The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

This convergence of elements in the late-nineteenth-century United States, Strong concluded, could not be an accident; it was part of God’s plan. God was “training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future.” The moment of a final contest between the races was at hand, and God was schooling Anglo-Saxons for victory and conquest. Strong’s God was an evangelical one, not Calvinist, and Anglo-Saxons had to choose their destiny. God had given them capacities—their skill at creating wealth, their “genius for colonizing”—that, if properly used would lead Americans to spread across the world, and other races would not only have no choice other than submitting but would also be happy to do so. Strong spiced his racism with religion to explain why Americans would make the right choice. All civilizations had their vices, and Anglo-Saxons would succumb to their own materialism without the “salt” of Christianity. He regarded popular government as providential and irreversible, but without Christianity, it could decline into anarchism.