Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  When a kindly lady trying to help James asked him what kind of people he would like to meet in America, he thought to reply, "Why, my dear madam, have you more than one kind?" For in what he called this "vast crude democracy of trade," he insisted, only "the new, the simple, the cheap, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly" could be found.48 Change and practicality were America's worst sins. Unlike holy London, James's new home, the cities contained only buildings without any history or value aside from the crassly commercial. Skyscrapers lack "the authority of permanence or ... long duration" and were simply "the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written. "49

  For a moment, James does ask himself why New York's inevitably dirty port area should offend him when he would find a similar scene in Naples or somewhere else in Europe to be picturesque.50 But soon he is off again on the perpetual American ugliness due to the "complete abolition of forms."51

  In short, America was accused of being so terrible because it was simultaneously too homogeneous and yet too varied, too democratic and not democratic enough, too amoral and yet too puritanical. If the same yardsticks were applied to other countries, they might also be found wanting. Yet the anti-Americans never asked why squalor, for example, should be a sign of respectable age or local color in one place and of degradation in another.

  Of course, America did lack the seasoning that Europe possessed. By definition, any new society will lack that quality. But America was able to use European achievements as its past while constructing its own future. In addition, as many European writers noted, the United States had the youthful qualities of vigor and adaptability. The Europeans had a different problem, which examining the United States highlighted for them: whether they would be able to build a future different from that of America.

  Many of the realities neglected by Europeans in general and antiAmericans in particular showed that this was the true issue. For example, the cultural apex and creativity of which Europeans boasted was largely monopolized in each country by a single capital city and by the upper classes alone. The greatness of opera, ballet, chamber music, or poetry was enjoyed by a tiny minority of society. It was all very well to say that Europe had a high culture and Americans had a low one, but how many Europeans actually had access to or preferred those exalted artistic heights?

  In bragging about their lofty intellectual level and exalted tastes, antiAmericans were comparing the average American to the top io percent of their own society, while ignoring the other 9o percent. Local mass culture was beneath notice in Europe. Only after being challenged by a popular culture exported from America to fill the vacuum would European intellectuals claim that their own people were being deprived of the classics in exchange for imported junk.

  In addition, the anti-American idea initiated in this period-that its modernization was innately inimical to culture-would be proven wrong. The United States would excel in new forms of creative endeavor (jazz, film, photography, dance, and new literary schools) that took as their inspiration the industrialized modernism it pioneered. The United States would produce a high-quality culture of its own using new media and themes, based on a society whose distinctive attributes were not roadblocks but an occasion for originality.

  Moreover, while American techniques of mass production could be said to debase culture, they were also the greatest tools ever created for spreading its benefits. The common people came to be exposed to the finest artistic works-though only they could decide whether or not to like them-through a mass educational system, records, film, radio, television, and other innovations developed primarily in the United States.

  To this kind of familiar condemnation of American society in terms of its internal functioning, however, in the late nineteenth century was added a growing fear about the United States becoming a (perhaps the) main global power. As America's growing economy combined with the insecurities or outright decline of their own states and empires, there were more patriotic reasons for Europeans to denounce the United States. It was the alleged American combination of being so "ethically primitive and technologically advanced" and its growing strength, in the words of historian Simon Schama, that petrified them.52 In this vein, the United States seemed the power of the future, and its rise would seemingly come at the expense of Britain, Germany, France, and other European countries.

  Such warnings had been issued by Frenchmen as far back as the 1790s, but they reached the level of obsession by the 189os. Either the U.S. empire would be one of armed conquest or of economic and cultural domination-or both, as increasingly seemed possible and later appeared to be obvious. In the words of one Frenchman backing the former theory, the United States "aspires to nothing less than having the entire humanity in its orbit. Today Mexico, tomorrow the world! Such is the real, only maxim of this imperialist and merchant republic." Americans are only united, the author added, by "the ambition they have to extend their empire far beyond the present limits.""

  This alarm bell was set off not only by growing American economic power but also by four defeats of European states in their own imperialistic struggles around the turn of the century: Italy by Ethiopia in 1896, Spain by the United States in 1898, Britain by the South African Boers, and Russia by Japan in 1905. These were unsettling omens of, to para phrase Spengler, the decline of most of the West. The French poet Paul Valery called these events "symptoms" of a possibly fatal European illness and predicted that America would be the dying continent's unwelcome heir.54 The U.S. victory over Spain in 1898, Valery explained, was the moment he felt a loyalty to Europe as a whole, for which America was an alien rival.55

  Strangely, the man who most symbolized this new American world role and who seemed to embody many of the negative stereotypes about Americans, Theodore Roosevelt, was rather popular among his European colleagues for his intellectual scope, although he was patronized for his typical American youthfulness and vigor.56 Yet the policies he represented were a different matter. When Roosevelt advocated that America speak softly and carry a big stick, originally an African saying, Europeans exaggerated the size of the stick and could not possibly imagine any American capable of speaking softly.

  While a military threat remained a future and hypothetical concern, American cultural and spiritual aggression was already seen as a clear and present danger. The United States, warned Edmund Mandat- Grancey, a French nobleman writing in 189i, was like a disease that would infect Europe. Even if Americans could live with their dreadful institutions, they were the carriers of a cultural plague that would kill European civilization."' Two years later, in Voyage to the Land of Dollars, Emile Barbier warned that the United States was invading Europe with its commodities-locomotives, coal, silk, fruit, cotton, and even wine."'

  Yet much of this hysteria and antagonism took place before the United States was even active on the world scene. By the time it actually defeated Spain in 1898, easily capturing Cuba and the Philippines, the event simply confirmed the already formulated theory about the American threat. The Spanish-American War was nonetheless a pivotal event that European critics saw as the start of an American advance on their continent. To make matters worse, many observers in France and Germany feared that the English-speaking nations, the United States and Britain, would combine forces to dominate the world.

  In the words of Philippe Roger, the foremost historian of French antiAmericanism, "The idea was that the daughter of Europe-Americahad turned against Europe and was now a potential enemy." That year, 1898, was also the peak of conflict between liberal and conservative forces in France. One issue alone brought French people together: hatred of America. A visiting Cuban, who himself welcomed Spain's defeat, remarked, "Weird spectacle indeed.... Republican and anticlerical France joins with the France of the manor houses (restored thanks to the rich American marriages [made by French aristocrats]) to shout down the United States and heap praise upon the Spanish monarchy!"59

  America's second big action on the world stage
was its intervention in World War I, and this, too, provoked an anti-American reaction, even from the countries that it helped as an ally. Arriving in France, the U.S. forces thought that they would be popular. General John Pershing marched his troops directly to the tomb of the Frenchman who had done so much to help America become independent and who had praised George Washington as the father of liberty. "Lafayette," announced the American general proudly, "We are here!"

  But the earlier bitterness and suspicion of the United States remained unvanquished in many French and some British hearts. Once victory was attained, warm feelings declined toward the Yanks despite their blood sacrifice on behalf of their European allies. There was much envy for a society so relatively wealthy and unscathed by war, secure enough, in a later British writer's words, to have "ignored so many problems" and "professed to believe itself immune from most human ills [and] to have conquered most human problems." To those who had suffered so much, American "optimism seemed indecent."60

  The conservative British magazine, The Spectator, which had looked at the United States as the world's savior during the war, was complaining by 1921, "We are too proud to be helped by the daughter country." And a year later, it published an article under the title "Mother's Eldest Daughter," which said that the United States was wealthy, energetic, and powerful but quite immature. "Its resources were physical, like a youth's, and like a youth it did not know what to do with them."61

  In Britain, though, anti-Americanism remained more a matter of snobbishness and nasty journalistic remarks than of any political importance. Like a British comedic rhyme of the 192os, making fun of imported American literature, "Our children need these refining books/About gangsters, bootleggers, thugs and crooks."62 A 1936-1937 survey of British schoolchildren found they thought that the United States was a place to get rich quickly and produced good athletes but that Americans were boastful, were unable to speak English correctly, and made inferior products. Nevertheless, British leaders could simply view America as a junior ally and protege merely in need of proper tutoring. Still, old stereotypes endured.63

  But the two countries had too much in common culturally and politically for serious antagonism to develop. There were proportionately more pro-Americans in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. The relative good feeling in Britain was expressed by such well-known figures as H. G. Wells, the visionary writer, who was not only impressed by American cities and living standards but also thought the universities "far more alive to the thinking and knowledge-making function of universities than [those of] Great Britain." He did not fear rising American power, concluding that "by sheer virtue of its size, its free traditions, and the ... initiative in its people, the leadership of progress must ultimately rest [in American hands]."64

  The British politician most committed to close friendship with America was the greatest of his generation. Winston Churchill, himself halfAmerican, undertook his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples in 1932 to promote friendship and alliance between the two countries. Churchill foresaw that this partnership would one day literally save the world. He had to delay completion of the book in order to put his idea into practice as Britain's prime minister during World War II.

  France was a totally different matter. Indeed, while the United States had saved France during World War I, the reaction in many circles was not exactly one of gratitude. President Woodrow Wilson, like several of his well-meaning successors, thought his efforts to fight dictators and ensure peace would be appreciated. Instead, he was detested in France as being self-righteous and too soft on the defeated Germans. Wilson was seen as a wooly-minded idealist and a religious fanatic, stereotypes that would also be applied to other American leaders. When he failed to persuade Congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and America withdrew into isolationism, French critics added weakness to their indictment of him.

  Two more developments particularly enraged the French: the U.S. attempt to be paid for its wartime loans and the dramatic postwar increase of American cultural exports to France. What followed was a high point in the long history of French anti-Americanism. Unnoticed in America, whose news from Paris was mostly about American writers living there, the 1920S in France was characterized by a remarkable degree of anti-Americanism.

  In tremendously influential books published throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s-like Robert Aron's and Arnaud Dandieu's The American Cancer, J.-L. Chastanet's Uncle Shylock, and Charles Pomaret's America's Conquest of Europe, and many other works-every American action was put in the worst possible light. The United States only entered the war in 1917 because it wanted to profit from European suffering as long as possible and then dominate that continent at the lowest possible cost. Chastanet predicted that the future belonged to American imperialism: "You will practice usury on a lot of nations and you will dominate them."65

  These authors, as others in the past, all denounced American society as being hypnotized by technology and obsessed with moneymaking to the point where human spiritual life was destroyed. This was a country that wanted to impose its system on the whole world. Imperialism was at the core of its nature. They portrayed America as the main threat to Europe-and to France above all-a notion that took some awesome blindness in an era when Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin were among that continent's rulers.

  French anti-Americanism was a unanimous nonpartisan affair. The left and right could agree on one thing: the United States was the land of a harsh and brutal "absolute capitalism." Conservatives stressed its spiritual poverty and destruction of tradition; leftists claimed it was dominated by monopolies that exploited workers. Both saw it as a threat to the kind of France they preferred. Charles Maurras, the French right's leading philosopher, painted America as a society shaped by the impersonal requirements of an uncaring market to the exclusion of all humane concerns. The left made the same argument by citing the repression of strikes, the weakness of the American left, and the tendency of mechanization to destroy jobs.

  Yet both sides were also reacting against the greatest threat of all. The 1920S was a period of great prosperity in the United States. Economic growth was accompanied by the spread internationally of such American innovations as jazz, films, and automobiles. The pilot-author Antoine de Saint-Exupery argued that the material productivity of American industrial society was not a significant benefit because it was cancelled out by the spiritual emptiness that accompanied it. This was a common characteristic that meant that there was no difference between German Nazism, Soviet Communism, and Americanism. Of these, however, Americanism was the most dangerous of all because France would find its version of the "industrial disease," the "American cancer," most at- tractive.66

  Similarly, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, in his lectures and writings during the 192os, warned that the elite best qualified to lead and govern was being crushed by the masses. In this sense, American society was a brutal one with "a primitive people camouflaged behind the latest inventions." There, "The masses crushes [sic] beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."67

  In some cases, however, anti-Americans were concluding that these faceless masses did indeed have a sinister and secret elite as its leader. Increasingly, both French and German68 anti-Americans in the 1920S closely linked their doctrine with anti-Semitism. Jews and Americans became twin symbols of blame for those who hated modern society and rapid change. Earlier contempt for the new immigrants to America, as expressed by Griffin, Spengler, and others, was generalized. But this hatred increasingly focused on the Jews as the authors of the problem, an idea echoed by such anti-American American expatriates as James, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. The negative stereotypes of Jews and Americans had developed in parallel. Both groups were said to be money-grubbing enemies of tradition who conspired to foist a new system on humanity to serve their own
interests. The intertwining of these hatreds grew with fascism in the 193os and 1940s.

  In France during the 192os, Maurras portrayed American Jews as blocking U.S. entry into World War I because they allegedly favored Germany. Later, when he and likeminded people became favorable toward Nazi Germany, they developed conspiracy theories about antiGerman American Jews pushing the United States into World War II. There was a strong, albeit false, belief in France that Jews ran the U.S. financial system and thus were to blame for France's large debts to America and for the U.S. economic threat to that country. The choice of the nickname "Uncle Shylock" for the United States was not accidental. Robert Brasillach, a right-wing French intellectual who collaborated with the Nazis, explained that there were three reasons for Frenchmen to hate America: its dollars, hypocrisy, and control by international Jewry.69

  In novels, essays, films, plays, and travel books during the 192os, America was also denounced by the French intellectual class as threatening to engulf the world with its malformed society. A 1924 play warned that in the United States the Americans had already infiltrated France. Parisians learned how mechanized American farming threatened the pastoral idyll of the French countryside. The surrealist, soon to be Communist, writer Louis Aragon quipped in 1925 a prophecy of a September i1 far in the future: "Let faraway America and its white buildings come crashing down."70 The United States was portrayed as monotonous and provincial, a nightmare of identical boxlike houses, standardized products, and narrow minds.71 While there were grains of truth in many such ideas, they were so exaggerated and stereotyped as to be rendered meaningless.

  It was America, far more than the Soviet Union-which supposedly respected and honored intellectuals-that frightened the French intellectual class as a model. Emmanuel Berl neatly coupled these themes in a sentence: "America is multiplying its territory, where the values of the West risk finding their grave."72