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epilogue Dreaming of the White Republic, Defending the Souls of Black Folk Amid the public debate over American imperialism in 1899, the former vice consul -general to Haiti, Arthur Bird, mused about how the United States and the world would change over the next hundred years. Playing off Edward Bellamy’s enormously popular utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, Bird penned his own prediction for the future, Looking Forward: A Dream of the United States of America in 1999. His vision of what the future held demonstrated how radically northern whites’ religious, national, and racial imaginations had altered since the mid-1860s. An ethnic nationalism of whiteness, underpinned by Protestantism, had penetrated and had come to dominate the American psyche. Looking Forward showed that whiteness, Protestantism, American nationalism, and imperialism were bound tightly together in the moral conception of whites by the turn of the century. African Americans, especially W. E. B. Du Bois, continued to attack the tenets of the white republic and armed themselves for a long battle. They held fast to the belief that racial status or affiliation should not be considered in determining the national citizenry, but they lost the battle for America’s identity. They stepped into the new century ready for war, but with far less hope than they had a generation earlier. In Bird’s Looking Forward, the world was drastically transformed during the twentieth century. These hundred years were marked by the ascendance and control of whiteness and Protestant Christianity. Germany gobbled up France; the SpanishandTurkishnationswerewipedoffthemap;CentralandSouthAmericans rushed to link arms with the United States after the War of 1898; and the United States dominated the entire Western Hemisphere. The American capital was moved to Mexico, a land of “perpetual sunshine and flowers,” and Admiral Dewey, “the idol of America,” became President Dewey. Sectional grievances within the original United States were completely obliterated. “[T]hat little strip of territory lying between Mason and Dixon’s line and the gulf of Mexico was no longer known epilogue / 245 or recognized as the South,” Bird wrote. While the end of the twentieth century witnessed hemispheric control by the United States, it also entailed the global supremacy of Protestant Christianity and the Anglo-Saxon race. Great Britain triumphed victoriously throughout the globe, maintaining its control over India and ruling the entire continent of Africa. “The power and stamina of the Anglo-Saxon race,” Bird claimed, “dominated the world in 1999 through the vast Republic of the Americas and the world-wide British empire.” Religious faith was especially crucial to Anglo-Saxon authority, and missionaries marched across the Earth leaving schools and churches along the way. “At the close of the twentieth century indications point to a general christianizing of all peoples on the globe.” “America,” he concluded, “is destined to become the Light of the World.”1 Racial antagonism and alienation continued to flourish in Bird’s twentieth century ,asthebloodofwhitesandblacksdrenchedtheland.ToBird,thereasonforthe violence was simple: “the troublesome Ethiopians” refused to accept second-class citizenship passively. And whites became increasingly frustrated with these black ne’er do wells. “The fact cannot be denied,” Bird professed, “that the presence of thenegroinNorthAmericaisundesirable.”Heimaginedthatby1960anenormous mass movement would form to push people of color out of the original United States: “People commenced to realize that the negro was an utterly alien race; that when they landed here America gained nothing,” he prophesied. “The propositiontotransferthenegropopulationtotheCentralandSouthernAmericanStates was agitated in that year.” Congress followed the will of the people, and African AmericanswereremovedtoseveralprovincesinVenezuela.There,theyfarmedand lived on horse meat. In 1975, “[e]ven Boston,” the hub of opposition to African American removal, “applauded the movement as being a philanthropic one, calculated to increase the well being of the negro. The brainy men of Boston argued that reservationshadbeenfrequentlypurchasedfortheuseofIndians,andtherewasno good reason why one should not be purchased for the use of the American negro.” The United States would finally become a “white man’s country” in name and in reality.2 Bird’s predictions regarding race relations in this future world were dark and disturbing, but they were not far from mainstream public opinions. His forecast of racial segregation paralleled that of author and reformer Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward was undoubtedly the most popular utopian novel of the nineteenth century. It sold sixty thousand copies in its first full year of distribution , and more than one hundred thousand in 1889. His novel was so popular, in fact, that it led thousands of northerners to form “Nationalist Clubs” to discuss [3.141.31.240...

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