'Hero of Our Race': The King Alfred Millenary and the construction of Anglo-American imperial and racial identity

The Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great was admired in many eras, but never more than in the nineteenth century. This glorification reached its zenith with the King Alfred Millenary, the celebration of the thousand-year anniversary of his death, in which English, American, and other admirers gathered to pay tribute to the man they styled the “Hero of Our Race.”; The Alfred Millenary arose from and partook of a particular moment in Anglo-American history. Planning for the Millenary was begun in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War and one year after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The Millenary was held in 1901, the year of the deaths of Victoria and President McKinley. This time period, 1898–1901, was also one of growing Anglo-American rapprochement and saw the United States entering into the league of colonialist powers, an entry that England alone seemed to support. Debate over the nature of imperialism—its justification and goals—was widespread at the time. Finally, in this period, racialist doctrines about the relative superiority of various races were applied to all areas of Western culture.; These three things—Anglo-American rapprochement, imperialism, and racialism—were complexly interrelated and depended for their strength and prominence on each other. For example, Anglo-American rapprochement was based in part on perceived racial similarities between the two countries and found support in the racialist doctrine of Anglo-Saxonism. The rapprochement also arose from and in turn supported the various imperial ambitions of the two countries, ambitions that were justified in part by Anglo-Saxonism.; The Alfred Millenary was both the culmination and incarnation of this complex nexus. Anglo-American rapprochement, imperialism, and Anglo-Saxonism found their expression in this celebration of the ninth-century king. Alfred was seen as the common racial ancestor of the English and the Americans whose superiority supported the claims of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and thus Anglo-American imperial ambitions. In its rhetoric, symbolism, and physical form, the King Alfred Millenary drew on and reinforced these links between imperialism, Anglo-Saxonism, and Anglo-American rapprochement, thus becoming not just the celebration of an important historical personage, but indeed the very embodiment of the current historical moment.