by Barry Rubin
Certainly, reactions against America in Britain were much milder than in France. True, in the House of Commons, a resolution was introduced in i9oo denouncing the demoralizing effect of American plays on the London stage, but it did not pass.23 Teachers briefly protested the alleged rise of Americanisms in the English language, yet, contrary to what later happened in France, this did not become a national obsession.
At about this time, negative assessments from the new socialist left began to appear, like one by a British journalist in the 189os, who claimed that America had disappointed British progressives because of its machine politics ruled by party bosses and because of the growing gap between rich and poor. There was, of course, a strong basis for a critique of American society based on its very real ills of that era, one of the most corrupt in the country's history, during which robber barons held sway and corporations bought and looted governments. Indeed, Europeans learned about such matters mainly from the books of American authors who skewered the corruption and injustice of that period. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Jack London's The Iron Heel were widely read in England during those years .21
It is surprising, though, how small a part the problems that most concerned Americans played in mainstream anti-Americanism. In part, this was because the American critics focused on the decline of what previously had been considered a better, more democratic society, while the anti-Americans saw the country as innately rather than temporarily in disrepute. Instead, most of the criticisms continued to be those of the past, more conservative and antidemocratic in nature.
For example, again and again, especially among British writers, America was deemed to be a badly organized society because people there did not know their place. For example, James Bryce, a historian, member of parliament, Liberal Party leader, and frequent visitor to America whose three-volume work on the country, American Commonwealth, was published in 1889, believed that America's problem was an excess of democ racy. Among the evils of democracy were a "commonness of mind and tone, want of dignity and prevalent in and about conduct of public affairs, insensibility to nobler aspects and finer responsibilities of national life; apathy among luxurious classes and fastidious minds because they are no more important than ordinary voters, and because they're disgusted by vulgarities of public life; lack of knowledge, tact and judgment in legislature."25
As was often true, America might well deserve criticism, but antiAmericans' claims had little to do with the actual problems the country faced. Two of Bryce's most positive remarks-that Americans were lawabiding and there was little conflict between the privileged and underprivileged-were also wrong. Equally, Bryce thought that the upper classes and best minds did not deign to intervene in public life because they were disgusted by the vulgarities of a system dominated by the masses. Rather than "magnifying his office and making it honorable," the national leader panders to the people instead of adhering to an aristocratic sense of duty to higher principles.26 The real problem was quite different: politicians were ignoring the people's interests and catering to those of corporations that enriched them.
In a remarkable passage, Bryce charged that ordinary people were too uppity for their own good, and suffered because they tried to defend their interests rather than accept the rule of a proper elite. If only the average American was "less educated, less shrewd, less actively interested in public affairs, less independent in spirit [he] might be disposed, like the masses in Europe, to look up to the classes which have hitherto done the work."27
The dangers of liberalism and equality were also seen as spreading to religion. Some insisted that America was a godless country, while many Catholics thought the United States was dangerously Protestant, which amounted to the same thing. Those on the left, or cultural romantics, considered the United States to be saturated with a narrow Puritanism. But when a liberal reform movement-emphasizing education and social reform-arose in the American Catholic church late in the nineteenth century, it was denounced by French Catholic traditionalists as the heresy of "Americanism," a dangerous infection of democratic ideas that would be condemned by Pope Leo XIII in 1897. As in other areas, America was condemned as a dangerous hotbed of excessive democracy and disrespect for tradition. One conservative leader, Abbe Henry Delassus, wrote a book entitled Americanism and the Anti-Christian Conspiracy, which posited the existence of an alliance of Jews, Masons, and Americans to destroy Christianity.28
Mixing all the traditional themes, the Paris Review warned that Americanism was "not only an attack of heresy; it is an invasion of barbarism. It is ... the assault of a new power against Christian society.... It is money against honor, bold brutality against delicateness ... machinery against philosophy.... The purchase of all, the theft of all, joyous rapine supplanting justice and the demands of duty.... Religious Americanism is only one of the assaults of pan-Americanism."29
One of the most bizarre anti-American incidents, which showed some Europeans' readiness to believe anything bad about America, was the Diana Vaughn affair. A Frenchman named Leo Taxil claimed that the imaginary Vaughn was born among Native Americans and, at a secret ceremony in Charleston, South Carolina, was personally commissioned by Satan to destroy Christianity. She was sponsored by the Masonic order and even went to Mars at times to consort with devils. But after arriving in France, she supposedly changed sides and began exposing Satanists on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the 188os and 189os, Taxil wrote a dozen long books on the subject-including a fictitious "autobiography" of Vaughn, which focused on an American-based conspiracy to seize control of the world. Finally, in 1897, he promised that Vaughn would make a public appearance but instead, before a crowd of 300 people, Taxil admitted he had made up the whole story. Many conservative European Catholics continued to believe, however, that the devil was in league with America.30
If anti-American intellectuals of the day did not accept the notion that the devil was literally backing America, they still thought that the threat from the United States amounted to just about the same thing. Such people evinced a growing sense of fighting a losing battle against a tidal wave of globalizing American evil. This is not to deny the admiration of America by some or the adoption of its cultural and technological products by many more. Yet it was precisely a readiness to import American technology or signs that Europeans were copying its ways that set off the anti-American alarm bells.
That is also why anti-Americanism usually came from conservatives, leftists, and cultural aesthetes rather than from liberals, who were more likely to think American institutions were invitingly democratic and American innovations socially useful. As a result, much antiAmericanism combined both aesthetic and intellectual, leftist and conservative critiques. The left would gradually come to view the United States as capitalism in its purest, most distasteful form, which would seduce others and prevent the creation of a socialist utopia. To conservatives, American capitalism was equally objectionable since it rejected the notion of an elite based on breeding, which conservatives favored, or refined taste, which aesthetes advocated.
For example, John Ruskin, a popular British aesthete, who refused an invitation to visit the United States because it had no castles, was nonetheless able to condemn that country in 1863 for its "lust of wealth, and trust in it; vulgar faith in magnitude and multitude, instead of nobleness; ... perpetual self-contemplation [resulting] in passionate vanity; [and] total ignorance of the finer and higher arts ."31 For the French aesthete Philippe B. J. Buchez, writing in 1885, America was the materialist threat to human destiny, merely "a nation of ignorant shopkeepers and narrowminded industrialists whose entire vast continent contains not one single work of art or scientific work that they made."32
The British poet and aesthete Matthew Arnold complained that America's better treatment of the poor was less important than the fact that it degraded the aristocracy of those who could distinguish "that which is elevated and beautiful."33 Arnold's friend, Lepel Henry Griffin, put the same idea more crudely
. In his 1884 book, sarcastically entitled The Great Republic, he dubbed the United States "the country of disillusion and disappointment." In the entire civilized world, only Russia could compete with it in sordidness, meanness, and ugliness. Griffin explained that America was far worse than British-ruled India because it had a government in which "the educated, the cultured, the honest, and even the wealthy, weigh as nothing in the balance against the scum of Europe which the Atlantic has washed up on the shores of the New World."34
Similar views were expressed by the right-wing German philosopher Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West and a precursor of fascism, who saw the United States as a major cause of that decline. Not only did its people think only of "economic advantages," but lesser races had also seized control from Anglo-Saxons and dragged the country to ruin.35
Aside from any political or cultural ideology, America often reduced otherwise intelligent people to a state of sputtering indignation because it was simply different from their familiar world. After his visit to America in 1909, Sigmund Freud, a cultural conservative despite the revolutionary nature of his ideas, succumbed to a severe case of Americaphobia. He even blamed his chronic intestinal trouble on its cooking, though he suffered from this ailment before his trip.36 On hearing an American ask another to repeat something he had said, Freud remarked in contempt, "These people cannot even understand each other." His biographer, Ernest Jones, said that Freud found it hard to adapt himself to the "free and easy manners of the New World. He was a good European with a sense of dignity and a respect for learning which at that time was less prominent in America." After his trip, he told Jones, "America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake."37
No matter what the ideology, interest group, or psychological cause of anti-Americanism, that idea's presence often told more about its perpetrators than about the United States itself. This was especially so in regard to one powerful personal issue that was rarely addressed directly. Everyone in Europe had the option of emigrating to America, and anyone who thought about that alternative-or perhaps about America at all-had to deal, consciously or subconsciously, with the question of whether or not he or she should do so.
This was a major decision. To stay in Europe implied that one was happier, too thoroughly wedded to that way of life, too fearful, or too well-off to benefit from such a dramatic change. Having a negative view of that potential destination was an easy way to solve the problem and justify one's choice. Looking down at America allowed one to rationalize that decision as being based on a preference for precious traditions and lofty culture rather than, say, fear, self-interest, or a smug satisfaction with the status quo.
Rejecting America as a destination for oneself was, in effect, a decision to decide that it was inferior. The temptation had been virtuously resisted in the name of fatherland, pride, and spirituality, as well as a hundred other superior features. In contrast, the lure could be denounced as a work of the devil, the siren call of purely material wealth that entailed a loss of individuality or, say, intellectual and cultural stature.
For example, the British historian Thomas Carlyle talked a brother out of emigrating to escape his poor and unhappy life by saying, "That is a miserable fate for any one, at best. Never dream of it. Could you banish yourself from all that is interesting to your mind, forget the his tory, the glorious institutions, the noble principles of old Scotland that you might eat a better dinner, perhaps?"38
Similarly, the French novelist Stendhal had the hero of one novel ask himself the question: To go or not to go? He takes a long walk and concludes the answer must be "No" because, "I would be bored in America, among men perfectly just and reasonable, maybe, but coarse, but only thinking about the dollars.... The American morality seems to me of an appalling vulgarity, and reading the works of their distinguished men, I only have one desire: never to meet them in this world. This model country seems to me the triumph of silly and egoist mediocrity."39
And what would be the issue that would most obsess writers, intellectuals, and the others who wrote down their opinions and shaped public opinion about this choice? That in America they would be unimportant, not only because they were on unfamiliar ground but also because their "class" as a whole was less appreciated there. As a result, they romanticized how elevated was their fate at home. Since most of these opinion makers were either aristocrats (or aspired to that status), artists, or intellectuals, they fixated on the low status of these groups as America's true sin.
Later, as the United States became a cultural superpower and could bestow great rewards upon artists, creative figures, and writers, many did emigrate, often fleeing persecution. Some of them achieved their greatest success there. All the more reason, then, for those who stayed behindor who quickly returned because they did not like America or failed there-to justify themselves by making even angrier critiques.
One of the first such people was the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who spent some miserable years in the American Midwest during the 188os working as a farmhand, store clerk, railroad laborer, itinerant lecturer, and church secretary. After returning home, Hamsun turned his experiences into a lecture series and later into a book, The Cultural Life of Modern America, published in 1889, a scathing account of a country with "too little culture and not enough intelligence. "40
In particular, like Stendhal, he disliked American pride. "American patriotism never tries to avoid a flare-up, and it is fearless about the consequences of its hot-headed impetuosity."41 The alleged eagerness of Americans for conflict, contrasting to the supposedly more pacific European nature, was a constant theme of anti-Americans down to the present day, and is made more ironic in this case given Hamsun's later support for fascism. Similarly, like many other European anti-Americans, Hamsun concluded that the country was characterized by a "despotism of freedom ... all the more intolerable because it is exercised by a selfrighteous, unintelligent people."42
Another theme that was gathering impetus in the 188os, though its roots went back a century, was that the United States was a society that had surrendered to technology and become its slave. This futuristic United States was a Frankenstein's monster of wild, inferior, and antihuman ways that might escape to ravage the countryside. Typically, the German philosopher Richard Muller-Freienfels wrote of America in his 1927 work, The Mysteries of the Soul that a "chief characteristic of Americanism is the technicalization or mechanization of life. In Europe it is a servant-at least in theory-but in America it is the almost undisputed despot of life."43
Anti-Americanism, however, was not an inevitable response even for the most fervent aesthetes, including those discussing the question of industrialization and mechanization. Oscar Wilde, who made a long lecture tour of America in 1882, emerged with a reasonably balanced view despite a sometimes hostile reception in the United States. When Wilde urged the locals to love beauty and art, American newspapers had a field day making fun of his languid poses and costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings. Given his views, Wilde could have been most critical of America and indifferent to its success in raising the common people's living standards. Instead, he was a reasonably fair observer, telling his British lecture audiences in 1883, "The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed." They might not wear the latest fashions, he recounted, but had decent garments, unlike England where so many people were clad in rags .41
Wilde also perceptively noted America's eagerness to fix its problems and improve the quality of life. In England, he explained, an innovator was regarded as a crazy man who often ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor was honored, helped, and rewarded with wealth. Foreseeing new approaches to art, Wilde even found American machinery beautiful, an ideal combination of strength and beauty, and described one waterworks as "the most beautifully rhythmic thing I have ever seen. "41
Of course, Wilde was known for his cutting w
it, and he did not disappoint his listeners. Back home, his most famous joke was that the American knowledge of art, especially in the West, was so limited that a wealthy miner turned art patron successfully sued a railroad company for damages when his plaster cast of the Venus de Milo arrived without arms.46
While humorous, Wilde's critique also gives still another vision of the European fear of what an industrialized-defined society would do to culture. Everyone in America, he explained, was always running, hurrying to catch a train, "a state of things which is not favorable to poetry or romance." One can only imagine, he added, how the story of Romeo and Juliet would have lost all its charm if they had been racing to jump on trains all the time. He found America to be "the noisiest country that ever existed." One awoke to the sounds of steam whistles, not nightingales. Since "all Art depends upon exquisite and delicate sensibility ... such continual turmoil must ultimately be destructive of the musical faculty."47 Of course, the United States would come to excel in the production of popular music, though some European critics would agree that the results only proved that American musical faculty had indeed been destroyed.
Less charitable was the American-born emigre writer Henry James, who lived in London and identified with the European critique. A book based on his grand return visit to the United States was essentially the work of a hostile British traveler. Indeed, it is dreadfully unreadable largely because James wrote in a style seemingly intended to make him sound like an exceptionally jaded and effete British aristocrat.