GR: Crystal Palace resonances

[L E Bryan]

> On Sep 26, 2017, at 3:32 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "The election campaign of 1874--or, to fix the date exactly, Disraeli's speech in the Crystal Palace in 1872--marked the birth of imperialism 
> as the catch phrase of domestic politics. [mostly re The Irish Question]---J. Schumpeter, "Imperialism as a Catch Phrase", 1955. 
> 
> There seems to be a consensus that the growth of the modern bureaucratic state of the West, such an almost unique historical focus  [in fiction at least] of Gravity's Rainbow,  happened because of the need to administer, 'manage', the colonies. England first then the US from around 1898. 
> 
> in that mid-war year 1943, a year before GR is set, the Vice President of the US gave a major-enough speech that declared that America would no longer maintain, try to build, an empire, sez Louis Fischer, later biographer of Gandhi, who was there, in a little book called Empire, 1944. 
> About that promise.........

Of course that would have been the hated Henry Wallace, dumped by the Democratic Party in 1944 for the more influenceable (they thought) Harry Truman. The Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, still had visions of manifest destiny.

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