A tangled web emerges here at Biteback and The Robson Press. David Swanson, author of War Is A Lie, speaks of a peace activist on the Titanic at War is a Crime. The activist hails from the first class passengers of the famous ship. Not only have The Robson Press published a book on the first class passengers of the Titanic – Hugh Brewster's Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage – but they're also soon to publish a book on the peace activist in question: W. T Stead, whose story is told in Muckraker...
'As we mark the 100-year anniversary of the unsinkable Titanic sinking, we should recall both the good and bad of that long-forgotten world of 1912. Were an unbelievably expensive means of luxury travel between the United States and Europe invented today, there would be no reason to expect peace activists to be found among the passengers. But it is not at all surprising that among the first-class passengers on the world's largest ship in 1912 was a well-known advocate of peace.'...
'Stead saw the United States' history, including its disarmament after its Civil War and its tradition of maintaining no standing armies on the scale common in Europe, as an example to be cherished and followed rather than strayed from. He also modeled his vision of a United States of Europe on the United States of America.'...
'Stead sought to draw lessons from the United States that the United States would itself reject:
"What are the New World conditions? They are these: all the States dwell together in Federal Union, without hostile frontiers and without standing armies, and with a greater expenditure upon education than upon armaments."
Can you even imagine what it would be like if the United States today spent more on education than on armaments? In such a bizarre world, some of us might have heard of people like William Thomas Stead.'...