of the world.” It was a phrase, he noted, “fine, round,
full sounding,” that originated not “in the mouth of a bumptious Yankee,
but was coined by a keen Englishman,” whom Vanderlip described as the
“Radical of the Radicals,” the renowned editor of the journal Review
of Reviews, William T. Stead, whose book, bearing the “full sounding”
phrase as its title, was about to be published. Among Stead’s “extravagant
predictions regarding our future,” Vanderlip said, were the Briton’s “assertions that we are to dominate not only the industrial and commercial
Prelude: American Century and World Revolution situations, but political events also, and even that England’s greatest hope lies in frankly throwing in her lot with the Americans.