Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  While 1927 was the year in which the American aviator Charles Lindbergh was toasted in Paris for his solo flight across the Atlantic, a wave of books and articles argued that America and Europe were growing apart culturally. In Who Will Be Master: Europe or America?, Lucien Romier said that although no American held such ideas, "Europe and America no longer represent the same type of civilization. "73

  That, too, was the year that Andre Siegfried wrote his book, The United States Today, which presented the all-too-common thesis that the United States represented a bad society with the power to impose itself on others, long before it had any such influence, at least outside of the smallest Latin American states. "America can do anything," he warned, to "strangle men and governments, help them in situations she chooses, watch over them and finally-the things she likes above alljudge them from the heights of moral superiority and impose her lessons on them."74

  Siegfried explained that "the chief contrast between Europe and America is not so much one of geography as a fundamental difference between two epochs in the history of mankind." The American model was based on an assembly line that reduced people to automatons, as slaves to machines. "We Westerners must each firmly denounce whatever is American in his house, his clothes, his soul." Otherwise, technology would conquer all, becoming an end in itself, as had already happened in the United States.75

  In every way, America continued to be portrayed as inferior to Europe, even when these differences were largely imaginery. For example, American cities were said not to be like French cities. Regis Michaud, in the 1928 book What's Needed to Understand the American Soul, explained that "neither art nor harmony preceded their birth. One can hardly believe that civilized beings have been able to pile up so many dreadful spectacles." Anything attractive in American landscape was European.76

  The French woman, Siegfried explained, "doesn't lose sight of [her] purpose, which is the preparation of pleasant meals."" In contrast, the American woman, described in earlier decades as too bossy and independent, continued to be denounced, as one French traveler summarized it earlier, for her "brutality ... autonomy, egoism and excessive independence ... practical intelligence, trivial materialism and a self-interested mind.... She seems to us ignorant and pretentious, unable to follow a conversation, so cold she freezes us ... mute, sour-tempered, prudish. ... Do they have domestic qualities? Even less. The American woman is laziness personified."78

  Similarly, Octave Noel of Paris's prestigious L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes explained in his book, The American Peril, the difference between good European chauvinism, derived from "an excess of patriotic sentiment," and bad American jingoism, which arose from a "ferocious[ness] dictated by the appetites or aspirations of a people whose ... efforts have been directed over the past century toward the endless increase of wealth and material goods, and the achievement of comfort."79 In other words, Europeans genuinely loved their countries while Americans only supported their nation out of greed.

  Americans prided themselves on their individualism, rejecting social controls to an extent almost unprecedented in the world. Yet French anti-Americanism insisted that the United States was a mass society that imposed an unacceptable standardization on each person. A century after Europeans first accused the United States of lacking any culture, French critics saw no reason to change this verdict. "North America," wrote one of them, "has inspired no painters, kindled no sculptors, brought forth no songs from its musicians, except for the monotone Negroes." And whatever poets and writers it had produced could not wait to leave for Europe, to "turn from their native soil with bitterness."80

  As a result of this outpouring of indoctrination, in 1931, sixty years after Baudelaire warned that Americanization was triumphing, Paul Morand concluded, "It is fashionable for the intelligentsia to detest Amer- ica."S1 In that year, The American Cancer and Decadence of the French Nation (because it was being influenced by the United States) were published as anti-American, anti-industrialization books.

  While there were Frenchmen who liked the United States, what they had to say only further inflamed the anti-Americans by seeming to show that the cultural and intellectual invasion was gaining momentum. Mor- and's well-intentioned praise for America was like waving a red cape in front of an already enraged bull. Americans, he wrote, are

  the strongest race in the world-the only one which has succeeded in organizing itself since [World War I]; the only one which is not living on a past reputation.... A sporting instinct makes the pupils in any history class long to be Spaniards in the sixteenth century, Englishmen in the eighteenth, Frenchman in the days of [Napoleon]. And that same enthusiasm makes us now desire, momentarily at least, to be Americans. Who does not worship victory?82

  To demand that Frenchmen protect themselves against American culture, Morand concluded, "is simply to refuse that preestablished order which is called the future. [I go to America] to apply to Europe such things as I saw there."83

  But when Georges Duhamel saw this future, he shuddered and became one of France's leading anti-American thinkers. Duhamel had been an army doctor during World War I who achieved success thereafter as a novelist, but he also wrote essays and travel literature. His Scenes of Future Life, published in 1930, came out just after the Wall Street crash, when stories about America's failures were more credible than they had been at any time since the Civil War. The title of the book tells all, for, Duhamel fears, the "future life" of Europe will be lowered to the level of America. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, he warns his countrymen; it tolls for the civilized way of life.

  Yet in this ferocious attack, he presents no statistics, interviews with real people, quotes from actual Americans, or evidence of any kind. America is condemned because of its effect on his psyche. Facts, he seems to be saying, are for the kind of mass-produced, standardized minds produced by a decadent industrial civilization. Long live subjectivity! And yet, partly due to this approach, if the same book was reissued as a new volume penned by a French intellectual in reaction to the September ii, aooi, attacks or the U.S. war on Iraq, it would require only a little updating for the specific fads and technologies being harpooned by the author.

  After a preface emphasizing France's vulnerability to the American disease, Duhamel tells his story in the form of dialogues with his fictional interlocutor, the well-educated-for an American-Parker P. Pitkin. Pitkin is understandably baffled by Duhamel's unrelenting view of America as the world's most dangerous anti-utopia. For the author, America represented the machine versus art and vulgarity versus refinement. The United States was "a deviation" from Western civilization. Europe was the land of the spirit, while America destroyed the spirit.

  Duhamel called American dance music the "triumph of barbaric silliness." For him, jazz "seems to have been dreamt up to arouse the reflexes of a sedentary mollusk." The noise of the railway had killed music, he said, failing to understand-or determined not to appreciatehow the rhythm of the American city would lead to George Gershwin's miraculous melodies. His "American in Paris" would no doubt have been for Duhamel the ultimate work of the devil.84

  He found the American people to be "miserable, care-worn creatures stupefied by drudgery." Everything is identical, the result of mass production, a claim he makes even regarding the legs of American women, which he describes as being beautiful but only because they looked "as if they had come off an assembly line." The country's bureaucracy was worse than that of Soviet Russia. His horror is limitless. America is the "belly of the monster" and "the abyss of perfect falseness."85

  Filmmaking, an area where France would soon excel, was to Duhamel a characteristically American "pastime of illiterates ... a spectacle which demands no effort, which assumes no continuity in ideas, raises no questions, and deals seriously with no problems." He predicted that a steady diet of films would destroy the American people's intellect in a halfcentury and so subvert the French as to make them unable to govern themselves.86

  In every aspect of its existence, America emb
odied the effacement, the destruction of the individual. Its civilization was an even greater threat than any foreign military invasion, he warned. People reject what is imposed on them by a tyrant or by foreign domination, but they might eagerly accept the rule of a different kind of dictatorship, "a false civilization." He feared it might already be too late, as American civilization was already ruling the world. But he bade the citizens of France to take up arms, to form their battalions and rise to the defense of their ioo kinds of cheese, 50 types of plum, and beloved cafes against the ruthless standardization represented by American technology. He called on each fellow citizen to "denounce the American items which he finds in his house, in his wardrobe, and in his soul."87

  It is hard to overstate either the ludicrous caricature of America in Duhamel's writing or the influence that these kinds of arguments had on French society and, to a lesser extent, on other Europeans. Many of these ideas sank into the psychological bedrock, shaping attitudes at times of future international tension or apparently advancing Americanization. Like his fellow anti-Americans, Duhamel loves France, traditional France as he sees it, and fears modern society as likely to destroy all its good features. America is the epitome of this destructive alternative, and so he hates and must discredit it. The resulting passion carries away any possibility for even a balanced critical approach that points out the real shortcomings of America, as well as the forces that limit or can be used to remedy them.

  What is especially noteworthy is how anti-Americanism was, in the work of Duhamel as elsewhere, so easily able to embrace totally contradictory complaints about the United States without any of its proponents-or even opponents-noticing.

  For example, Duhamel ridicules Americans for counting calories and worrying about whether their food was healthy, a barbaric introduction of science into the mysteries of cuisine.88 Yet his successors would later complain that unhealthy American food was being forced on them. He condemned the movie theatre as the "temple of the images that move," yet it was in France that the cinema would be most deified and American films would be decried for defiling this superb art form.89

  He and others spoke passionately in defense of an old culture they portrayed as permanent and naturally superior, yet his successors would condemn America by using a postmodernism that portrayed all cultures as artificial and ridiculed the United States for adhering to allegedly oppressive standards of high culture. And while Duhamel did not concern himself with foreign policy, his compatriots made fun of American ideas of morality and democracy in diplomacy, defending the obvious primacy of realpolitik and raison d'etat-even the very words are French-in any proper nation's conduct of its affairs. Yet their successors would condemn America as being self-seeking and insufficiently moralistic in its international involvements.

  Of course, in claiming that their views were accurate, anti-American critics could always cite American writers who said similar things, though on which side of the Atlantic the ideas originated was not always clear. Henry Miller, for example, reflected French-style anti-Americanism just as James earlier had imitated the British version. Miller's account of his travels through the United States in 1940 and 1941, after his long residence in Paris, repeated the three favorite themes of the French antiAmericans: American arrogance, absence of culture, and ruthless conformity.

  According to Miller, "We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky." America was "a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen," the most monotonous country in the world, lacking any honest publishers, artistic film company, decent theatre, music other than that created by African-Americans, museums with anything but junk, or more than a "handful" of writers with any creativity. Anyone with talent is "doomed to have it crushed one way or another," bribed into being a hack or ignored until starved into submission. Living in a country of such "spiritual gorillas" would tempt anyone to commit suicide.90

  Miller, like Henry James before him, was an American whose hostility to his native country had become that of a defector rather than a domestic critic, though Miller later chose to return to living in the United States. Beginning with a rejection of real faults, he had simply, though sincerely, adopted the foreign anti-American perspective on America as a means for asserting his own superiority. The effect of his writing in both reflecting and shaping French and other European views of America can only be understood if he is quoted at length:

  We are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlight- enment?91

  It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress-but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects.... The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.92

  Yet at the same time, as Duhamel had warned, Europe was evolving in ways paralleling or pursuing the path pioneered by America. Some Europeans idolized American music and film while being introduced to the dubious pleasures of American-invented advertising. Aristocracies declined and democracy developed, bringing to Europe institutions that had once been American novelties. Modern factories, too, came to Europe, as did large corporations. In general, then, Europe, especially the masses, ignored the anti-Americans' warnings while embracing a degree of Americanization, at least in the way critics had defined it.

  In distinction to the conservatives, pro-Americans embraced or at least did not fear change. They had confidence in their societies' ability to pick and choose what it wanted. Unlike romantics and leftists, proAmericans also, out of self-interest or realism, wanted to limit change, seeking improvement rather than utopia. That is why the political locus of those favorable to the United States was among moderate socialists, liberals, and moderate conservatives. They also included average people who wanted to improve their living standards. In contrast, intellectuals in general were the class enemy of America as a model because it challenged the ideas of tradition or revolution for which they saw themselves as guardians. It also represented a society that lowered their status and pushed aside the things they most treasured.

  Thus, while America had a tremendous influence because many in Europe wanted this outcome, the negative associations with the United States and institutionalized hostility to it also remained. And this was most true in France, where all the anti-American forces were present and relatively strong. Outside of Communist Russia and Nazi Germany during the 1930s, France had by far the most anti-American intelligentsia in Europe, but this pattern also continued in other countries. Obviously, criticisms of America could be valid, but many leading European intel lectuals held views based on the most puerile stereotypes, the same ones that had been circulating since the American revolution.

  By the late 1930s and well into the 1940s, though, outspoken antiAmericanism became increasingly, if temporarily, restricted to proCommunist and pro-fascist circles. These were the movements that sought to remake the world in their own, not an American, image. Liberals and moderate conservatives increasingly looked to the United States as a necessary ally in their struggles to save themselves, first from Nazi Germany and then from the Communist USSR.

  But the problem of Americanization and anti-Americanism would not go away. For while French and other European cultures survived quite nicely the depression of the 1930s, the Nazi era, the war and occupation, and even the Communist challenge, the anti-Americans' worst nightmare did seem to come true. The United States became more powerful and influential, saving Europe in another world war and a cold war while finding even more ways
to spread its culture. For a time, the nonCommunist varieties of anti-Americanism would recede, though French and other European intellectual life was deeply influenced by Soviet propaganda and Marxist or semi-Marxist thinking. Yet all the old antiAmerican concepts further developed during this period would remain very much alive, waiting to be revived on numerous occasions thereafter.

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  This was an era in the United States that combined the dynamic of rapid growth and change through industrialization with terrible social problems. Economic booms alternated with busts, levels of corruption reached their highest, and city slums proliferated. New immigrants poured into the country, changing its face as they underwent the throes of adjustment to a very different society. Workers were often exploited; farmers had to cope with many hard times.

  Europeans, like Americans, observed all these developments. Yet while there was much to criticize, a fair assessment would have taken into account three factors. There was much positive as well as negative in what was happening in America during that era. Equally, there was much evidence of the hard work taken to make things better and of the transitory nature of many problems. Finally, equal, sometimes parallel, and often worse difficulties were being suffered in Europe. Many foreign observers did note these points.

  AMERICA AS A HORRIBLE FATE

  fhile earlier nineteenth-century anti-Americanism had ridiculed that country as a failure and unattractive model, by the 188os its success and potential power were undeniable. Anti-Americanism adjusted to these changes by using the same basic critique but now recoiling in horror at the prospect of America being the model for the future of humanity and, in particular, their own societies.

  At the same time, though, there was a strong factor of anti-American bias in the evaluation of more than a few Europeans, applying earlier prejudices about the United States to the new situation. There were two aspects of this critique. First, the American social, cultural, and political system was portrayed as terrible in its own right, as the embodiment of soulless industrialization and all-powerful capitalism. Europeans feared that this model would spread to their own and other countries. Second, there was a belief that the United States was becoming more powerful and thus posed a direct threat of being able to impose its control on others and transform them in its despicable image.