T.S. Eliot, American by birth, English by choice, was once asked why he had moved to London, instead of settling down in St. Louis with a nice woman from the midwest.

"I didn't like being dead that much," was his reply.

Eliot shared one of American intellectuals' most unflattering prejudices -- a contempt for things American. Just sit in the cafes on the Left Bank in Paris today. Make sure you are in the company of American intellectuals... and mention McDonalds. Or Monica Lewinsky. Or Guiliani, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. 

I visit this subject because almost everyone expects the next century to be dominated by America... by its culture, its businesses, and its stock market. Nearly every editorial page makes some reference to "American Triumphalism." Nearly every editorial writer is appalled by McDonalds... and contemptuous of the great hoi polloi of middle-class America... but proud to sit with them on top of the world. My prediction: they will slip from their perch before the end of this decade. Eliot spent most of his life in London.

His first wife went mad and had to be institutionalized after their separation. His most famous poem, The Wasteland, described the hollowness of post-WWI feeling. God was dead. What was left? Eliot had no interest in politics.

"What shall I do now? What shall I do?" 'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street 'With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? 'What shall we ever do?'

But he never went back to St. Louis. 

For a long time it had been the habit of European intellectuals to disparage America... and for American intellectuals to agree with them. Sydney Smith, in the mid-Victorian era, asked if anyone would really care to see an American play or listen to an American tune. I believe it was he who called the whole nation an "experiment in vulgarity."

The Figaro newspaper has been around in Paris for a long time. It reprinted a copy of its front page from 1900 -- as part of its first edition of the year 2000. I noted an interesting article about Senator Andrews Clark. I never heard of him. But the Washington correspondent said he was the richest man in the senate, richer than the next 8 richest senators put together. He made his money, the article tells us, starting with nothing but a team of oxen. He drove them out to a copper mine, the Verde Mine, where he made his fortune. By the turn of the century, he had banks, railways, rubber plantations, you name it.

Was he vulgar? Probably as vulgar as a bus station. But, in New York, he also had a collection of masterpieces from the "modern french school," which probably adorn the walls of some public museum today. The Figaro wondered wistfully whether it might be possible to get "this prodigious businessman" to Paris, where "our artists and poor would have no reason to object."

Joseph Conrad described this quality of American business in his character, Holroyd, who says, "we shall run the world's business whether it likes it or not."

And indeed, that is what happened in the 20th century.

It turned out to be an American Century, just as Henry Luce had suggested. But America's chattering classes have no idea of what brought about America's triumph, nor what to do with it.