Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  Moreover, the European visitors' view that materialism and democracy blocked the creation of a serious culture in the United States was already being disproven. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, the Hudson River school of painting, and many others were doing important and original work. As in politics, a viable mass-oriented alternative to Europe's official aristocratic culture was possible.

  Even the kindly British novelist Charles Dickens, least snobbish of his nation and defender of the downtrodden in his great novels, could not quite shake himself loose from European disdain. Dickens had some positive things to say about the United States in a book about his 1842 journey there, finding Americans "by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable and affectionate." He also had good personal reasons for turning against America after being cheated by speculators in a canal company fraud and by publishers who stole his writings and never paid him royalties.

  Nevertheless, his conclusion was that while the British suffer from being self-absorbed, inner-oriented characters, Americans are colorless because they are obsessed with what their fellows think of them, a result of that dreaded equality that makes them want to be like everyone else. And, at times, even Dickens was overcome by the American disease that so often affected European travelers. Its main symptom was an angry feverish hatred toward America in general that made otherwise sane people almost froth at the mouth.

  Traveling from Cincinnati downstream to Cairo, Illinois, he wrote of "the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo."79

  Ironically, this was the very material that Mark Twain would render so unforgettably as a writer exemplifying a distinctly American worldview. At any rate, in Dickens's rendition, the United States was a land of sleazy business ethics, rampant lawlessness and violence, crass materialism, insufferable and undereducated boors, and gluttony. It is a list quite familiar a century later. Instead of an eagle as its national symbol, Dickens proposes choosing a more appropriate animal for America's emblem: a bat "for its short-sightedness, [a rooster] for its bragging," a magpie "for its [dis]honesty," a peacock "for its vanity," or an ostrich for its desire to avoid reality.80

  Dickens's novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, published in 1866, is certainly the funniest nineteenth-century anti-American satire. His poor hero, who makes the mistake of immigrating to America, suffers the entire repertoire of American ills, ranging from terrible climate to cultural barbarism to predatory swindlers who sell him land in a malaria-infested frontier town where he becomes seriously ill.

  When Martin is invited to dinner, he hears a bell "ringing violently" and is convinced the house is afire as a series of agitated gentlemen rush in. The alarm turns out to be only the dinner bell. American gluttony was a favorite theme of nineteenth-century European writers, perhaps because the average American ate far better than his European counterpart. In the dining room, Martin sees: "All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defense, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast time tomorrow morn- ing."81

  And when he finally returns to England, according to one of the book's running jokes, every time the word "America" is mentioned, he becomes ill.

  Obviously, the reactions to America of each country's nationals reflected the priorities and problems of their native lands. The British put a little more emphasis on excessive equality, the French on intellectual and cultural poverty, and the Germans spoke much of spiritual barrenness. Yet all these themes are found in the ideas of each of them. It is telling, too, how much of this criticism came out of a combination of aristocratic and romantic spirit, of leftist and rightist ideas intertwined.

  Both aristocrats and romantics, conservatives and radicals, looked down on a middle-class republic that was certainly not their idea of utopia. Conservative Germans, who had a horror of republicanism, easily classified America as unpalatable. But so did German romantics who had an equal horror of materialism and the masses.

  During the first half of the nineteenth century, European antiAmericans concluded that the United States was to be ridiculed, not feared. Its ludicrous political system was a clear failure and might well collapse of its own weight. If the United States posed any threat, it arose from bad example rather than global ambitions. The word "model" sneeringly appeared most often in anti-American literature to discredit the idea that this country might provide an example to emulate. This concept would later be expressed as the rejection of "Americanization."

  The second stage of anti-Americanism then was to insist that the United States was a failure. But contrary to these predictions of earlynineteenth-century anti-Americans-who would see the Civil War as the doom they had been expecting-the United States did not collapse. On the contrary, it grew steadily stronger and more visibly successful. Only when the American experiment had clearly worked-around the i88os, when American industrialization began to lead the world, or after 1898, when the U.S. victory over Spain made it an incipient world powerwas it no longer possible to insist that it had failed. But the antiAmericans would find the threat of American success to be an even more serious matter. And this would lead to the third stage of antiAmericanism.

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  THE FEAR OF AN AMERICAN FUTURE

  Culturally, America was becoming known as the land of jazz, movies, and advertising. It was becoming easier to speak of a distinctive American worldview, style, and way of life. In some ways, the modernization of Europe seemed to parallel what already existed in America: it became more secular, democratic, urban, faster paced, mass-oriented, geograph ically mobile, classless, questioning of tradition, deifying change, and many other such characteristics.

  This prospect, however, while embraced by many Europeans, horrified others who identified it with, among other things, the influence of America's baleful example. This reaction gave rise to the third era of antiAmericanism. "For some reason or other," the American writer James Russell Lowell wrote in 1869, "the European has rarely been able to see America except in caricature."2 Yet this caricature evolved over time. The idea that America was a failure, widely held in the first half of the nineteenth century, had proved wrong. Anti-Americans had discouraged taking that country as a role model by ridiculing it as politically unviable, culturally impoverished, and socially failed.

  Now, however, as the French economist Paul de Rousiers aptly wrote in 1892, "America ceased to be an object of curiosity to become an object of dread."3 If America was no longer a joke to be laughed at or an inferior to be sneered at, if it actually was going to be the prototype of their own future, the United States might really be a danger to the entire world. If America was going to be a great power, it might impose itself on others. And if Europeans were persuaded to copy voluntarily its alleged spirit of relentless, soulless industrialization, and modernization, they, too, would sink into social, political, and cultural barbarity.

  Thus, in 1901, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a British writer, said in a letter from the United States to his friend, the novelist E. M. Forster: "The things that rubbed into me in this country are 1) that the future of the world lies with America, and 2) that radically and essentially America is a barbarous country. The life of the spirit ... is, not accidentally or temporarily, but inevitably and eternally killed in this country. "4

  Ironically, then, as the United States proved wrong its historic antiAmerican critics who said it could never succeed, this very success only inspired more anti-Americanism. One could well believe it was headed for world economic domination and that others must copy its methods or fall far behind. The anti-Americans believed that while the United States had became highly productive, its
progress had come at a significant cost to cultural and spiritual values. The cost of the enterprise seemed too high for these critics, who felt that it had literally sold its soul to attain material riches.

  One clear expression of this attitude came in 1926 from Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian of the Middle Ages, a time that European conservatives might find preferable to the new age. Huizinga wrote that his group of Europeans traveling together through America constantly felt, "We all have something that you lack; we admire your strength but we do not envy you. Your instrument of civilization and progress, your big cities and your perfect organization, only makes us nostalgic for what is old and quiet, and sometimes your life seems hardly to be worth living, not to speak of your future."5

  But was it the future of only the United States itself that was at stake? Perhaps that country's success would allow it to dominate the whole world. Or perhaps that same success would convince others to copy the American model. In his 1926 novel, The Plumed Serpent, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence records the thoughts of his protagonist Kate Leslie on encountering America: "Was it the great continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up, the continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God?" Was America the place "where the human will declares itself `free' to pull down the soul of the world?" Was America merely a negation of all that existed, "the life-breath of materialism? And would the great negative pull of the Americans at last break the heart of the world?"6

  This was the fear in Europe. The United States would break the heart of the world by becoming the wellspring of a new and very destructive type of society in which everything was subjected to efficiency, organization, and material gain. This new theme of anti-Americanism began to be apparent during the Civil War. The British and French governments were hostile to the Union partly because they saw it as the embodiment of America's terrible society, as opposed to the more "Europeanstyle" agricultural and aristocratic South. The French government was on the verge of recognizing and aiding the Confederacy as an independent country. Despite its own antislavery policy, the British government only awaited a decisive Confederate victory to provide an occasion for doing the same thing.

  Ironically, the widespread sympathy for the Confederacy in England and France also rested on the fact that a Southern victory would restart the flow of cotton to their textile mills.' Thus, on the one hand, the Europeans opposed the Union as a competing industrial power while, on the other hand, in anti-American terms, they condemned it as inferior to themselves because it was an industrial society.

  Many Europeans, both conservatives and romantics, thus defended the Southerners as victims of Yankee imperialists who wanted to seize their wealth. The Europeans claimed that the drive to eradicate slavery was just a smokescreen for imperialism, just as a century later their spiritual descendants portrayed the U.S. role in promoting freedom and democracy in the world as an excuse to conquer the globe. In part, Europeans failed to understand that American policies in the Civil War, Cold War, or 2003 Iraq War were motivated in large part-if by no means completely-by moral considerations beyond pure realpolitik. And equally, in all three wars, beyond an alleged humanitarian intention, Europeans were concerned that a U.S. victory would leave the United States too powerful, a threat to their own interests.

  European liberals and reformers-like John Bright, Richard Cobden, and John Stuart Mill in England, and even the more leftist Karl Marx8- supported the Union precisely because they saw it as a role model. But most of the ruling classes and intellectuals in Britain and France denounced the United States during the Civil War as a country so dreadful that it should not be allowed to survive. The French newspaper, Le Pays, called the U.S. government, "one of the most barbarous, most nefarious, and most inept which has ever been seen." While the South was a European-style, homogeneous, integrated society, the North was no more than a collection "of turbulent immigrants."9

  A Spanish newspaper, El Pensamiento Espannol, made the comprehensive anti-American case in September 1862: "The history of this model republic can be summed up in a few words. It came into being by rebellion. It was founded on atheism. It was populated by the dregs of all the nations in the world. It has lived without law of God or man. Within a hundred years, greed has ruined it. Now it is fighting like a cannibal, and it will die in a flood of blood and mire."1o

  Similar sentiments were voiced by the London Times, the newspaper of the British establishment, in hardly less restrained language: "We ought to give our moral weight to our English kith and kin [Southern whites], who have gallantly striven so long for their liberties against a mongrel race of plunderers and oppressors." The breakup of the United States, it concluded, would be good "riddance of a nightmare.""

  So deep did the hostility of the Union's critics run that they even refused to be swayed by President Abraham Lincoln's 1862 decision to free the slaves, though they had attacked his failure to do so earlier. The British ambassador in Washington, Lord Russell, denounced this step as "cold, vindictive, and entirely political," a vile encouragement to "acts of plunder, of [arson], and of revenge."12 The Times claimed that Lincoln was appealing "to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts and when the blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet." 13

  Disgusted by the hypocrisy of those for whom the United States could never be in the right, the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill sat down on October 27, 1862, and wrote a letter to an American friend, noting that "the proclamation [freeing the slaves] has only increased the venom of those who after taunting you for so long with caring nothing for abolition [of slavery], now reproach you for your abolitionism as the worst of your crimes." And then he added a memorable thought that still rings fresh today, denouncing those who claimed to be objecting only to American policies but "who so hate your democratic institutions that they would be sure to inveigh against you whatever you did, and are enraged at no longer being able to taunt you with being false to your own principles."14

  When Mill wrote the phrase "your democratic institutions," he was quite aware that these critics did not necessarily hate the United States because they opposed democracy as such. The most ferocious British anti-Americans were staunch defenders of parliamentary democracy. What they hated was the specific American version of such institutions, its purported soulless, narrowly capitalist, anti-intellectual, mob-ruled, and culturally inferior society.

  Even in France, there were sympathizers with America who thought along the same lines as Mill. In 1865, several liberal French intellectuals met to celebrate the Union victory, the triumph of American democracy, and the abolition of slavery. Their leader was Edouard Rene Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a legal scholar. Opposed to their own dictator, Napoleon III, they wanted to establish a French republican government modeled on America's constitution. They toasted the two countries' historic ties and mutual love of liberty, which made them like "two sisters." At one point in the evening, Leboulaye remarked, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if people in France gave the United States a great memorial to independence" to show their mutual dedication to the cause of mutual liberty? And this began the movement that twenty-one years later, when France had indeed reestablished a republic, resulted in it presenting the Statue of Liberty to New York.15

  These were legitimate sentiments and an important part of the historic French view of the United States as well. But they never silenced the alternative and powerful anti-American attitudes of some very vocal sectors. Indeed, even as the Statue of Liberty was being presented, there were grumblings in Paris of American ingratitude for all France had done for it.16 Increasingly after the Civil War, as America began to outproduce Europe in the making of so many manufactured products, it came to represent not so much liberty but rather freedom's restriction
and hollowness in the archetypal modern capitalist commercial society.

  What could be more significant in this regard than the context of the first French use of the word "Americanization," in Le Journal on January 16, 1867, proclaiming how a recent French fair, the Universal Exhibition, constituted "the latest blow in what amounts to the Americanization of France-Industry outdoing Art, steam threshing machines in place of paintings."" The peculiar but powerful idea that the growth of technology as such would jeopardize culture derived in large part from the European conception that this is what had happened in the United States.

  One after the other, France's most celebrated nineteenth-century writers brought their pens down on the head of America. Honore de Balzac portrayed the United States as excessively materialistic, greedy, and insensitive. Stendhal said America's democracy was merely the appeasement of shopkeepers. In 1873, the poet Charles Baudelaire was complaining that humanity was almost hopelessly Americanized because of the triumph of the "physical" over the "moral" element in life.18

  In his preface to a translation of Edgar Allan Poe's More Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1875, Baudelaire concluded that nothing could be more grotesque than the fact that "Americanmania has virtually become a socially acceptable fad."19 He described the United States, in a phrase echoed by many contemporaries, as gaslight barbarism, the alliance of technology with primitiveness.20 Baudelaire thought the real ruler of America was far more cruel and inflexible than any monarch: the tyranny of public opinion.21

  One uniquely French argument for America's march toward world domination was that it was part of an Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking alignment with the world's most powerful country, Great Britain. True, the colonists had made common cause with France to win their inde pendence, but they had then revived their loyalty toward England. Many echoed Talleyrand's complaint: "I have not found a single Englishman who did not feel at home among Americans and not a single Frenchman who did not feel a stranger."22 To some extent, French antagonism of America was displaced from its historic rivalry toward Britain, which the United States gradually replaced in French thinking as the leading English-speaking power and alternative society.