Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  While after 1783, America was no longer so easily criticized as a formless continent whose climate made it inferior, the degeneracy theory was still repeated by many Europeans. Alongside it, however, new claims arose about the inferiority of the American system and society. The random mixing of different immigrant groups and a democratic system, it was said, undermined any possibility for the development of good manners, fine morals, and high culture.

  The revolution's triumph and the founding of the United States as a republic also encouraged European liberals, who praised America because they wanted to see more freedom and representative government in their own countries. But indeed, as so often was to happen thereafter, institutions and policies that made friends also inspired enemies, especially among conservatives or those soured by the excesses of the French Revolution who wanted to blame America as its model. Thus, the creation of the United States as a democratic republic gave birth to the idea that such a system could work elsewhere and thus encouraged those opposing that idea to prove that America was a bad role model.

  Thomas Moore, an Irish romantic poet who traveled through America in 1803 and 1804, merged the old and new schools of anti-Americanism in what might have been the first anti-American poems. Despite his Irish nationalism and satires on the British, Moore was horrified at a new society he saw as miserly, quarrelsome, and uncouth. "The rude familiarity of the lower orders" and low level of society might be acceptable if they came from a new and inexperienced people. But Americans were not merely passing through a temporary youthful stage but were already so full of vice and corruption as to destroy hope that the country would be great in the future.40

  In a series of poems on America, Moore wrote that a combined degenerate environment of "infertile strife" and a rabble of immigrants created a:

  Americans were "the motley dregs of every distant clime" who reeked "of anarchy and taint of crime." Like anti-Americans of two centuries later, Moore concluded that the United States had no future but was already on the decline, a dying empire.41

  Coming from the opposite end of the political spectrum, Thomas Hamilton, a British conservative, agreed with the rebellious poet. During his visit in the 183os, he concluded that America was plagued by a wretched climate including extreme temperature changes and emanations from swamps that blighted life.42 Even Charles Darwin, the great British naturalist, could still suggest in the 1830s that Buffon was largely correct. If fossil evidence showed that large animals had once lived there, this only proved that any vigor or creative force America once possessed "had lost its power." Thus, America was an example of evolution heading in the wrong direction.43

  The greatest influence in preserving the theory of degeneracy into the 1830s, as well as spreading anti-Americanism generally during that era, was a young, German-speaking, Hungarian poet named Nikolas Lenau. Famous for his melancholy moods, Lenau said he hoped that going to America would cure him. As a liberal, Lenau had considered the United States to be the beacon of liberty and regarded Europe, caught in the toils of monarchist repression, as a lost cause. This, he claimed, motivated him to emigrate to the United States in 1831.

  Instead, the experience banished his political ideals. His first year seemed hopeful, but then things started going wrong. Lenau became ill and was injured in a fall from a sled. He never learned much English and lost money on a property he bought in Ohio. With his enthusiasm waning, Lenau poured his anger into letters to friends back home, which were later published in a book and also inspired a best-selling 1855 novel by the Austrian Ferdinand Kurnberger. It depicts the travels in America of a gradually disillusioned German poet who finds people there to be egotistical, materialistic, vulgar, and immature braggarts who lack civilization, religion, freedom, or equality.44

  Lenau attributed much of his growing dislike for America to the inferiority of nature there. The idea of degeneration, he concluded, was literally true, and he claimed to see it in the moral and mental decline of German immigrants who had lost their energy and even sanity. How could such a fate be avoided in a benighted land where nature "has no feelings or imagination," being itself so monotonous that it destroyed the personalities of those dwelling there?45

  The absence of songbirds was for Lenau a symbol of this spiritual poverty. Lenau had captured birds in Europe and kept them as pets. But in America, he wrote his brother-in-law, "There are no nightingales, indeed there are no real songbirds at all." He also could not find "a courageous dog, a fiery horse, or a man full of passion. Nature is terribly languid."46

  This and other themes of Lenau would become staples for the critique of America in later eras. "These Americans," he wrote, "are shopkeepers with souls that stink towards heaven. They are dead for all spiritual life, completely dead. The nightingale is right when he does not want to come to these louts."47

  Sounding like many European leftists and rightists of later generations, Lenau found America to be hopelessly materialistic. Everything was based on the almighty dollar and the rational calculation of personal interest rather than some organic connection as in an antique and traditional society. "What we call Fatherland is here merely a property insurance scheme. The American knows nothing, he seeks nothing but money. He has no ideas," and so neither state nor society had any spiritual values.48 Lenau returned to Europe "cured ... of the chimera of freedom and independence that I had longed for with youthful enthusiasm." The New World represented not liberty but alienation, power, numbers, and money.49

  There was, however, one terribly ironic detail of his life that Lenau kept from his readers. He had never intended to emigrate to America but merely went there to invest in property he could lease out. The critic who had castigated America for being in the toils of an avaricious materialism had gone there to cash in for himself.50

  But it is impossible to overestimate the impact in Europe of Lenau's vision of America. The lack of nightingales became an international symbol of everything wrong with America. Already the British poet John Keats, who had never been in America and whose chronic illness and early death did not prove the superiority of European climes, had called America "that most hateful" and "monstrous" land because, the author of "Ode to a Nightingale" complained, it had flowers without scent and birds without song.51 The 1843 lines of the German poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben also touched on the subject:

  But the problem was not just a natural one:

  It is a land with dreams deceptive filled

  O'er which the concept freedom, passing by,

  Enchanting, lets its shadows flutter down.52

  It is striking that such criticism came from Fallersleben, an outspoken political liberal who supported the growing unrest in the various German lands and was eventually deported from Prussia. He had never visited America and knew it only secondhand through friends who corresponded with German immigrants in Texas. He even wrote several songs honoring that state and, unlike Lenau's approach, refused an offer of land if he emigrated there.53 But like other rebels and romantics of the day, Lenau dreamed of a very different sort of paradise from the American experiment.

  Alongside the new political and cultural complaints-which grew louder throughout the nineteenth century-the idea that the United States was a hopeless enterprise doomed by nature lived on, especially in France.54 Some French scientists continued to insist that the degeneracy theory was right and that Americans aged faster while horses, dogs, and bulls there showed less vigor and courage than in Europe.55

  Indeed, criticism about America based on its environmental conditions, reminiscent of the degeneracy theory, survived well into the twentieth century. In 1929, the Frenchman Regis Michaud, who taught French literature for twelve years at U.S. universities and wrote a critical book on America, described, among many other vices, the United States as "a geographic mass without harmony, a country of contrasts and disparities on a grande scale with a violent climate. "56

  In 1933, the French diplomat and poet Paul Claudel wrote in his journal, while serving in Washi
ngton, that the early American statesman Alexander Hamilton had admitted that America's inferior climate stopped dogs from barking. In fact, this was one of De Pauw's claims that Hamilton had ridiculed.57 Shortly thereafter, the liberal British poet W. H. Auden bemoaned the excesses of America's climate, including vast numbers of insects, snakes, and poison ivy. "The truth is," he wrote, "nature never intended human beings to live here and her hostility" forced its original inhabitants to a nomadic existence and continued to plague their successors.58

  During anti-Americanism's first epoch, the cause of that country's inevitable failure was placed on the innately inferior nature of the land. After America's independence, though, this blame was increasingly transferred to a degraded people who lived in a badly structured society. By the 1830s, fear grew in Europe that ideas embodied in the United Statesrepublicanism, materialism, the leveling of classes, and a rejection of aristocratic high culture-would spread back across the Atlantic Ocean.

  In the reactionary climate following the French Revolution's turn toward terror and dictatorship, Napoleon's aggressive wars, and the challenge posed by democratic movements, the Old World's existing system seemed far more welcome to much of the political and intellectual elite there. It was thought better by those in the most privileged groups to stick with the status quo of monarchy, high culture, a strong class system, a traditional economy, and aristocratic-dominated politics than to make risky changes that threatened their interests and were obviously not going to work. Ironically, many of the antidemocratic ideas developed by the European right at this time would later become staples of the leftist critique of America.

  Of course, all peoples like to see their innate superiority asserted and "proven." Americans themselves would certainly be no exception to this rule. Yet once the United States was established as a living challenge to the European monarchies, anti-Americanism came to serve a specific political function. While anti-Americanism still incorporated aspects of the degeneracy theory, it increasingly focused on the claim that the American democratic experiment was a failure leading to a degraded society and culture. As degeneracy theory declined throughout the nineteenth century, in the new version of anti-Americanism the Americans were still judged uncivilized and degenerate. But now they had no one to blame but themselves for this sorry state of affairs.

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  THE DISTASTEFUL REPUBLIC

  In the American republic's early years, this potential threat was handled largely through ridicule. By portraying America as an obvious and inevitable failure, European critics hoped that no one would follow its example and thus the danger would be averted.

  The idea that civilization could never arise in America, the degeneracy theory, had been the first stage of anti-Americanism. The second stage was the claim that the Americans' efforts to create a civilization had failed. This view generally dominated the anti-American critique in the years between the creation of the U.S. system in 1783 until roughly the end of the Civil War in 1865.

  Of course, some Europeans did think that the United States was offering a vision of something new and fresh that they wanted for their own countries. The popular German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for example, penned an ode to the United States embodying that view:

  With reform- and revolution-minded Europeans being inspired by the American precedent, their political adversaries had all the more reason to despise and discredit it. Nineteenth-century history proved just how subversive was the American example, the appeal of its ideas and institutions. Following the establishment of the United States, a series of struggles convulsed Europe that included the French Revolution, the rise of a British reform movement, continent-wide upheavals in 1848, and many more skirmishes in the conflict between aristocratic and democratic rule.

  While the United States did not directly sponsor foreign democratic movements, its revolution was as inspirational for the nineteenth century as the Russian Communist revolution was for the twentieth: the resulting political system was an alternative to all existing societies that entranced some, repelled others, and could be ignored by no one.

  The founders and early leaders of the United States were aware of their unique role as a democratic revolution confronting countries with a different system. "The Royalists everywhere detest and despise us as republicans," wrote John Quincy Adams shortly after the triumph of European reaction at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. America's political principles "make the throne of every European monarch rock under him as with the throes of an earthquake." America's growth and prosperity would naturally arouse jealousy and antagonism abroad because of its role as an alternative model.'

  In a July 4, 1821, speech in Washington before an audience including the European diplomatic corps, then-President John Quincy Adams explained that America represented a new type of government "destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude."4

  For those viewing the United States as a threat to all existing Western civilization, destructive of order and an enemy of traditional values, discrediting it became a matter of life and death. Such was literally the case for Simon Linguet, a French lawyer, who warned in the 178os that a rabble of adventurers would use the continent's rich resources to make the United States a great economic power. Eventually, he predicted, America's armies would cross the Atlantic, subjugate Europe, and destroy civilization.' Linguet did not have to wait long to see the society he revered destroyed by new ideas paralleling those in America. He was guillotined by the French revolutionaries in 1794.

  In Britain, for the majority of the upper class seeking to limit democracy, the French Revolution's terror and disorder confirmed their fear that the kind of liberty and equality existing in America was dangerous. "Britain ... has naught to learn from the present state of American democracy," wrote a clergyman named George Lewis in 1845 after spending several years in America, "except to thank God for the more compact and secure fabric of British freedom."6

  Most Europeans visiting America to write about it-as opposed to those who went there as immigrants-were wealthy, conservative, and not predisposed to sympathy with the new country. Only the rich could afford the cost and time required for such a voyage. Most of them were repelled by that nation's basic precepts, democratic political institutions, and primitive cultural level.

  Yet even when accurately noting the new country's problems, critics often wrongly insisted that these faults were innate in the American system rather than correctable over time. Of course, America was still very much a society in development, but many of its symptoms were those of youth that experience and experiment would solve. At the same time, it was also true that there was a spirit of America different from that of Europe. Many of the characteristics Europeans dislikedsuch as classlessness, secularism, and informality-derived from broader trends of modernity, which, though few realized it in the early nineteenth century, would come to characterize Western society in general.

  Equally, the emerging American society was the global prophet of a pragmatic worldview not to European taste, especially outside of Britain. This worldview, so thoroughly integrated into their life and culture as to be taken for granted by Americans, can simply be described as judging any system, institution, or idea on how well it works in practice and showing a readiness to discard whatever fails that test. In contrast, European civilization up to that time-and, to a large extent, since thenjudged everything on how well it accorded to past practices. Change was viewed as dangerous and destabilizing; the benefit of the doubt rested with the status quo. Innovations were often judged not on their own merit but rather on whether they fit with some preexisting doctrine or theory of how things should work.

  Obviously, a pragmatic approach can mean jettisoning much that is good. Anti-Americans saw it as a general assault on tradition, high cultural standards, intellectual life, and all the good thin
gs of the past they cherished. They were blind to the benefits of that powerful American optimism and readiness for change that kept the door open to beneficial innovations while facilitating the correction of faults. Moreover, pragmatism was the basis for modernization and for challenging all the past's bad, nonfunctional aspects. Pragmatism was America's great philosophical and practical innovation. All the specific aspects of its model-equality, free enterprise, democracy, human rights, industrialization, and so on-related to this worldview.

  While all the negative claims about America did not discourage many thousands of immigrants from going to America, they certainly shaped the views of future Europeans: those left behind who had never been there. It often seems, too, as if Europe's rejection of many factors at the root of future American success were reasons why it would fall behind in many arenas. Indeed, it was a mistake for the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to couple in his condemnation of America "the most vile [pragmatism] combined with its inevitable companion, ignorance."' Ultimately, it was precisely American practicality that inspired battles against ignorance.

  One of the most disconcerting notions emerging from the U.S. system was the advocacy of equality, not as some abstract ideal but as a reality of daily life. The assumption was that the best way to maximize human potential was to give the largest number of people the best possible chance of contributing to society. And if this goal was far from fully realized at the start of the United States, U.S. society continued to evolve toward implementing that principle.

  Of course, people did not remain equal in practice. Some factor would determine the rise and fall of individuals' status. The nineteenth-century American measure of success, still a key theme today despite many changes in emphasis, was that worldly achievement would be largely the result of ability and hard work. This was a reaction against a Europe that Americans saw as bound by an aristocratic system that rewarded people simply for the good fortune of their birth. Most Europeans argued in contrast that by giving primacy to those who were literally noble, their system set a high standard of manners and culture. Underneath its democratic facade, they saw America as simply giving first place to those who attained wealth.