Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  Both left- and right-wing ideologues gave such warnings, with their ideas soon being taken up by mass movements. Beyond avoiding the danger of imitating America, they sought to use its alleged threat and bad example to mobilize supporters for their own plans to revolutionize society. Thus, for both Communists and fascists, the United States was a prime competitor-first as a rival model for organizing society, later as a great power that opposed their designs. The United States represented one potential future, but they had a better alternative to offer. American democracy must be shown as a sham, its higher living standards exposed as a myth.

  The far left and right each had its own particular emphasis. The extreme right argued that America had changed European society too much, while the leftists claimed that it had not gone far enough. Marxists said that America was racist, while fascists insisted it was a mongrel society based on race mixing. Rightists focused more often on America as a threat to their tradition, society, and culture. Leftists wanted to portray America as a false utopia, not a paradise for the common man but a hell dominated by a ruthless ruling class whose apparent success only strengthened its real oppressiveness.

  Yet in ridiculing its democratic pretensions and questioning its economic successes, the political spectrum's two extremes also shared a surprising amount in common regarding their critique of the United States. Each saw the United States as a real direct threat to its own global tri umph. Both used similar themes-sometimes in virtually identical words-built on previous European anti-Americanism of both the aristocratic and romantic varieties.

  Precisely because America was attractive to the earlier nineteenthcentury European left and to so many liberals and reformers, radicals were all the more determined to destroy any such "illusions." Take Russia, for example. The Decembrist reformers of the 182os, whose coup attempt against the czar failed, based much of their proposed constitution on that of America. Leaders of the following generation of Russian oppositionists thought in similar terms. Michael Bakunin, the great theorist of anarchism, saw the United States as the "classic land of political liberty," while his liberal counterpart Alexander Herzen believed that the United States was the only country that might become the ideal state for promoting human welfare.'

  In contrast, the conservative arch-opponent of Russian liberals and leftists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his 1871 novel, The Devils, retells the familiar tale of America being so horrible as to turn a revolutionary into a reactionary. The character closest to Dostoyevsky's political standpoint is a Russian who went to America to discover how American workers fared and concluded that it was there that men "live under the worst possible social conditions." When a Russian liberal laughingly responds that their own country better fits that description, the conservative protagonist claimed that workers in America are routinely beaten, robbed, and cheated at every turn. Two years there taught him that Russiansnot Americans-were the people destined to "regenerate and save the world."2

  Ironically, it was the reactionary Russian view of America rather than the progressive one that would prevail under the Soviet regime. But until the Communist takeover in 1917, Russian liberals and socialists continued to see the United States in a positive light.'

  Karl Marx, too, had many good things to say about the United States, albeit because he saw it as being a step ahead of contemporary Europe rather than as the embodiment of his own ideal society. After Lincoln's 1864 reelection, Marx even wrote the president: "From the commencement of the [Civil War] the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class." America was the place that "the idea of [a] great Democratic Republic had first sprung up ... the [Bill of Rights] was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century." The South's secession was nothing more than "a crusade of property against labor," and the interests of European workers required that the Union would win.4

  Remarkably, Marx added, "The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes." He called Lincoln the "single-minded son of the working class," who would lead his country through the "struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world."5

  Yet such attitudes did not always characterize the main cultural figures of the left or its politicians as they neared power. Even Marx's daughter, Eleanor, who came with her lover, Edward Aveling, to the United States in 1886 to raise money for the cause, was not enchanted. They wrote a book entitled The Working-Class Movement in America but didn't find much of one, claiming nevertheless that capitalist exploitation had created greater extremes of wealth and poverty than in Europe.6 They especially sought to debunk the romantic image of the quintessentially American figure of the free-spirited cowboy, portraying him simply as a low-paid proletarian "as much at the mercy of the capitalist" as any factory slave.7

  The younger Marx's writing tried to deal with the central problem that the United States posed for Marxists. Their doctrine claimed that the workers' impoverishment, inability to escape from servitude, and absence of any better alternative system would inevitably force the proletariat to wage a socialist revolution. Thus, the idea that America could provide a better future for its workers must be quashed. Many immigrants to the United States discovered that they could dramatically improve their personal conditions and change classes in a way that was impossible in contemporary Europe. Eventually, American workers achieved heights of prosperity unimagined in the Old Country. Many Europeans suspected that this was so and that they should thus emigrate or seek to install a similar system at home. The left, like the ruling establishment, needed to convince them otherwise.

  Ironically, another source for the future left's style of antiAmericanism was the same kind of anti-industrialization, antimodernist romanticism that was supposedly alien to its ideology but that had so long prevailed among European artists. The novelist Maxim Gorky, whose admirer Lenin would soon begin the task of modernizing and industrializing Russia, expressed well the notions that would come to dominate Western pro-Communist circles and those in the Soviet Union.

  Gorky's 19o6 book, The City of the Yellow Devil was an anti-ode to New York, a place "lacking in any desire to be beautiful" whose buildings "tower gloomily and drearily.... The city seems like a vast jaw, with uneven black teeth. It breathes clouds of black smoke into the sky and puffs like a glutton suffering from his obesity.... The street is a slippery, greedy throat, in the depths of which float dark bits of the city's foodliving people." Each resident is a victim as the city "strangles him, sucks his blood and brain, devours his muscles and nerves, and grows and grows.... Inner freedom, the freedom of the spirit does not shine in these people's eyes.""

  And yet even Gorky admits that these people are not miserable but rather "tragically satisfied with themselves." Like later European cultural critics, Gorky had to find a way to explain why Americans were not unhappy given the alleged awfulness of their lives. And he used a rationale employed by many such successors: they are kept happy only since they "buy rubbish they do not need and watch shows that only dull their wits."9

  This argument required, however, the self-proclaimed tribunes of the people to ignore the expressed preferences of the American masses, who generally supported their democratic system while rejecting the left's ideology and proposed solution. This analysis of Americans as paralyzed by false consciousness failed to understand the blessings of stability, relative prosperity, and an opportunity for advancement that often were within reach.

  Gorky's writings also show how much of the European left's condescension to America was in reality based on a snobbishness and European chauvinism shared with their reactionary counterparts. In a letter he wrote while visiting America in 19o6, Gorky declared, "Everything beautiful comes from Europe."10 Long after the Communist revolution in Russia, he told an American magazine that the United States "is the mo
st deformed civilization on our planet," for whatever Europe's faults, these had been "magnified to monstrous proportions" there."

  Once the Soviet Union had been established, Communist views of the United States were no longer a matter of individual choice but were determined by the regime's policy. The USSR was the first country to impose mandatory anti-Americanism on its citizens and all aspects of its educational and media system. Since the USSR was to be the masses' hope and humanity's future, it must be made clear to all citizens and followers in the Communist movement that the United States could not play that role. And if the new Soviet regime needed imported American technology or products-as many other radical rulers would in the future-this made discrediting America even more urgent. No one could be allowed to think that America's scientific or technical achievements were proof of that system's superiority.

  As Soviet leaders focused on the threat of America's international power, they ordered propagandists, journalists, and cultural workers to emphasize the failings of America as a society. According to Lenin, who wanted to counter the appeal of Wilson's advocacy of freedom for other nations, the United States embodied "the most rabid imperialism" and "the most shameless oppression and suppression of weak and small nationalities." Democracy in America "provided the most perfect mask for the most horrible policies."12 While President Wilson saw World War I as a battle to promote democracy and end future conflicts, Lenin insisted that U.S. participation in the war was only due to "the interests of the New York Stock Exchange. "13 Lenin's USSR thus saw America as also being engaged in a drive for world domination that only one side could win.

  Lenin's "Letter to American Workers" of August 1918 proclaimed that America was one of the worst countries in the world regarding the gap "between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism." Rather than a country of relative democracy and equality, the United States was merely "the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery. " 14

  Stalin, Lenin's successor, viewed America as his main rival. As early as 1929, he highlighted America's role as the great Satan of global evil. "When a revolutionary crisis has developed" there, he said, "that will be the beginning of the end of all world capitalism.""

  Thus, from the 1920S until the USSR's collapse seventy years later, anti-American propaganda there-and from foreign Communist parties-was quite consistent since it derived from a centrally dictated political line based on Moscow's interests. At times, it focused on specific U.S. policies, but the details never affected the overall message. Nothing positive could ever be said about the United States. Aside from direct clashes on the international stage, it was the existence of the United States as a visibly more successful alternative model for human society that made discrediting it so important for the Soviet Union's masters.

  Yet once one gets beyond the rhetorical flourishes about capitalism and the frequent claims of America's economic failure (by no means fantasies, of course, during the Great Depression of the 193os), the content of most of that domestic critique was strikingly like pre-Soviet and contemporary non-Marxist European complaints. When degrading American culture and society, pro-Communist intellectuals and those influenced by them in the West often sounded like both their romantic or conservative anti-American ancestors. On these two issues as well as on America's role in the world, their claims were also virtually identical to those of their successors in the early twenty-first century.

  In earlier years, however, the Communists' two main themes were about America as an economic failure and as a phony democracy. The United States was portrayed as a plutocracy ruled by a handful of ruthless monopolists, who held the vast majority of the population imprisoned in poverty. Thus, a 1931 Soviet primer on its own economic progress contrasts the anarchy, waste, exploitation, and economic insecurity rampant in America with the USSR's system: "In America the machine is not a helper to the worker ... but an enemy. Every new machine, every new invention throws out upon the street thousands of workers." But in Russia, "We build factories in order that there may be no poverty, no filth, no sickness, no unemployment, no exhausting labor. "16

  A Soviet engineer even authored a poem to explain this idea:

  Thus, Soviet peasants starving from the disasters wrought by collectivization or urban workers facing terrible conditions could rest secure in the belief that their American counterparts were worse off. At the same time, of course, the Soviet regime controlled all the means of communication and information-down to letters from relatives abroad or conversations with visiting Americans-to ensure that only negative images rather than more balanced ones reached its people.

  The state-approved image of the United States was represented by a picture in a 1938 textbook in which unemployed American workers, clad in shabby clothes and without coats, stamp their feet on the pavement to get warm, while a passing "elegantly dressed lady" offers half a bar of chocolate to one man as a way to alleviate his starvation. American society consisted of millionaires swallowing up feebler folk and helpless proletarians. Yet a brighter future was already visible in the form of black and white workers uniting to bring a Communist revolution and, no doubt, raise America to the dizzy heights achieved by Stalin's regime.''

  Social decadence was said to undercut any technological achievement that America could claim. The silhouette chosen for the cover of Alexander Hamadan's American Silhouettes, published in 1936, was that of a hobo against the backdrop of a New York City skyline. In the 1930s, the truth of poverty and racial prejudice was bad enough, but Soviet propagandists had to embellish it. Thus, the 1941 Soviet Handbook for Elementary School Teachers told them to instruct Soviet youth that their counterparts in the United States "are deprived of real knowledge," taught only the essentials of reading, writing, and arithmetic "because in the opinion of the American bourgeoisie this is enough for the children of the toilers." A 1934 novel has a Soviet thief dreamily comparing the advantages of forced labor on the White Sea-Baltic Canal to the far more terrible conditions of American prisons.19

  When the Soviets loosened up beyond the barest cliches about America, though, they quickly returned to all the usual European charges against the United States, as in the satirical travel book, Little Golden America, published in 1937 by the comic writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeni Petrov at the moment Ilf was dying of tuberculosis contracted on the trip. Like their Western European predecessors of a century earlier, they found American life annoyingly homogeneous and sadly "colorless and deper- sonalized."20

  They also made fun of the rapid pace of life ("we were constantly racing somewhere at top speed"), the obsession with both religion and financial success (on examining the Bibles found in American hotel rooms, they noted that the pages referenced "for success in business" were "greasy" with use), the horrors of American cuisine ("quite tasteless"), and yet the gluttony of the people (Americans "do not eat; they fill up on food, just as an automobile is filled with gasoline." ).21 But while they were ostensibly condemning capitalism, they were actually arguing America's inferiority to Europe.

  Sounding precisely like the aristocratic travelers of the early nineteenth century, the authors explained that Americans are simply unintellectual, lazy creatures who are inferior: "The average American, despite his outward show of activity, is really a passive person by nature. He must have everything presented to him in a finished form, like a spoiled husband."22

  While Americans did have "many splendid and appealing traits," including being good workers, neat, accurate, and honest, "They simply did not possess ... curiosity."23 Americans, the authors added, "cannot endure abstract conversations [but are] interested only in what is directly connected with his house, his automobile, or his nearest neighbors."24 Mistaking pragmatism for a lack of intelligence or intellectual ability was a common European error about America.

  Sounding like the romantics of a century earlier-and, ironically, at a time when Russian patriotism was still conde
mned in the USSR-they wrote that while Russians have a powerful love of their native land down to the level of its soil, an American only asks of his country to "let him alone" and "not to interfere with his listening to the radio or going to the movies. "21 Since, of course, Soviet citizens' slightest deviation from the party line would have landed them in a slave labor camp, perhaps being left alone by one's government did not sound so bad.

  Similarly, like earlier critics of America, many of their complaints resulted from the fact that a modernization process-despite all the Soviet talk of progress and industrialization-was simply not understood in Moscow or other places. At least the nineteenth-century aristocratic and romantic critics knew they did not want a mass society, even if it did provide a better life for the masses. But the leftist anti-Americans could never admit that.

  Ilf and Petrov, for example, said that American food was of poor quality because it was more profitable to ship meat (frozen chickens) and produce (unripe tomatoes) longer distances than to grow fresher foods near cities.26 Yet any culinary loss was mitigated by the fact that this technique allowed for a much greater quantity of relatively better quality food and at far lower prices than would otherwise have been the case.

  In other words, while American workers might eat imperfect tomatoes, they did at least have-unlike in the USSR-tomatoes to eat at affordable prices. American farmers generally also made more money from this system. In contrast, seventy-five years after the Communist regime came to power, Russia still had a huge number of impoverished peasants who could not provide its workers a decent diet. For its city people, no tomatoes or chicken of any kind were on the menu.