Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  Though surface aspects of these arguments would shift over two centuries as Europe in some ways came to resemble America more closely, the essential difference between the viewpoints would remain. Europe would see itself as the repository of a high-quality culture, spiritual values, and intellectual merit. America was seen by them as a society in which an unbridled capitalism determined everything on the basis of profit and market rather than quality, ideas, or values. And if their own societies were moving in this wrong direction-in Europe and elsewhere-the blame was often put on the local imitation or external influence of America.

  While many of these ideas developed among European conservatives in the early nineteenth century, the seeds of the left's parallel critique could already be seen in the European romantic movement's antiAmericanism. A country extolling materialistic pragmatism did not appeal to those extolling the transcendental glory of a society emphasizing high aesthetic values. America, then, was equally distasteful to the aristocrat who revered the European status quo and to the romantic rebel who hoped for spiritual transcendence, just as their right- and left-wing descendants would often agree only on the idea that America was not what they wanted.

  As a result of their personal predilections, then, European critics often ignored the new society's practical accomplishments and reduced the United States to a country that merely permitted and encouraged moneymaking as its ideal. To make matters worse, European intellectuals and artists could never forgive the United States for denying their class the exalted or central role that they claimed to hold in Europe.

  Such achievements as freedom from the restraints of Europe's class order, human rights, or the chance for individual betterment were discounted as dangerous illusions by the European critics. The United States was portrayed as merely an artificial creation with no animating spirit. As the Norwegian-born scientist and poet Henrik Steffens put it, America was "a classical statue, cold, motionless, it did not raise its eyes nor move its limbs and there was no living heart beating in its breast."8 Its freedom was actually an insidious form of slavery. Steffens mixed his science with romantic philosophy. He was convinced that social progress could bring greater individual development. Instead, like others, he found America to be dominated by conformity and the enslavement of individuals to material goods. Steffens found America to be especially repugnant since, like others who would become harsh critics, he thought it contradicted his cherished theory.

  The argument that the United States was soulless gained a virtual consensus among European critics. Americans, wrote the French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, best known as Stendhal, "seem to have done away with a part of themselves. The wells of feeling appear to have dried up; they are just, they have common sense and they are unhappy."9 The French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who visited the United States in the 1790s, determined that "the American people are perhaps the people least acquainted with passion in the whole world."10 Victor Jacquemont, a friend of Lafayette and a naturalist, concluded after one night in New York in 1827 that the minds of Americans were "generally merely cold, platitudinous and vulgar."" Kant echoed this theme a few years later in explaining that Americans were incapable of civilization because they "had no passion, hardly speak at all, never caress one another, care about nothing, and are lazy." 12

  Even as the United States was being disrespected precisely in order to undercut its real and potential influence on Europe, its ingenious political structures and remarkably original revolution were being denied. When Europeans spoke of great revolutions, either to exalt or decry them, the French and not the American model was the standard for judgment.

  For conservatives, the horrors of the French Revolution and the failed republic that followed showed the dangers of such experiments, a category in which they included the United States. They shuddered at its example, which gave them added incentive to find the American version a failure as well, one more proof that democracy didn't work or at best produced a dreadful society.

  For Romantics as well as the political radicals who were starting to preach the revolutionary transformation of their own societies, the fact that the French Revolution had brought disaster to its own people and the continent-with its reign of terror, quick reversion to dictatorship, imperialist ambitions, and endless wars-was no proof that the American version was superior. For them, the American counterpart was too bland, bourgeois, and boring, insufficiently utopian or theoretical. In fact, before King Louis XVI was beheaded by them, some French radicals proposed it to be a sufficiently cruel punishment to exile him to Phila- delphia,13 then the capital of American society and culture, anticipating by 150 years the comedian W. C. Fields's famous joke that being in that city was preferable only to death.

  Both sides often missed the point, viewing as shortcomings precisely the factors that made America succeed. Thus, in 1823, the Austrian diplomat Johann Georg Hulsemann denounced the country's "incoherence" in such institutions as the "separation of powers which, as well-known, is a theoretical error." 14 The word "theoretical" here is most significant. The great breakthrough of Franklin, Jefferson, James Madison, and their colleagues in devising a new and workable system of government based on federalism (a division of authority between central and state governments) and checks and balances (a division of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government) was of no importance.

  Yet it was precisely this structure that was the centerpiece of the system's success. Gradually, European systems would move closer to an American-style model. But in the nineteenth century and afterward, the European left and right often extolled a centralization of power that would constantly produce failed regimes and repressive dictatorships in France, the USSR, and throughout the Third World. Ridiculed as purely practical, America was thought incapable of producing any valid political philosophy. The fact that its system worked so well in practice was thus irrelevant. The lack of guillotines and the absence of any decline into dictatorship were not counted to its credit.

  Not everyone in Europe mocked the American system, but a remarkable number of people did so, including the leading philosophers and historians of the day. Often targeted for ridicule was the notion of giving the common people a voice in governing. It was, as one French observer, Abbe de Mably, wrote in his book about the government and laws of the United States in 1784, dangerous and impractical," especially because as common people went, those of the United States were particularly unimpressive.

  In the words of Francois Soules's 1787 history of the American revolution, "In America the wise are few indeed in comparison with the ignorant, the selfish, and those men who blindly allow themselves led. "16 American-style democracy was a step backward, wrote the German poet Ludwig Borne in 1830, into a "monstrous prison of freedom" whose "invisible chains" were more oppressive than the visible ones in Germany, for in the United States, "the most repulsive of all tyrants, the populace, hold vulgar sway. "17 Louis Marie Turreau de Linieres, former French ambassador to the United States, agreed that it was "a fraud" to let common Americans influence public affairs since they were incapable of reasoning. The Bill of Rights would cause anarchy because it would paralyze government from acting effectively.'8

  Thus, the French novelist Stendhal, writing in 1830, concluded that American-style democracy was boring and banal because it let "the tyranny of opinion" of the small-minded masses control society.19 Another French writer, Felix de Beaujour, consul-general in Washington from 1804 to 1811, was so critical of the United States that the British used his book as anti-American propaganda during the War of 1812, when they again fought the Americans.20 Beaujour explained that unless the Senate was elected for life and the House of Representatives limited to big landowners, the U.S. government would collapse in despotism or disunion.21

  An economy that bred rampant materialism was seen as the counterpart of a spiritually empty society and an unworkable political system. The country's obsession with greed combined with mob rule, Beaujour wro
te, and ensured that American civilization would be "ugly and vulgar, with unpolished manners, indelicate feelings, primitive social life, and conversation entirely centered on money."22 In 1783, the German historian A. L. von Schlozer wrote that as a "commercial country," the United States had replaced monarch and aristocracy with "the nobility of money, which is far more dangerous and tyrannical." The revolutionary German dramatist Karl Gutzkow expressed the same idea in the mid-nineteenth century: "It is unbelievable how easily the American can change ideas into money."23

  This was a consensus view among much of the European elite and intelligentsia. Heinrich Heine, the romantic German poet, concluded, "Worldly utility is their true religion and money is their God, their once all-powerful God."24 The stereotype of the grasping Yankee, who lived only to work and profit while neglecting all spiritual or cultural values, would remain unchanged over the decades.

  As scores of European writers purveyed this image, it entered the world of fiction and in many forms passed down to the following generations. In the mid-nineteenth century, several German novels focused on the unfortunate experiences of immigrants in America: the violence, theft, and fraud practiced on newcomers, as well as American arrogance and greed. Some authors openly said their purpose for writing such things was to stop emigration to the United States.25

  For example, in his 1841 German novel, Rulemann Friedrich Eylert writes of the unhappy experiences of a German immigrant, who discovers that "degraded thinking, lying, deception, and unlimited greed are the natural and inescapable consequences of the commercial spirit ... that like a tidal wave inundates the highest and lowest elements of American society. Every harmless passion and all moral sentiments are blunted in the daily pursuit of money."26

  This theme is illustrated by incidents that might easily have taken place in Germany. The hero breaks an oil lamp at a hotel and is sent to jail when he cannot pay for the damage. The hotelkeeper bribes his lawyer so that the poor man is sentenced to be a servant at the inn and has to work long hours. A fellow immigrant tells him the secret of success in America: work hard and deny oneself all pleasure, which the author called "the best and truest description of the whole American character" and quite different from the German spirit.27

  Ferdinand Kurnberger, in his very popular 1855 tale of a similarly disillusioned German immigrant, agrees that American culture is im- poverished.28 Newsboys sell smutty literature, and a "Negro band" plays so badly that the German has to correct them. A student tells him, quoting Franklin, that "time is money"-a concept particularly repugnant to the author-and that man's purpose on earth is to produce wealth. A boarding house owner's dilution of his champagne with brandy is a symbol of decadence. In an art gallery, puritanical Americans put clothes on Greek statues. A German immigrant who tries to spread culture in America is hung. The hero remarks, "All men are equal. Does that mean all hogs are equal? What a sham this culture is. "29

  The basic cultural critique of America prevalent in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Europe was already in place by the 1830s, long before the onset of mass production, consumerism, Hollywood, or television. Materialism plus democracy made for a spiritual emptiness. The United States was a mass culture based on the lowest common denominator. Instead of standards being set by an aristocratic and privileged class of intellectuals and artists, its society catered to the vulgar mob with low values, bad manners, and a grubby materialistic outlook.

  Perrin Du Lac, who visited the American frontier in the first years of the nineteenth century, turned an equally memorable phrase about how materialism destroyed any cultural or spiritual values: "A brook, were it worthy of the muse of Virgil ... is nothing to them but so much pure water, so of no value." In general, Americans only cared for material things: "A good Havana cigar, a newspaper, and a bottle of Madeirathose are the joys of an American life."30 Yet those who extolled the virtues of material deprivation for the masses' spiritual welfare rarely themselves shared in this supposedly beneficial lifestyle.

  Nothing reveals the universality of this view of American materialism more than the fact that it was echoed by even one of the greatest European defenders of the United States, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville. Americans, he explained, were so insensible to the wonders of nature that they only "perceive the mighty forests that surround them [when] they fall beneath the hatchet." In sum, he concluded, "Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests-in one word, anti-poetic-as the life of a man in the United States."31

  The story behind Tocqueville's trip to the United States gives important clues to the disdainful conclusions of so many European visitors. When Tocqueville wrote about America, he was heavily influenced by the current situation and recent experiences of his own country. In the 1830s, no place in the world had suffered more from the excesses of democracy. France's own revolution had been followed by a quartercentury of turmoil that ended in a devastating national defeat with Napoleon's fall in 1815.

  Tocqueville decided to make his famous visit to America when the conservative Bourbon monarchy he served was overthrown in 183o by a regime oriented toward middle-class demands. This was precisely the kind of regime that anti-Americans identified negatively with the United States. Unhappy with the transition, Tocqueville looked for a way to get out of Paris for a while, nominally to study the American prison system for the French Ministry of Justice. Instead, he produced his two-volume Democracy in America, published in 1834 and 1840.

  While Tocqueville's praise of the United States is well-known to Americans, rarely noted is the fact that he shared most of the contemporary European criticisms of its state and society. He wrote: "Unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing. Human beings are not competent to exercise with discretion.... The main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as it is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at ... the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyr- anny."32

  Yet Tocqueville's words seem to relate more to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, the guillotine, and Napoleon than to the rule of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. When the author describes America, he is frightened not by dictatorship from above but about tyranny arising from below, by public opinion and such institutions as elected legislatures or juries drawn from common citizens. America's rulers, he complains, are only passive tools of the masses. Writing at a time when autocracy was ascendant in much of Europe, with rampant censorship and repression, he concludes, "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion."33 So great is this alleged majority tyranny that "freedom of opinion does not exist in America." The power of the majority "is so absolute and so irresistible" that dissent from it would bring ruin. Thus, no one dares to voice his own view.34

  He writes that in the United States, "The power of the majority [far] surpasses all the powers with which we are acquainted in Europe."35 In Europe, opposition views circulate in secret. But in America, he explains, discussion is open only until the majority decides, and once that happens, "Everyone is silent, and the friends as well as the opponents of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety." This type of repression explains why America stifles literary genius.36 In effect, he makes the United States sound as if it practices the "democratic centralism" that was later a principle of Communist parties, in which discussion is only permitted before the party line is set, a mistaken view of America still being voiced by Europeans in the twenty-first century.

  In a remarkable passage, Tocqueville foresees the type of "repressive tolerance" critique that would characterize the European post-Marxist left's critique of the United States. By instituting democracy and satisfying peoples' needs, he seems to say, America has created a terrible society because it undermines the desire to revolt against it:

  The Inquisition has never been able t
o prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority succeeds much better in the United States, since it actually removes any wish to publish them. Unbelievers are to be met with in America, but there is no public organ of infidelity. Attempts have been made by some governments to protect morality by prohibiting licentious books. In the United States no one is punished for this sort of books, but no one is induced to write them; not because all the citizens are immaculate in conduct, but because the majority of the community is decent and orderly.37

  If Tocqueville had been a romantic, he might have attributed this problem to the absence of spirit that would give rise to poetry and philosophy or at least have pointed to the weakness of an intellectual class in providing guidance and high culture. As a conservative, though, he concludes that the proper element missing in the society is the absence of guidance by an aristocratic class secure in its wealth and values.

  As a result, Tocqueville is sure that pragmatism must lead to a mindless materialism. Americans, he writes, are tormented by a vague dread "lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to" their own welfare.38 The American "clings to his world's goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications."39