Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  The resulting theory would predict that the same plight of backwardness was a powerful natural force that could also strike white Europeans who tried to settle America. This was no abstract or marginal debate. It involved Europe's best minds, the leading naturalists, scientists, and philosophers of the day. Few of those who insisted that America was intrin sically inferior to Europe ever visited there. Like those of many later antiAmericans, their theories were based on ignorance and misinformation or a distortion of facts designed to prove some political standpoint, philosophical concept, or scientific theory.

  These claims could also be based on some apparently self-evident observations. Why, European thinkers asked, was the American continent so sparsely populated? Didn't this imply that it lacked the essential requirements for human life? Even if America could eventually be civilized, this task just beginning would require, as it had in Europe, countless generations to achieve. Moreover, they added, in Europe nature was fairly benign and assisted humankind, while in America such features as hurricanes, floods, lightning storms, poisonous snakes, deadly insects, and epidemic diseases were a wild force that would have to be conquered with great difficulty.

  The issue of climate obsessed the Europeans, especially since they heard most about the blizzards of frosty New England, or frigid French Canada, or the humid South. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with no air conditioning or effective central heating, people were the pawns of weather. The food one ate, health or infirmity, and wealth or poverty all depended on the climate. Extremes of hot or cold were said to create unstable people and conditions inimical to progress.

  Equally, most Europeans considered the taming of nature to be the basis of civilization. The gardens of England and France were wellordered affairs in which flowers, waterfalls, and trees were made to march in discipline. Wild nature meant wild men; a disorderly environment engendered a lawless and backward society. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau might see Native Americans as exemplars of the "noble savage" who enjoyed freedom without the burdens of an oppressive social structure. But most of his contemporaries were convinced that they were only savages plain and simple.

  And how could their environment permit anything else? For either it made civilization impossible or, at best, it might take many centuries to wrest a decent society from the hostile wilderness. European thinking leaned toward the view that success was impossible. In his noted 1748 work, The Spirit of the Law, the French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu said that the "temper of the mind" and "passions of the heart" are prisoners to climate. In cooler ones, such as in Northern Europe, people were more vigorous, possessing additional strength, courage, and frankness while being less prone to suspicion.4 But he also warned that a wilderness that had remained largely uninhabited must have a dangerous climate, perhaps fatal to any colonist who went there., Taming this hostile soil and climate would require a constant, probably losing battle.6

  Most of the ammunition for the early anti-Americans came from another Frenchman, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Although now largely forgotten, Buffon was considered to be the greatest biologist and naturalist of his time. His works were widely read and quoted. Born in 1707 into a family of minor officials in a provincial town, he was at first an indifferent student of law and later of mathematics at the University of Angers. Leaving school, he embarked on extensive travels throughout Europe.7

  On returning to France in 1732, however, Buffon become both serious and ambitious. Ironically, as a social-climbing, innovative, aggressive selfpromoter, Buffon seemed to embody the kind of figure who two centuries later would be the French intellectuals' negative stereotype of an American. Indeed, Buffon was such a good politician that he even survived the French Revolution with his head intact, no mean feat for a man who became a royal official and aristocrat.

  Buffon's success began when he started translating into French works by the British scientist Isaac Newton and others. He networked with the aristocracy until his contacts brought him to the favorable attention of King Louis XV. As a result, in 1739, Buffon was elected to the prestigious Academy of Sciences and became director of the Royal Botanical Garden, making him officially the country's top expert on nature. He was a colorful figure known for fancy clothes (his lace cuffs were famous) and the pursuit of women, money, and power.

  Despite cultivating a superb image, however, he was not a very good scientist. His theories and factual statements were often wrong, not surprising since he rarely did experiments. As an excuse, Buffon claimed that focusing too much on factual details would make it harder to understand the whole, an approach that would characterize the critique of America made by many future French intellectuals.

  Buffon's main work was a multivolume natural history intended to summarize all human knowledge about geology, zoology, and botany. Each known animal, for example, was described in great detail. When the first three volumes were finally published in 1749, they were translated into most European languages. Buffon became an international celebrity. In honor of his accomplishments, the king made him a count in 1771.

  Aside from classifying animals, vegetables, and minerals, Buffon also divided humanity into different subgroups along racial lines. All people, he believed, had originated in a single species but had been modified by the climate, diet, and physical conditions in which they lived. America's environment was so hostile that adaptation there was the opposite of growth: it was degeneration. America would remain backward because its environment was so hostile that it made civilization there virtually impossible.

  Buffon, who never visited America, insisted that nature there was "much less varied and ... strong" than in Europe." Ignorant of such impressive American animals as the buffalo and grizzly bear, Buffon claimed that the biggest American animals were "four, six, eight, and ten times" smaller than those of Europe or Africa. There was nothing to compare to the hippopotamus, elephant, or giraffe.9 Even if the same animal could be found in both the Old and New Worlds-like the wolf and elk-the former version was always better. For example, the American puma was "smaller, weaker, and more cowardly than the real lion."10

  The most impressive proof of America's innate degeneracy, Buffon claimed, was that "all the animals which have been transported from Europe to America-like the horse, ass, sheep, goat, hog, etc.-have become smaller."" What went for animals also applied to people. The Native American "is feeble and small in his organs of generation; he has neither body hair nor beard nor ardor for his female; although swifter than the European because he is better accustomed to running, he is, on the other hand, less strong in body; he is also less sensitive, and yet more timid and more cowardly; he has no vivacity, no activity of mind." In sum, using phrases like those applied by anti-Americans two centuries later to the people of the United States, he concluded, "Their heart is frozen, their society cold, their empire cruel."12

  What caused this degeneration? Buffon thought it was due to the New World being both too cold and too humid. Without ever inhaling a breath in America, he felt confident in concluding that its air and earth were permeated with "moist and poisonous vapors" unable to give proper nourishment except to snakes and insects.13

  This pessimistic belief was widely accepted throughout Europe. Among the many who echoed such views was the great French philosopher Voltaire, who said that the American climate and environment were so inimical to human life that it made no sense for France to fight to obtain "a few acres of snow" there.14 Prospective immigrants, mostly from the poorer classes, either did not hear or ignored such claims and went to America anyway.

  Adding grist to the argument, though, was the work done by Peter Kalm, a scientist sent by the Royal Swedish Academy on a three-year study tour of America in 1748. In contrast to Buffon, Kalm was a meticulous scientist who, for example, recorded daily temperature readings in Philadelphia over a four-month period in 1749. But his analysis was also colored by naivete (he believed reports that rattlesnakes caught squirrels by hypnotizing them)
and bias, especially against German immigrants he met there.'s

  Echoing Buffon in his book on America, Kalm claimed that cattle brought from England became smaller. Though he acknowledged that many of the settlers were robust, he also said that they had shorter life spans than Europeans, women ceased having children earlier, and everyone was weakened by the constantly changing weather. America's climate, Kalm concluded, inevitably made people there disease-ridden and beset by aggressive insects.16 Reviews of Kalm's book in Europe highlighted, as happened with other anti-American works, his most negative remarks."

  But next to Buffon, the greatest eighteenth-century popularizer of anti-American thinking was Cornelius De Pauw. Born in Holland in 1739, he spent most of his life in Berlin, Germany at the court of the Prussian king. Somehow, De Pauw, who never visited America, became Europe's leading expert on that land following publication of his book, Philosophical Research on the Americans, in 1768. It was a big hit in both Germany and France.

  Like many later anti-Americans, he had a hidden agenda. De Pauw worked for the Prussian ruler King Frederick II, who launched a systematic anti-American campaign. Thus, Prussia became the world's first state sponsor of anti-Americanism, based on its regime's interests. Since Prussia had no colonies in the Americas, that region must be made to seem a worthless distraction and even dangerous in order to discourage the growing emigration of Germans to America, where they would become British subjects and enrich that rival country.

  According to De Pauw, Europe's discovery of America was the most disastrous event in the history of civilization. Useful European products-such as wheat, clothing, and wine-were shipped off to the colonies in return for useless luxuries like gold and tobacco. Not only were animals in America smaller than in Europe, he explained, but they were also "badly formed." Those brought over from Europe became "stunted; their height shrank and their instinct and character were diminished by half.""' Indeed, everything in America was "either degenerate or monstrous." The natives were cowardly and impotent. "In a fight the weakest European could crush them with ease." Women quickly became infertile and their children, despite an early precociousness, lost all interest and ability to learn.19

  Initiating another key anti-American theme of later times, De Pauw was the first European to insist also on the innate inferiority of American culture. In 1776, on the verge of the American Revolution, De Pauw wrote another book explaining that there was not a single American philosopher, doctor, physicist, or scholar of note. He described Americans as stupid, indolent, lazy, drunken, physically weak, and thereforenot surprisingly-incapable of making progress.20

  Writing in similar terms, Abbe Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal, a Jesuit priest, teacher, economist, and philosopher, was another key person setting the tone for French thinking about America. His history of the Western hemisphere appeared in the 1770s and eventually went through twenty authorized editions and another twenty pirated ones. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson read with horror its accusations that they were part of an inferior people.

  "Nature," explained Raynal, "seems to have strangely neglected the New World." English settlers in America "visibly degenerated" in their new environment. They were less strong and less courageous, but also incapable of prolonged thought .21 America failed to produce a single good poet, mathematician, or any person superior in art or science whatsoever. Granted, he explained, Americans were precocious, but then they soon slowed down and fell far behind their European counterparts.22

  In addition to all this, Raynal could also be called the first leftist antiAmerican. The European conquest of America had brought death, disease, slavery, and destruction to the innocent natives there, he wrote. Since America was the child of such evil imperialism, Raynal insisted, nothing good could come of it.23

  Anti-American ideas became so predominant in Germany as to be repeated by that country's four greatest philosophers of the era. All agreed that America was fatally cursed. Immanuel Kant wrote in 1775 that Americans are "a not yet properly formed (or half degenerated) subrace" with a "frigidity and insensibility of temperament."24 Climate made these people "too weak for hard work, too indifferent to pursue anything carefully, incapable of all culture, in fact lower even than the Negro."25

  Kant's colleague, G. W. F. Hegel, like many later ideologues, had to dismiss America because it did not fit into the simplistic linear model he constructed for the development of states and civilizations. Rather than revise his categories, he had to distort the American reality to prove them. In the 182os, Hegel argued that civilization could only develop in temperate climates, whereas in North America surviving the "glowing rays of the sun" and "icy frost" took most of people's energy. As a result, the New World's animals were smaller, weaker, and more cowardly; their meat was neither tasty nor nourishing; and the birds had unpleasant voices. America lacked such basic requirements of civilization as the presence of iron or the horse.26

  Hegel combined the degeneration theory with a newer view of America as a failed society. The United States was held back because it had too much geography and not enough history to attain the population concentrations and traditions necessary for real civilization. It had produced nothing original and was of no real interest for Europeans.27 There was little room in his worldview for a workable democracy, which he thought trespassed on two of his main values by putting individualism ahead of community and weakening the state for the sake of private property.28

  A third influential German philosopher, Friedrich von Schlegel, wrote of America in 1828 that "many of the noblest and most beautiful species of animals did not exist there originally and others were found most unseemly in form and most degenerate in nature."29 And Arthur Schopenhauer claimed in 1859 that the inferiority of American mammals went hand in hand with the country's ignorance, conceit, brutal vulgarity, and idiotic veneration of women."

  Even in England, which had more experience than any other European country with what would become the United States, similar thinking prevailed. The leading American expert there during the first years of U.S. independence was William Robertson, a historian, Presbyterian minister, and politician who, in his History of America published in 1777, repeated all the familiar arguments about the cold climate, impoverished nature, "rude and indolent people," and inferior animals.,, The climate that had "stunted the growth and enfeebled the spirits of its native animals proved pernicious to such as have migrated into it voluntarily."32 His book became a huge success and was translated into many languages.

  As one can well imagine, these prejudices drove Americans crazy. Knowing their experience totally refuted such claims, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson felt angry and frustrated in trying to prove that their inevitable inferiority was a myth, especially when this problem became a vital issue during the independence struggle. If America was ever to be a country instead of a colony ruled by Britain, it had to convince other Europeans to give financial and military help by showing that a viable state and economy could be created in the North American wilderness. This is why Americans so passionately welcomed Europeans like the Marquis de Lafayette or Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw America not as the permanent victim of its past but as the wave of the future.

  In 1755, Franklin published a work showing that America's population was thriving, not decaying. For example, he pointed out that there were twice as many marriages in America than in Europe, each resulting in eight births compared to four in Europe, and that the population was doubling every twenty years.33 As the patriots strove to persuade Europe to back independence for the United States, they sent Franklin to Paris as an ambassador to mobilize support.

  At a banquet he held at his home there in February 1778, Franklin asked all the guests to stand against a wall in order to see who had really "degenerated." All of the eighteen Americans were taller than the eighteen Europeans there. And, as the most delicious conceivable irony, the shortest of them all-"a mere shrimp," in Franklin's words-was Raynal himself, the main champion of th
e claim that Europeans were physically superior! 34

  Jefferson was equally obsessed with proving anti-Americanism wrong. He wrote a book, Notes on the State of Virginia, in part to disprove the degeneracy concept. Jefferson compiled records of the weather to prove that America was not so cold and wet. He also reported about animals that were not so tiny as detractors had claimed. He pointed out that the American bear was twice as big as its European counterpart and that fossil elephants discovered in America were gigantic. Of fourteen animals common to both continents, he concluded, seven were actually larger in America while seven more were of equal size. He compiled statistics to demonstrate how rapidly the population grew, disproving the idea that Americans were sickly and relatively infertile .31

  After the revolution, Jefferson took Franklin's old job as the American ambassador to France, where he continued his predecessor's efforts to combat anti-American ideas. In 1787, he had the remains of a New Hampshire moose shipped to France and had it displayed in the lobby of the hotel where he lived to show that American animals were big.36 In response to Raynal's claim that there were no distinguished Americans, Jefferson cited Washington for his military achievements, Franklin as a genius in physics, and David Rittenhouse, a Pennsylvanian who would succeed Franklin as president of the American Philosophical Society, as an astronomer and artist.37

  Along with Jefferson's and Franklin's great efforts, the American victory over Britain in the revolution had some effect in modifying European views. After hearing Franklin describe America's growth and prosperity, Buffon in 1777 publicly rejected the degeneration theory, conceding, "In a country in which Europeans multiply so readily, where the natives live longer than elsewhere, it is hardly possible that men degenerate. "38

  Even Raynal, impressed by Franklin, admitted that education was spreading in America, children were well brought up, and Americans had more leisure time to develop their intellects than did Europeans. Indeed, reflecting his own new uncertainty about the issue, Raynal personally underwrote an essay contest on whether America was a blessing or a curse to mankind.39