The last moments of Sacco and Vanzetti, among many others whom Elliott dispatched, were much more peaceful than they might have been. Elliott, an electrical engineer who, in the absence of anyone else, developed a unique talent for electrocuting condemned criminals "gently." That's not an oxymoron, considering that, at the hands of the less skilled, death in the electric chair could result in eyeball explosions and/or the victim being roasted alive. OK, that sounds like grist for a grandiloquent subtitle, but Bryson doesn't dwell on it. "Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world." "With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American humor and sensibilities," he writes. Afterward, though, there was a feeling that the United States was not just growing in prominence, but also in dominance.Īmericans, for instance, led the way with talkies and flooded the world market with movies that exposed the rest of the globe "to American voices, American vocabulary, American cadence and pronunciation and word order." That, writes Bryson, had a profound psychological effect. On the way, Bryson does note that, prior to Lindbergh's flight, Americans had always expected important things to happen in Europe.
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