II. Godless London

In 1885, Salvation Army leaders came to Stead and asked for his help to deal with the fact that girls were being forced into prostitution. Several survivors told him their stories. Stead became convinced that the problem was real and agreed that he would attempt to combat it. He hired detectives and went about the work of investigation. The result was four articles published in July 1885, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” As that name implies, like an Old Testament prophet condemning a city for its sins, Stead saw himself as a modern prophet, proclaiming an oracle against London. The articles engrossed the nation. A significant number of people denounced them, but everyone talked about them. The legislative campaign that went with them was immediately effective. At the time, the age of consent was thirteen years old. There had been efforts to get it raised, but on three separate occasions these had been thwarted in the House of Commons. Within weeks of Stead’s exposé, however, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 had passed, raising the age of consent to sixteen years.

Yet the backlash was also furious. It came out that a key story in the articles was actually one that Stead himself had arranged. Of course, he had carefully made sure that he could not be accused of sexual impropriety – even the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England, the archbishop of Westminster, had been informed in advance and was on standby to vouch for Stead’s noble intentions and character.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, Stead had judged that entrapment was the only way he would be able to obtain full proof. When this was revealed, some people felt emotionally manipulated and duped. Bernard Shaw fumed, “Nobody ever trusted him after the discovery that the case of Eliza Armstrong in the Maiden Tribute was a put-up job, and that he himself put it up.”Footnote ⁸ The wheel so turned that Stead himself was prosecuted. He was found guilty of abduction and of aiding and abetting in an assault. He served out his full term of three months in prison. A more fundamental criticism was that the “Maiden Tribute” articles were themselves obscene, that they were designed to titillate readers. All this matters for a discussion of If Christ Came to Chicago, because, in their judgment of that book as well, people sometimes disagreed whether Stead was merely exposing vice or also catering to it.

W. T. Stead was elated by his time in prison. Persecution was proof that he was a prophet. Moreover, perhaps he was more than just a prophet. A voice spoke to him in his lonely cell, which was privy to his messianic secret. It announced: “Be no longer a Christian, be a Christ.”Footnote ⁹ In 1889, Stead left the Pall Mall Gazette and founded his own journal. The Review of Reviews was an immediate triumph. At the time of the controversy, William Booth had fretted that Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” stunt might do irreparable damage to the Salvation Army. As it happened, however, that campaign greatly enhanced the organization’s standing with the public. In 1890 appeared Booth’s book, In Darkest England and the Way Out. At least General Booth’s name was the one on the title page.Footnote ¹⁰ The story began to circulate, however, that Stead was the real author. In truth, Stead was the book’s ghostwriter. That term did not exist yet, however, and so the conversation became confused. Some people assumed Stead’s denials meant more than they said. The editor of the Review of Reviews was really trying hard not to take credit for the book, but his answers were strictly accurate. He insisted that he had just done the work of a “literary hack,” while Booth had a right to “claim to be considered the author of the whole scheme.”Footnote ¹¹ For our purposes, what is significant about In Darkest England is that it is about a major city, namely London, and one that attempts to catalogue its problems and to offer solutions. Especially if you have a stereotypical image of the Victorian Salvation Army in your head, the book’s contents can appear surprisingly modern. It is focused on poverty, not personal sin. Booth abandoned the whole notion of the deserving and the undeserving poor, and just said boldly that his scheme would follow a policy of helping all people in need, irrespective of whether or not their own bad, foolish, sinful, vicious, or criminal choices had contributed to their situation. He even insisted that alcoholism was a disease and should be treated as such.Footnote ¹² The agnostic T. H. Huxley denounced In Darkest England as “socialism in disguise.”Footnote ¹³ Catherine Booth lay dying as the book was being written, and Stead later wrote a biography of her. Its endorsement by the Salvation Army included a disclaimer that the organization did not agree with Stead’s assertion that Catherine Booth had been psychic, but offered no objection to the fact that there was an entire chapter that made the case that she was a Socialist.Footnote ¹⁴

Yet one more cause needs to be introduced before we can send our English editor off to the shores of Lake Michigan. Stead had become committed to Spiritualism. From whatever source this power might spring, a successful medium must have the ability to read people. The first time Stead ever attended a séance, the medium nailed the kind of man he was, prophesying, “Young man, you are going to be the St. Paul of Spiritualism.”Footnote ¹⁵ In due course, Stead discovered that he was himself a medium. His gift was for automatic writing. Delightfully for our purposes, his spirit guide was a woman from Chicago, Julia Ames, whom he had once met in Europe, and who died young in 1891. In 1893, Stead founded a Spiritualist quarterly, the Borderland, in which he would publish messages from Julia. He eventually created an anthology of her missives that became a bestseller, Letters from Julia (1897).Footnote ¹⁶ To reiterate, these were messages from a deceased Chicagoan that Stead himself had written down through the technique of automatic writing. As you will recall, Stead already had some experience as a ghostwriter. To this reader, Letters from Julia seems to provide startling evidence that even after people have died, it is still possible for them to continue to bore us.

III. An Englishman in the Windy City

Like millions of others, Stead’s trip to Chicago was prompted by his desire to see the White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. W. T. Stead came to Chicago on October 31, 1893. He had promised himself that he would not speak or write, but would just listen and learn – that, however, would have been highly uncharacteristic.Footnote ¹⁷ He arrived just as the World’s Fair was ending, and he quickly learned that the buildings were to be torn down. Stead immediately launched a campaign to preserve them.Footnote ¹⁸ That was just a warm-up act. Soon, he was investigating all of Chicago’s ills. He hit upon the angle of asking people: If Christ came to Chicago, what would he think of various aspects of the city’s life? Stead rented the Central Music Hall and announced two meetings to be held on November 12. Chicago’s residents were to gather together and face their city’s problems. With his flair for sensationalism, Stead brought various people to say something at these meetings who were guaranteed to generate publicity, including a well-known madam and an anarchist who had gone to prison for violent acts. After these meetings, Stead continued to collect evidence and to harangue people. It all went into the book. Stead’s explosive exposé, If Christ Came to Chicago, was published in February 1894. Its author prudently left town the day before.

As with the “Maiden Tribute” articles, If Christ Came to Chicago, had both allies and enemies. For our purposes, a key line of attack was that Stead was an outsider, a foreigner, a transatlantic interloper. This challenge crystallized even before the book appeared. Stead was invited to address the Chicago Woman’s Club. Relishing his prophetic office, he railed at these society women, denouncing the wealthy, self-indulgent ladies of Chicago as “more disreputable in the eyes of God” than “the worst harlot.”Footnote ¹⁹ Stead, however, was not the only journalist with a penchant for sensationalism. The Chicago press whipped up a tidal wave of ill-will toward him, claiming that this British guest had slandered the women of Chicago, accusing godly church ladies of being the worst women in all the world. Stead’s paper also had a highly successful subsidiary, the American Review of Reviews. Its American editor told Stead frankly that he had “over-stepped the bounds of propriety as a foreign visitor” and thus destroyed his influence.Footnote ²⁰ The Chicago Tribune dismissed Stead as an outsider who just wanted to use Chicago in order to gain “further notoriety in London.”Footnote ²¹ Stead was taken aback when a distinguished person he respected told him to his face that he should have never presumed to write such a book because he was not a United States citizen.Footnote ²² Indeed, residents of the Windy City could be fiercely competitive. Late nineteenth-century Chicagoans were inclined to point out, as if they were boasting, that the Chicago Fire of 1871 was much bigger than the so-called Great Fire of London in 1666.Footnote ²³

As many of us do in our scholarship, I am partially musing on these themes for personal reasons. My transatlantic crossing is in the other direction. I am an American who studies the British. Some of you know that my wife is British. That is what anthropologists call participant observation. I earned my PhD in Britain, and held my first faculty position not in the Midwest of America but in the Midlands of England. My original academic home was not the American Society of Church History, but the Ecclesiastical History Society, and I was published in its annual, Studies in Church History, before my work ever appeared in our society’s journal, Church History. Part of why I so relish the high honor of being your president is that for many years I told myself that because I did not attend an American doctoral program and come up through the ranks and networks on this side of the Atlantic, I would find myself forever excluded from the inner workings of the American academy.

IV. The Sinking of the Titanic

Transatlantic efforts can go awry. As it happens, W. T. Stead took part in one of the most famous transatlantic failures of the twentieth century. And it literally killed him. On April 15, 1912, he went down with the Titanic. The sinking of the Titanic was the last providential act in history. Or, to put it more accurately, at least in our context of Britain and America, it is the last time there was a general, widespread view in mainstream culture that a major current event could be attributed to a specific, divine intention that was readily discernible. This providential explanation was the result of two interlocking components. The first was the astonishingly long list of improbable factors that all went wrong, if any single one of which had gone differently so many lives would not have been lost. Just to name a few, these included forgetting to bring binoculars for the look-outs; ignoring messages warning about icebergs, and even demanding that other ships stop sending them; a nearby ship, which, with incredible obtuseness, watched the Titanic repeatedly send up flares, but somehow could not grasp that they were a distress signal; and the failure to equip the ship with anything close to enough lifeboats. It was even calculated that if the crew had seen the iceberg either 15 s earlier or 15 s later, the ship would not have hit the iceberg in a way that would have caused it to sink.Footnote ²⁴

The second component in this providential view was the all-too-manifest moral failings that invited the wrath of God. The Titanic was designed to be unprecedentedly, ostentatiously luxurious. The outrageousness of finding such fittings on a mere mode of transport – from tennis courts to palm courts – was part of the point. The iceberg was hit on a Sunday evening. It was standard practice at that time for liners to forbid card playing on Sundays in order to honor the sabbath, but the Titanic had waived this restriction for its carousing debut outing. The captain himself was seen by many passengers on that fatal sabbath in full evening dress, attending a lavish dinner party. First class was populated with the idle rich, frivolously amusing themselves. This maiden voyage was such a society event that, when the Titanic sailed, the New York Times listed on its front page the prominent people who were on board. New Yorkers agreed that the leader of this fat-cat pack was the forty-seven-year-old John Jacob Astor, one of the wealthiest men in the world. He had recently scandalized the public by leaving the wife of his youth for a woman who was but a youth – eighteen years old, to be precise. It flickered across more than one mind that such an immoral, self-indulgent creature deserved to die. Stead himself was travelling first class. The cheapest such ticket costs $400, whereas one could travel second class for just $60. (And I am leaving out altogether the third class, which, of course, is where the majority of the passengers were.) A schoolteacher earned around $500 per annum in 1912. In other words, although Stead liked to play the prophet – denouncing the pampered rich and demanding that people help those in need – for greater luxury on a mere handful of days of travel, he was willing to throw away a lot of money that could have made a significant difference in the lives of quite a few poor people. One might wonder: If Christ crossed the Atlantic on an ocean liner, would he make the same choice?

The providential view of this disastrous event was immediately and widely adopted. The ship sank on a Monday, and on the following Sunday, just to take one example, E. J. Pulsford, the minister of the New Church in Bath, England, preached a sermon titled “Divine Providence and the Titanic Disaster.” Pulsford averred: “One cannot read the details without having it very forcibly suggested that some of the besetting evils of our present-day life are at the root of it … the calamity is but the natural fruit of the evil of our age.”Footnote ²⁵ And that perspective has endured ever since. In his 1955 bestseller about the tragedy, A Night to Remember, Walter Lord included a chapter named after the comment made by a crewmember before the Titanic sailed, which so drove home the providential view: “God himself could not sink this ship.”Footnote ²⁶ Lord’s book begins with a foreword that recounts an uncanny premonition. In 1898, a novel called Futility told the story of a new, playground-of-a-liner billed as “unsinkable,” which hits an iceberg and goes to the bottom of the sea. Many people die because there are not enough lifeboats. That fictitious ship was called – believe it or not – the Titan. But wait, there’s more. On June 18, 2023, everyone on board a submersible attempting to go to the wreck of the Titanic was killed when it imploded. The passengers were wealthy businessmen doing something that arguably had no justification beyond self-indulgence, and there was a sense in a lot of the ensuing commentary that hubris, entitlement, and conspicuous consumption were still being punished in the deep waters of the Atlantic. Moreover, believe it or not, the submersible that imploded was called the Titan, the very same name used in the 1898 novel that predicted it all.

Alma White of the Pillar of Fire Church is generally considered to be the first American woman to be recognized as holding the office of bishop. She also wrote a book on the tragedy. White declared that the loss at sea of so many lives was a providential occurrence that was easy to read, even for beginners: “Who is so stupid and dull of comprehension as not to be able to see the handwriting on the wall in the sinking of the Titanic!”Footnote ²⁷ With exegetical relish, she sermonized on the vision in Daniel 2 in which an image with a head of gold is smashed by a rock that was not cut out with human hands. The rock, of course, being the iceberg, with the Titanic being the image of our modern Babylon. Maybe on the Titanic’s maiden voyage, Stead himself was part of the maiden tribute of modern Babylon. For our purposes, however, what is remarkable is that – in Alma White’s telling – the image represents the British empire, and the sinking of the Titanic is not only read providentially, but specifically as the Almighty’s judgment on the English. This is the reverse transatlantic exchange from the one Stead had made: here we have an American taking on the self-imposed task of telling Britons some home truths. The very name, Great Britain, exuded arrogance, White pontificated, and now the Almighty was judging that nation for its “presumption and pride”: “The pride of a typical Englishman is almost inconceivable.”Footnote ²⁸ There is an entire chapter titled “Prominent Characteristics of the English.” The English, White explained, are such an insufferable race as to say in their hearts: “Our wisdom has been demonstrated for many generations. ‘Yankees’ can teach us nothing.”Footnote ²⁹ That, of course, is such a provoking attitude that “it would be unjust if there were no divine retribution.”Footnote ³⁰

I will add just one more sea-worthy rivet to drive this point home. Gilbert Talbot was from an elite, aristocratic English family. In 1912, he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. When the Titanic sank, he promptly gave a speech about the tragedy to a student club. In it, Talbot painted this “vast floating Ritz” as a moral outrage:

In short, to reiterate, the sinking of the Titanic was an event that seemed to many people one that could be readily read providentially. A few years later, however, the First World War was raging, and Gilbert Talbot was serving his country as an army officer. The body of a dead German soldier was decaying just outside their trench, and “the smell was upsetting the men.”Footnote ³² Talbot ordered a sergeant to move it, and the luckless man was killed in the attempt. It was hard to find a conceptual or linguistic register of meaning with which to make sense of such realities. Talbot only survived in France for two and a half months. He died in one of those futile, slaughterous assaults for which World War One is remembered: literally everyone who made the attempt was either killed or wounded. The consensus view became that the war was meaningless. Even priests and ordained ministers serving as military chaplains concurred in that view.Footnote ³³ Here was an unprecedentedly big event in history – a great war, a world war – yet it did not seem to reveal any clearly discernible, divine intention. For many people – for mainstream society as a whole – a providential view of history also sailed out for the last time on the maiden voyage of the Titanic.

V. The Burden of the Word against Chicago

And so we return to If Christ Came to Chicago. Repeating the pattern from the “Maiden Tribute” campaign, because Stead was indisputably a sensationalist, it was possible to argue that he was a perpetrator rather than a prophet. The American and Union news companies refused to distribute the book, and the Chicago newspaper, the Inter Ocean, summarized their decision with the headline, “Stead’s Book Barred. Pronounced Blasphemous by the Big News Companies.”Footnote ³⁴ Other critics echoed this view that the very title of Stead’s book should be considered sacrilegious. That reaction, however, in all likelihood, was a spurious one being wielded by people who disliked the book for other reasons, the primary one being that it made Chicago or America look bad. A range of ministers in the city, including a Presbyterian and a Congregationalist, took advantage of the publicity generated by the book to preach a sermon titled, “If Christ Came to Chicago,” so that phrase was not inherently offensive to pious ears.Footnote ³⁵ Still, Stead sensed that religious language had a special frisson, and he used it compulsively. For instance, he referred to the city’s three leading businessmen – George M. Pullman, Marshall Field, and Philip Armour – as “Chicago’s Trinity.”Footnote ³⁶ Many of the chapter titles are biblical quotations or allusions, including less predictable ones such as “Casting Out Devils” and “The Tyranny of the Assyrian.” Most of the time, all Stead meant by what he called the Civic Church was that people of goodwill from all religions or none should organize together to do humanitarian work. As he pithily put it: “Men may differ about original sin, [but] they agree about the necessity of supplying pure water.”Footnote ³⁷ Stead reported candidly in If Christ Came to Chicago that the Roman Catholic leader in Britain, the archbishop of Westminster, had told him: “Call it anything but a church and I am with you with all my heart. Call it a church and not one of my people will lift a finger to help you.”Footnote ³⁸ You would think that winning over such a large communion would be sufficient incentive for so insignificant an adjustment in the scheme as one of mere nomenclature, but apparently Stead’s Messiah Complex made him stubbornly unwilling to let go of the fantasy that there might be a sense in which he could become the founder of the one, universal church.

Another charge against the book had greater plausibility. In a complete inversion of today’s laws, in 1890s Chicago, gambling was illegal, but prostitution was not. At that time, the municipal government’s approach to vice – both legal and illegal – was to try to contain it in a notorious redlight district, the Levee. As it happens, that district was just about three blocks due west of our hotel here. I know about some of the insatiable appetites of our society’s members, so your interest might be piqued by the fact that what you will find if you go there today is an establishment called Sandmeyer’s, which is a charming, independent bookstore. In If Christ Came to Chicago, Stead provided not only an apparently complete list of every den of vice, but even each one’s exact address. Extraordinarily, he even provided a map with the houses of ill-repute marked out in red and their street address prominently affixed in a large font. This all added a dose of ambiguity: was Stead exposing wrong or doing wrong? It did not take a terribly dirty mind to realize that Stead’s denunciatory tome could be reverse-engineered to serve as a remarkably well-researched and highly accurate low-life guidebook. The Chicago Tribune dubbed If Christ Came to Chicago “a directory of sin,” adding: “The book really belongs to the class of literature that is denominated obscene, and as such ought to be suppressed.”Footnote ³⁹ Inter Ocean grumbled that the only reason why the book was selling so well was that it was a magnet for the type of smutty reader who wishes to indulge “a prurient curiosity.”Footnote ⁴⁰ And, to state the obvious, the efforts of the editor of the Review of Reviews did not turn Chicago into the City of God he heralded. Before Billy Sunday failed, Chicago was the town that W. T. Stead could not shut down.

If Christ Came to Chicago, however, was a product of the Social Gospel movement, and therefore did not tackle only vice, but also other problems, including homelessness and unemployment. Stead praised Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission, which still exists today. Indeed, it is the oldest, continuous homeless shelter in the United States. As no doubt you have also experienced, Stead reminded readers of “the very cold wind which blows on the shores of Lake Michigan.”Footnote ⁴¹ As was the case in the Social Gospel movement in general, Stead unabashedly envisioned a magisterial reformation: “For the improvement of the lot of the least of these, Christ’s brethren, the assistance of the municipal authority is indispensable.”Footnote ⁴² But civic leaders were also part of the problem. Stead hit hard the corruption of politicians. During my own lifetime so far, no less than four people who have served as governor of Illinois have gone to prison. When the last one was sentenced, a local newspaper ran a cartoon with the erstwhile powerful politician arriving at the penitentiary and the warden explaining apologetically, “I’m sorry, sir, but the governor’s suite is already taken.”

Having painted Chicago as a sewer of a city, toward the end of the book, in a chapter titled, “In the Twentieth Century,” Stead presents a positive picture of a post-reform, glorious, imagined, future midwestern metropolis. He evokes a Chicago that had tackled its problems and taken its rightful, premier place. It was a flattering vision: The Windy City has become “the capital of America, for all rivalry to Chicago as the capital had disappeared at the dawn of the twentieth century. Even New York no longer dreamed of contesting the supremacy of the younger city.”Footnote ⁴³ Earlier in the book, Stead had already imagined – in a startling prediction of events we have just experienced – a reform-minded, “English-speaking Pope,” and even wondered if the papacy itself might want to relocate to the shores of Lake Michigan.Footnote ⁴⁴ Chicagoans have marveled at Stead’s prescience. He predicted, for instance, the regaining of the lakefront property as public park land. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra certainly fulfills Stead’s prediction that Chicago would have a leading position in “musical America.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Workers did secure an eight-hour day. Bertha Palmer did not become mayor, but Chicago would elect a woman mayor in the twentieth century. And Stead’s book did lead to some immediate, welcome action. It prompted some prominent citizens to form the Civic Federation, an organization that continues to exist and has done a great deal of good.Footnote ⁴⁶ One of its key founders was also one of Stead’s main supporters, the Christian social reformer Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House. A plan was also quickly implemented to hire the unemployed to clean the city’s streets. This effort was so thoroughly recognized as a response to If Christ Came to Chicago that these workers were called “Stead’s Brigades.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The book also inspired Charles M. Sheldon, the minister of Central Congregational Church, Topeka, Kansas, to write his Social Gospel novel, In His Steps (1896), one of the bestselling books of all time.Footnote ⁴⁸ The – at certain times, in certain places – ubiquitous question, “What would Jesus do?,” can indirectly be traced back to Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago. In a theological improvement upon Stead, Sheldon spoke of the third person of the Trinity coming to Chicago: “And still the Holy Spirit moved over the great, heaving, selfish, pleasure-loving, sin-stained city.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Stead’s text resounded for decades. As late as 1943, the English, Anglo-Catholic journalist, Sidney Dark, wrote a book titled If Christ Came to London. Stead would have liked it. Dark wrote bluntly, “By a Christian revolution I mean a Socialist revolution, and the object of this book is to demonstrate that a Socialist revolution would be a Christian revolution.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Building off the success of If Christ Came to Chicago, just five months later, Stead published another volume about the Windy City, which he claimed was a kind of sequel, Chicago To-Day; or, the Labour War in America (1894). Chicago was the center for organized labor in America, and this book chronicled the strikes that had broken out, not least at the Pullman Company, a leading manufacturer of railroad cars, which was based in Chicago. Chicago To-Day was a Social Gospel tract, one that unabashedly sided with the workers against the owners, and heralded “the evolution of modern society from the competitive to the co-operative stage.” Stead even echoed The Communist Manifesto, commending an arrangement in which “each man would work according to his might, and receive according to his need.”Footnote ⁵¹ He noted that some of the strikers waved red flags. The Social Gospel ministry of George Herron, Professor of Applied Christianity, at Iowa College, was championed in a chapter titled, “A Prophet of the Social Revolution.” Stead was careful to praise Chicago. He was more gun shy now, aware this time around of the perils of transatlantic presumption: “I speak with some trepidation, for fear I shall be taken up by the gentleman who resents these passing observations from a stranger … if the gentleman who has intimated his dissent were to come to London and say of us a thousand-fold harder things than any which I have ventured to hint of Chicago, there is not one of us would care a straw what he said.”Footnote ⁵² Chicago was then being led by someone who turned out to be the first of nine Irish Catholic mayors. The celebrated Chicago journalist, Finley Peter Dunn, both of whose parents had been born in Ireland, had once been asked if he was a Roman Catholic and replied that, no, he was a “Chicago Catholic.”Footnote ⁵³ To this day, the city dyes the entire Chicago River green every year for St Patrick’s Day. The editor of the Review of Reviews observed: “The Irish, being forbidden to rule their own country, have recouped themselves by ruling the great American cities.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Stead’s critics in Chicago, however, were not won around by this second offering either. The Chicago Tribune dismissed Stead’s book-length treatment of labor relations as trade union propaganda: “He looks at the question from one side only, and that is the side of the Anarchist.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Inter Ocean judged that Chicago To-Day was “simple and unmitigated compost,” which I am pretty sure is a polite, Victorian way of calling it shit.Footnote ⁵⁶

VI. Our Common English-Speaking Race

Stead, the prophet, was preoccupied with major cities. He saw London as Babylon and Chicago as Nineveh. He was even fond of referring to Chicago as “that great city,” just as the Almighty had done about Nineveh in the book of Jonah.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1889, Stead had written a note to himself: “I now see that I am called to found for the Nineteenth Century a city of God.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1897, Stead took on America’s largest metropolis, New York City. In so doing, he had now written (or at least ghostwritten) a volume about each of the three biggest cities in the English-speaking world. Indeed, speaking of ghostwriting, even his spirit guide, Julia, recognized this trinity. She insisted that one should no more grieve the death of someone you love than you would if they had moved “to New York, or Chicago, or London.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Stead’s Gotham City tirade was titled, Satan’s Invisible World Displayed. He had used that phrase for Part III of If Christ Came to Chicago, but it was obviously so thunderously prophetic and religiously charged that he could not resist employing it again. And, of course, that title was on to something. Perhaps you know that the American Society of Church History shied away from New York City last year because it was unwilling to give the devil his due. In Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, there was even a chapter titled, “Belial on the Judgement Seat.” This third book about America, however, made almost no impression. Someone else had sounded the alarm about New York City’s corruption years earlier, an investigation had followed, and reforms were made. Stead’s book merely chronicled those events, and most especially republished the publicly available information uncovered during the official inquiry. In short, the book was not a work of original investigative journalism, but merely a report about abuses that had already been exposed and addressed. For our purposes, what is most interesting about Satan’s Invisible World Displayed is Stead’s attempt to counter the charge of being a transatlantic interloper by presenting a view of the world that reclassified him as an insider. He spoke of “our common English-speaking race”: “The English-speaking race is one race, and the English-speaking world the common fatherland of all who speak the English tongue.”Footnote ⁶⁰

That schematic move reached its zenith in a book Stead published in 1902: The Americanisation of the World or The Trend of the Twentieth Century. It acknowledged unreservedly that the United States was destined to be the greatest power in the world, but once again introduced the category of “the English-Speaking race” as a way to include his own homeland in this triumph. The editor of the Review of Reviews analogized that Great Britain was like Judaism to America’s Christianity.Footnote ⁶¹ Stead’s vision had racism thoroughly baked into it. He seems to have chosen this ambiguous “English-speaking” construction because “Anglo-Saxon” would have left the Irish out. Still, Stead was forced to use the word “white” sometimes to bring a bit of conceptional clarity to this inherently fuzzy notion. He obviously did not believe that, for instance, someone from the Punjab could become part of the English-speaking race by becoming an English speaker. On the other hand, it would seem he did imagine that German, Polish, and Norwegian immigrants to America could be melted into the “English-speaking race.” It certainly never occurred to Stead that one way that Christ would come to Chicago in the twentieth century would be through Black bodies on the move as a result of the Great Migration. In fairness, however, a year later Stead retracted his championing of the English-speaking race, conceding that it had been marked by “parochialism,” and that he had failed to attend to the virtues exhibited by other races.Footnote ⁶² In a boosterish mood when he wrote The Americanisation of the World, he imagined the United States annexing more and more territory. Canada, for instance, just to take one salient example. Chicago was frequently evoked. Stead illustrated the reach of the United States by observing that the British government had decided that the best way to provide a telephone service in London was to contract the Western Electric Company of Chicago. Stead even boasted that the “Vice-Empress of India” was a “Chicago girl.”Footnote ⁶³ She was the former Mary Leiter, the daughter of a wealthy partner in what became Marshall Field and Company, but had once been Field and Leiter. Mary Leiter’s marriage to the Englishman George Curzon led to her eventually becoming The Lady Curzon, Viceregal-Consort of India. And the transatlantic effort that was the Curzon marriage was apparently a successful one.

Presumably realizing that he would never become the founder of the one universal church encompassing all people of goodwill, Stead settled back into appreciating the conservative evangelicalism of his youth. He was elated when an evangelist from Chicago, R. A. Torrey, came in 1903 to conduct revival meetings in England. Some of his fellow liberal Congregationalists denounced these meetings on the grounds that Torrey was too wedded to “the old-time religion,” but Stead retorted that they should be liberal enough to tolerate conservatives. Stead admitted that the daily press treated Torrey’s evangelistic meetings fairly, but he grumbled that they ought to have covered them sensationally so as to swell the crowds that could benefit from them.Footnote ⁶⁴

Looking back on Stead’s life, there had been eerie premonitions of its Titanic end. Way back in 1886, he had warned that a tragedy would occur if liners were not required to have sufficient lifeboats.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Darkest England contained this analogy: “When a man is drowning in mid-ocean the one thing that is needful, no doubt, is that he should plant his feet firmly on terra firma. But, how is he to get there? It is just the one thing he cannot do.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Loquacious, deceased Julia cautioned regarding passing from this life to the next: “What is necessary is to recognise that the Borderland is as important (at least) to cross as the Atlantic, but that it is not any more safe.”Footnote ⁶⁷ All sources agree that the editor of the Review of Reviews acquitted himself well in the final, transatlantic crisis that took his life. He was seen helping women and children into lifeboats. He gave away his life preserver to someone without one. I suspect his last, recorded words will stir and inspire the hearts of many members of this society, “I’m going back to my cabin to read.”Footnote ⁶⁸ One survivor even reported that it was Stead who had requested that the band play, “Nearer, My God, To Thee.”Footnote ⁶⁹ That was fitting. In his 1904 book, Hymns That Have Helped, Stead observed of this song: “It might fairly be called the most popular hymn among all sorts and conditions of men in America.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The Titanic went down closer to America than Britain, and, in any event, the United States was rising to be the world’s preeminent power, so it was a gracious instinct to let the Americans have their preferred choice for a recessional. Transatlantic cooperation cannot happen without such gestures. At his death, Stead was still the editor of the Review of Reviews. Its obituary tribute observed: “His grave is where he might have chosen it, between England and America.”Footnote ⁷¹