Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  While Tocqueville was a better reporter of what he saw than most of the other visiting writers, he shared the agenda of most to prove beyond any doubt that democracy was a bad system that should not be imitated by France or Europe in general. Virtually identical sentiments also dominated the British elite's perspective on the United States. It had watched with horror events in France and engaged in an all-out war to defeat the revolutionary regime there in addition to fighting two wars with the United States. Following the victory over Napoleon in 1815 came several decades of internal British struggles between reformers demanding more democracy and Tories fighting against change.

  British conservatives focused on the same points as their French counterparts but with their own national flavor. G. D. Warburton took a vacation to New England in 1844 and concluded that the Constitution's authors had shown but "the ingenuity of the madman" and democracy meant the reign of the "oracle of the pot-house and the ignorant swineherd of the backwoods."40

  One simple factor making the British believe that the American experiment had to be flawed was the fact that the colonists had rebelled against the mother country and then established a very different kind of society. And anything different from Britain, in British eyes-or, more broadly, anything different from Europe in European eyes-had to be inferior. Edward Wakefield, an influential writer in the 183os and 1840sone of his books was entitled the Art of Colonization-saw the problem as a failure to transfer to America the British social structure. Unchecked access to the frontier had created people who were too isolated and independent, bereft of the beneficial presence of aristocrats and gentleman capitalists.41

  He derided Americans as a "new people" who increased in number but made "no progress in the art of living." In terms of wealth, knowledge, skill, taste, and civilization in general, they had "degenerated from their [British] ancestors." They lacked education, moved around too much, did not acquire a great enough wealth to be an elite (except the slave owners), and were too violent, vain, obstinate, intolerant, and aggressive. Their notion of equality was too extreme and against nature, favoring the vile over the noble. In short, they were "a people who become rotten before they are ripe." As the father of the colonization of New Zealand, Wakefield consciously tried to set up that society as an alternative that would avoid all the mistakes of America.42

  Ironically, Wakefield came from a radical Quaker family, but as so often happened, anti-Americanism blended radicalism and conservativism. As one historian characterizes his thought, Wakefield viewed the proper colonial community as harkening "back to a legendary past, to the squire surrounded by his contented, cap-tipping yokels, in the good old days before industrialism and new ideas had upset the rural har- mony."43

  Equally blunt on this issue was Frederick Marryat, who was a former British government official as well as a former naval officer and author of popular sea tales. Marryat's agenda was to prove democracy, or at least what he considered to be the excessive democracy ruining the United States, dangerous.

  Both Tocqueville and Marryat made their visits at a time when populism was at one of its highest points in U.S. history. The defeat of the austere President John Quincy Adams, about the closest thing to an American aristocrat, by Andrew Jackson in 1828 ushered in a period in which frontier regions held more influence and American culture became self-consciously more mass-oriented. It was an era certain to feed Europeans' worst fears, though they might well have reached the same conclusions anyway.

  At the age of forty-five, in 1837, Marryat made a grand tour of America and produced a popular book about his travels. He concluded, "With all its imperfections, democracy is the form of government best suited to the present condition of America." Given Marryat's views, this was apparently not intended as a compliment.44

  Compared to Tocqueville's literary elegance, however, Marryat was quite blunt. Political equality, he wrote, made "the scum ... uppermost, and they do not see below it. The prudent, the enlightened, the wise, and the good, have all retired into the shade, preferring to pass a life of quiet retirement, rather than submit to the insolence and dictation of a mob."45

  He concluded that the United States "has proven to the world that, with every advantage on her side, the attempt at a republic has been a miserable failure and that the time is not yet come when mankind can govern themselves. Will it ever come? In my opinion, never. "46 He added, "No people have as yet been sufficiently enlightened to govern themselves."47

  Marryat's political prejudices were reinforced by events. In 1837, a rebellion against British rule broke out in Canada, and Americans sym pathized with it. The media whipped up anti-British sentiment, and the U.S. government let anti-British insurgents operate from American territory in New York state until a group of British loyalists crossed the border and destroyed their base. Marryat, at that moment visiting Toronto, attended a dinner honoring the raiders and toasted them. When news of this behavior reached the United States, he was denounced in the press and burned in effigy.

  As one might expect, this did not make Marryat fond of the American press, which he considered "licentious to the highest possible degree."48 As a result, he wrote, mutual defamation was a pervasive disease in America, and everyone was "suspicious and cautious of his neighbor." The real cause of this internecine warfare was each citizen's relentless effort to maintain equality by pulling everyone down to his own level.49

  Yet this kind of rot was said to pervade all aspects of American life. Giving the common people education, for example, and teaching them to read and write merely corrupted "those who might have been more virtuous and happy in their ignorance." Parents, Marryat wrote, did not control their children, who learned only what they wanted from a school curriculum that was largely republican propaganda teaching students to hate monarchies and glorify revolution. The schooling for the elite was inferior to Europe's, and there were few who could be called "a very highly educated man."50

  Most European observers agreed with Marryat's conclusion that, at best, American society was "a chaotic mass" with little that was "valuable or interesting."" Jacquemont's assessment of Americans was: "Disgusting, disgusting! It is shameful to speak of them: these animals are below criticism.... No population is as anti-picturesque.... [The United States is a] free and boring country."52

  It was hardly surprising, then, that Europeans thought that bad taste was king in America. Du Lac reported that liberalism was the enemy of politeness, for if everyone was equal, no one would give deference to others. On the contrary, they would be obnoxious in asserting their rights. In theatres, men kept their hats on, smoked smelly cigars, and did not give up their seats to ladies, who, for their part, were pretty enough at first but lost their teeth by the age of eighteen, lost their looks by age twenty, and were constantly wiping their noses.53

  Talleyrand spoke of Americans as clumsy parvenus who wore hats "that a European peasant would not be caught dead in." Unsurprisingly, the Frenchman found the cuisine dreadful. It was a country of "32 religions and only one dish ... and even that [is] inedible."54

  Yet while America was seen as banal, passionless, and ruled by conformity, it was simultaneously-and not without reason-portrayed as an extraordinarily hot-headed and violent place. Before the cowboys existed as a stereotype, Americans were compared to the "Indians" in this respect. By 1785, a British dictionary was defining the word "gouge" as "to squeeze out a man's eye with the thumb, a cruel practice used by the Bostonians in America."55 Certainly, there was great lawlessness, especially on the frontier. European visitors were able to catalogue a wide variety of murders, shootings, knifings, duels, and lynching. This problem, too, was ascribed to democracy. In Marryat's words, "Dueling always has been and always will be, one of the evils of democracy."56 This was a strange distortion since that practice had long been a mainstay of European aristocrats. Still, the idea of Americans as excessively and irrationally violent people would become another of the enduring European stereotypes.

  As the first half of
the nineteenth century went by, some British visitors became more outspokenly critical of slavery. 17 But the personal habit that seemed to symbolize everything Europeans disliked about America was tobacco chewing. Alexander Mackay, a British journalist who wrote a travel book in 1849, described a veritable flood of tobacco juice squirting throughout railroad cars. Passengers spit between Mackay's feet and over his shoulders. One even took a piece of tobacco from his mouth and drew pictures on a window with it.58

  Heine, who never visited the United States, wrote a poem about this vice in 1851:

  "I hardly know of any annoyance so deeply repugnant to English feelings, as the incessant remorseless spitting of Americans," said the British writer Frances Trollope, who added that this habit had made the lips of male Americans "almost uniformly thin and compressed."60

  Trollope might have been the single most influential person shaping European perceptions of America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her book Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, enjoyed a phenomenal success and was translated into several languages. Within a few years, people were speaking of "to trollopise," meaning to criticize the Americans. To sit "legs a la trollope" referred to that rude allegedly American habit of putting one's feet on the table and slouching back in a chair.61

  So much did she dislike the United States that the experience of visiting there transformed her from an optimistic liberal advocate for democracy to a reactionary opponent of change. A summary of her impressions may be gleaned by her conclusion that the main reason to visit America is "that we shall feel the more contented with our own coun- try."62 In retaliation, on display in New York was a waxwork of the author in the shape of a goblin.63

  Trollope never set out to play such a historic role. In 1827 she arrived in Cincinnati with three small children, sent by her eccentric husband to open a department store there. The store went bankrupt, and Trollope was stranded with her ill offspring. Desperate for money, she hit on the novel idea of writing a best seller. Americans criticized her book but bought it anyway. Even British liberals condemned it as an exaggerated indictment. Still, it proved a most persuasive one.64

  The focus of her attack was America's ascetic and cultural failings. Like other Europeans before her, she disliked American nature and people for being too wild compared to the highly domesticated ideal symbolized by the British garden. This simile was extended to American behavior, which she saw as equally untamed. Asked the greatest difference between England and the United States, Trollope pointed to the latter's "want of refinement." No one had an interest in high culture. In America, she explained, "that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of."65

  People ate too fast, had bad table manners, spoke poor English, talked too much about politics and religion (subjects not appropriate for public conversation), and rode roughshod over personal privacy. American gregariousness grated on her British sensibilities. When she wanted to take her meals at a Memphis hotel in a private room rather than with the rest of the guests, the landlady became angry. In Cincinnati, a hotelkeeper demanded that she drink her tea with the other guests or leave. People tried to engage her in conversation when she wanted to be left alone. She even complained that Americans, at least white ones, could not sing a song in tune. Women walked badly and their clothes, except in Philadelphia, were in terrible taste.

  In this vein, a leading British journalist, G. S. Venables, wrote in November 1866: "Perhaps an American England may produce a higher average of happiness than the existing system, but it would not be a country for a gentleman, and I for one would be quite a stranger in it."66 The essayist Matthew Arnold pointed out that in Europe, one was assigned a place in society at birth, while in the United States one must create it.67 For those already at the top of society-in terms of privilege, power, or prestige-this was a frightening thought.

  Always, the subtext was the ruinous nature of the American belief in equality, ranging from the low character of American political leaders to the difficulty of finding proper servants among such people. Indeed, Trollope wrote, "If refinement once creeps in among them, if they once learn to cling to the graces, the honors, the chivalry of life, then we shall say farewell to American equality, and welcome to European fellowship one of the finest countries on earth."68

  This was a remarkable revelation of a major anti-American theme. Any positive effect of equality was more than cancelled out by the fact that it would undermine the social position of those shaping Europe's interpretation of America. The success of America and its imitation by their own countries would undermine-or, at least, they thought it would undermine-their personal interests. In short, anti-Americanism was a class interest, not of the masses-who were the ones most likely to emigrate-but of the elite.

  Another negative consequence of America's emphasis on freedom and equality was said to be an excessively elevated status for women and children. This criticism was also intended to prove that the United States had rejected the natural order of society. Schopenhauer's list of American sins included a "foolish adoration of women."69 Like others, Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Wry, a Frenchman who owned a bookstore in Philadelphia in the 1790s, claimed that American women soon lost their beauty (due to the terrible climate) and never found good taste. He also thought their breasts excessively small. But most importantly, he and other Europeans thought they were not well-behaved, obedient, or affectionate.70

  America was sarcastically nicknamed in some European writings a "paradise for women." In a classic statement of the German writer Rulemann Friedrich Eylert:

  Woman! Do you want to see yourself restored to your aboriginal place of honor with your husband in the house as your slave and at your side in society? Do you want him to dance to your tune and early in the morning rush to buy meat, butter, vegetables and eggs, while you lie comfortably in bed and devote yourself to sweet morning dreams? ... If you want to experience the full blessings of a pampered existence, then go to America, become naturalized, purchase an American husband, and you are emancipated.71

  The underlying problem in this allegedly exalted status was that equality had gone too far, even in an age when no woman could vote.

  Another German contemporary wrote of the "typical" American woman: "She always carried books, brochures, and newspapers on her memorandum book and pencil, with which to copy down fragments from books and conversations. Full of claims to nobility, she nevertheless played the part of an avowed republican. She combined information with misinformation, common sense with transcendental nonsense ... one of those educated women who because of pretensions to equality with men have lost all the charm and advantages of their sex."72

  A working-class Scotsman, James D. Burns, who visited the United States during the Civil War, in his book about the experience recorded, "In America, female notions of equality and personal independence have to a great extent reversed the old order of things in the relation of the sexes.... The woman has made up her mind not to be bossed by her husband, which means she will do as she likes irrespective of his will." This damaged marriage and led to more frequent divorces.73

  Already, when Hollywood was still a howling wilderness, Americans were also said to be juvenile and obsessed with being youthful. The United States, as an immature society rejecting tradition, was a veritable never-land of Peter Pans determined to stay young forever. "In America," said one wit, "the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. "74 This was precisely what Europeans accused America of trying to do to them. As always, Oscar Wilde put it best and briefest: "The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for 300 years."75

  Given the alleged exalted status of children attributed to American society, one could hardly blame Americans for wanting to stay young. According to James F. Muirhead, a British editor of guidebooks to the United States, children there "learn to throw off the restraints of parental auth
ority" since they feel, according to the national credo, that they are "equal to everyone. I do not know of any task more difficult than for a father to keep his children well in hand."

  Muirhead added: "Nowhere is the child so constantly in evidence; nowhere are his wishes so carefully consulted; nowhere is he allowed to make his mark so strongly on society in general.... The small American ... interrupts the conversation of his elders, he has a voice in every matter, he eats and drinks what seems good to him, he (or at any rate she) wears finger-rings of price, he has no shyness or even modesty."76

  Anthony Trollope, who as an adult wrote a book about the place where he spent time as a child with his mother, Frances Trollope, thought American babies, "eat and drink just as they please; they are never punished; they are never banished, snubbed and kept in the background as children are kept with us, and yet they are wretched and uncomfortable. ... Can it be, I wonder, that the children are happier when they are made to obey orders."" Meanwhile, Marryat insisted that "there is little or no parental control," adding:

  Imagine a child of three years old in England behaving thus:

  "Johnny, my dear, come here," says his mama.

  "I won't," cries Johnny.

  "You must, my love, you are all wet, and you'll catch cold."

  "I won't," replies Johnny. And so forth.

  "A sturdy republican, sir," says his father to me, smiling at the boy's resolute disobedience.78

  Given the fact that everyone in America was criticized for their spirit of equality, it is not surprising that later criticism would often come down to sneering at an insufficient elitism, an excessive emphasis on the lower common denominator. Even when those complaints came from leftist intellectuals who claimed to revere equality, the old aristocratic disdain for the masses was often barely concealed beneath the supposed love for all humanity. Naturally, the peasants and workers who flocked from Europe to America as immigrants did not share this attitude.