From dr-us865 Thu Aug 25 11:43:26 1994
Return-Path: <dr-us865>
Received: by udlapvms.pue.udlap.mx (4.1/SMI-4.0)
id AA29920; Thu, 25 Aug 94 11:43:26 CST
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 11:42:06 -0600 (CST)
From: USA to 1865 <dr-us865@udlapvms>
Subject: AN AMIBIVALENT HERITAGE
To: USA to 1865 <dr-us865@udlapvms>
Message-Id: <Pine.3.07.9408251105.A29885-h100000@udlapvms>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE
Status: RO
X-Status:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 11:36:14 -0600 (CST)
From: JERDE MATTHEW E <ri088146@udlapvms>
To: USA to 1865 <dr-us865@udlapvms>
Subject: AMIBIVALENT
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE Euro-American Relations
Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann
HOOVER INSTITUTION on War, Revolution and Peace
Stanford University 1994
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at
Stanford University in 1919 hy President Herbert Hoover, is an
interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and
intemational afhirs in the tweptieth century. The vie.ws expressed in
its publications are entirely ehose of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of dee staff, officels, or Board of
Overseers of the Hoover Institution.
H(x)ver Essay No. 7
Copyrieht 01994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
eunior University Material contained in ehis essay may be quoted
with appropriate citation.
Firse printin6, 1994
Manufactured in the United States of America
98 97 96 95 94 e 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of G)neress Catalo6ing-in-Publication Data
Duignan, Peter. An ambi e lent heritage: Euro American relations /
Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann p. cm.(H(x)ver essays no. 7)
Includes bihliographical references. ISBN 0-8179 370e-1 1.
EuropeRelationeUnited States. 2. United States Civilization
European influences. 3. United StaeesRelationeEurope. 4. Europe
CivilizationAmerican intluences. 1. Gann, Lewis H., 19e4- . ll.
Title. lll. Series: H(xner essays (Stanford, Calif. :1992); no. 7.
D1065.U5D84 1994 945916
303.48'27304ec20=09CIP
>From its beginning, the relationship between Europe and America has
been marked by profound ambivalence. Europe (especially Britain) was
both admired and resented, held up for imitation and cursed. For much
of American history Europe was respected for its culture,
aristocratic manners, eloquence, and social prestige but feared for
its class struggles, authoritarianism, state religions, and fratricidal
wars. The Europeans felt Americans were uncouth, excessively
individualistic, and violent. Although the upper classes were often
anti-American, the working class initially viewed the United States
as the land of opportunity, equality, and freedom.
The United States became the world's most successful mu It
iracial and multiethnic society, but its roots were European (over 80
percent of Americans derive from European stock). The culture, laws,
and instititutions also largely came from Europe, especially from
Britain. But although Europe greatly influenced the United States until
World War ll, thereafter the United States has shaped Europe. And
although for much of American history, Europe was a mecca for
American artists and literati, after World War 11 American culture
became more self-confident and assertivea reflection of U.S.
military and economic might. No longer would the United States shy
away from involvement with Europe; instead the United States
determined to stay in Europe, rebuild it, and pressure the Europeans
into economic cooperation through a customs union and into the
military alliance through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). NATO would protect Europeans from the Soviet Union and from
one another. The result is a partial Americanization of Europe and the
dominance of American culture, technology, business methods, and
science. American power and influence created a good deal of
hostility, especially from the British and French, who resented the
loss of their leadership. But overall, American and Europeans
respected each other, depended on each other, and created, by massive
reciprocal relationships, the Atlantic Community, the greatest
political economic and cultural association in world history.
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE Euro-American Relations
INTRODUCTION
Most Americans have always regarded Europe as the continent from
which they traced their ancestry. As American historian Daniel ].
Boorstin put it, "our roots were European; we got our religion,
common law, constitutionalism and political ideals of liberty, justice
and equality from Europe." Americans equally derived their fears of
aristocrats, feudalism, and monopoly from Europe. The vast size and
wealth of the American continent and its pioneering history tended to
make Americans more confldent, self-reliant, and individualistic than
Europeans. European travelers to America traditionally stressed
Americans' untoward bumptiousness. But at the same time, Americans
felt insecure and culturally inferior compared with Europeans.
Despite Americans' reputation for national exuberance they have
periodically experienced moods of national despondency that were
more profound in the nineteenth than in the twentieth century. As a
diarist put it just before the outbreak of the Civil War, "We are a
weak, divided, disgraced people, unable to maintain our national
existence....It's a pity we ever renounced our allegiance to the British
Crown.''l Despite periodic recurrences of national melancholy, the
achievements of World War 11 brought about a major change in
attitude: Americans became more confident in their experiment. They
wanted to export the advantages of their
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
system to the world at large and increasingly believed, at least until
the Vietnam War, in the worth, even the superiority, of U .S . culture,
political and economic systems, science, and technology.2
The United States began as an outgrowth of Europemore
speciflcally, a British colony. The first English people to settle
permanently on this side of the Atlantic arrived at Jamestown in
1607 . British sovereignty thereafter extended over what later
became the thirteen coloniesa loose chain of territories wedged
between the Atlantic Ocean and the Allegheny Mountains. British
America would stay under the British Crown for more than a century
and a half, a time as long as that which. elapsed between the
enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and the present day. A
lexicographer such as Noah Webster might stress the peculiarity of
the American language (in his Amencan Dictionary, 1828); but in fact
American English never diverged from British English in the same way
Afrikaans diverges from High Dutch. Britain, its empire, and the
United States remained linked by a common tongue and culture that
would become strongly influenced by American usage.
The mutual impact was profound. Americans accepted from Britain
not only folkways, language, and culture but also a legal system based
on British Common Law, British parliamentary institutions, and
British local govemment. The founding fathers had all been bom
British subjects; they discussed politics according to the norms
familiar to educated English of a liberal disposition. Well-schooled
Americans of the period had read Shakespeare and Milton; they were
familiar with the King eames Bible and the Book of Common Prayer,
which deeply influenced American as well as British thought and
speech. American lawyers had read great British jurists such as Sir
William Blackstone. Literate Americans were familiar with the
philosophy of Locke and Hume. Americans and British people read the
same folktales and the same nursery rhymes, sang the same tunes,
and had the same traditiQns of voluntarism and religious diversity.
When Americans took up arms against the British Crown, they fought
in defense of what they considered the liberties due to true English
citizens, liberties previously secured by the English Parliament
against the English king during the seventeenth century.
Although Anglo-America would come to dominate most of
PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
North America, observers living in 1750 would have found such a
forecast surprising. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a prophet might
well have predicted that the heirs of Spain, dominant in most of South
America, Central America, and what is now the American Southwest,
would win the struggle for continental supremacy. Others might h=87ve
bet on the French, who occupied a huge belt of territory stretching
from Canada along the Mississippi Valley down to New Orleans and the
Gulf of Mexico. But it was the English-speaking peoples who won out
in the course of extended conflicts; English traditions of
constitutional government prevailed over royal absolutism or the
trust in centralized govemment that characterized France and Spain.
But though the bulk of North America remained English speaking,
great differences arose between America and the homeland. Britain
was a monarchy supported by a hereditary aristocracy and an
established church. The American colonists rejected all these
institutions. Within the United Kingdom, as constituted at the time of
the War of Independence, there were few immigrants and slavery was
outlawed. The United States, by contrast, had substantial foreign
minorities (especially Germans) and a small AfricanAmerican
population, mostly enslaved. From the beginnings of American settler
society, American relations with Britain, and indeed with Europe as a
whole, were marked by profound ambivalence.
The American War of Independence was indeed the first American
civil war. In the thirteen colonies, all those who would not or could
not fit into the American political culture and middleclass society
many of the rich and well bom at the top, as well as outsiders such as
Native Americans, Scottish Highlanders, povertystricken tenant
farmers, and some African Americanssided with the king against
those colonists who backed the Continental Congress and General
Washington. European opinion was likewise split. All those who
accounted themselves as progressives, as philosophes, or as moderate
reformers were apt to see the future with the United States. By
contrast, it was eIchurch and king" mobs that bumed the houses of
pro-American sympathizers in England.
George Washington's farewell address (1796) wamed against
"passionate attachments" to speciflc countries; it did not set the
United States on an isolationist course, however. It was Thomas
AN AMBIVAI.ENT HERITAGE 4
Jefferson in his first inaugural address (1801) who emphasized no
"entangling alliances" with foreign governments. The War of 1812
with Britain reinforced American distrust and determination to resist
foreign interference in the Westem Hemispherehence the Monroe
Doctrine (1823). One reason the United States refused to take part in
the anti-slave trade campaign after 1807 was bitter memories of
British seizure and search tactics. In fact, it was the British claim to
the right to search suspected slave ships that was a major cause of
the War of 1812. Not until the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 was
the issue solved: an African American squadron was delegated to stop
American ships suspected of carrying slaves. Thus America again
began cooperating with European powers, and the isolationist spirit in
the United States weakened. Throughout the history of the United
States, national interests have impelled American presidents and
Congress to actively engage with foreign states. American foreign
policy has always aimed to keep the nation whole and indivisible, to
protect its borders and frontiers, to keep hostile foreign powers out
of North America, and to ensure American commerce access to
markets and resources worldwide.3
>From its beginning a free-trading America sought to buy and sell
throughout the world. Commodore Matthew C. Perry opened up eapan to
American commerce after 1854, and at the Berlin Conference of
1884-1885, the United States insisted that the Congo region be a
free-trade area. Then, in 1899, Secretary of State John Hay
proclaimed an open door policy for trade with China. In World Wars I
and II the Americans retumed to Europe to fight alongside the
democracies. After World War II, the United States fought for global
trade liberalization through the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) . The United States, then, has never been a truly
isolationist nation but rather a neutralist one.
EUROPEAN VIEWS OF AMERICA
>From the late nineteenth century on, however, despite numerous
diplomatic disputes between Britain and the United States, a special
relationship developed between the two countries, much closer than,
say, the relationship between Spain and the Argentine or
PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
France and Quebec. Upper-class Americans took the British upper
class as their model: Harvard and Yale prided themselves on their
affinity to Oxford and Cambridge. Americans have always drawn
heavily on British books; many a rich American in the late nineteenth
century boasted of marrying his daughter to a British aristocrat with
a splendid title and an empty purse. The U.S.Canadian frontier
remained unfortified, setting up an intimate connection between U.S.
and Canadian expansion to the West as settlers crossed and recrossed
the frontier without hindrance.
In retum, many Europeans admired, even idealized America.
Goethe, a German poet, apostrophized the United States at the
beginning of the last century in a poem entitled Amerika, du hast es
besser: "America, you are better off than we are; may God preserve
you in future from Europe's moumful legacy, from romantic ruins,
from tales of bandits, knights, and ghosts." America, Alexis de
Tocqueville had written admiringly (1834-40), may justly boast of "a
marvellous combination . . . the spirit of religion and the spirit of
freedom." Religion supplies to freedom "the divine source of its right."
Freedom also stands indebted to those many newcomers "who came in
waves to plant themselves on the shores of the New World .... When
the immigrants left their motherland, they had no idea of any
superiority of some over others. It is not the happy or the powerful
who go into exile, and poverty with misfortune is the bestknown
guarantee of equality among men."4
Tocqueville may have somewhat romanticized America, but he was
rarely wrong. Religion affected American political culture in many
ways. Pastors and church elders left their imprint, both in promoting
moral idealism and in giving American politics and academe a
peculiar touch of self-righteousness. Equally important, as
Tocqueville had stressed, was the role of the immigrants. These men
and women had come to the United States for economic, political,
religious, or racial reasons; they had crossed the ocean to escape the
authority of nobles, monarchs, religious authorities, landlords, and,
more recently, commissars. (Anticommunism in America was
strengthened by successive waves of refugees from Eastern Europe,
China, Cuba, and Vietnam.) Generally speaking, these newcomers were
ambivalent toward their respective countries of origin but were self-
consciously patriotic toward the land of their
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE 6
adoption. Americanson the wholewere accustomed to self help and
more respectful toward the self-made man or woman than most
Europeans. Americans were for self-improvement, were informed, and
were active in self-govemment and voluntarism. e. S. Mill and
Tocqueville said that Americans were self-reliant, individualistic,
practical people; they were also joiners and pluralists from many
different cultures. Americans were also used to striking
differencesofwealthandfamiliarwithethnicandreligiousprejudice. But
the country was too vast and varied to permit the emergence of a
nationally recognized upper class. An old family in Boston counted for
nothing in Los Angeles. High.ranks in the civil service and the armed
forces did not carry the same prestige as they did in Europe. The
average Texan or Nevadan might not even recognize the names of
eastern prestige schools such as Phillips Exeter Academy in New
Hampshire or Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.
That system made for a surprising degree of stability given the
enormous disparities that divided U.S. society. Until recently,
Americans voted more oftenin national, state, and local elections
than the citizens of any other country. There was a great army of
unpaid activists. (During the 1960 presidential elections, for
instance, some 4,000,000 volunteers were busy organizing rallies,
ringing doorbells, mailing envelopes, and so on.) Each presidential,
each gubematorial candidate had to create or rebuild a personal
organization in a country where people moved often over enormous
distances. The American system accommodated flux in a way that no
European system could rival. It gave temporary places of prominence
to an extraordinarily large number of people and provided for political
alliances of the strangest kind, even alliances that might cut across
ideological divisions. Kipling, the bard of the empire, puzzled over the
American spirit's strange shifts of mood
That bids him flout the Law he makes,
That bids him make the Law he flouts
Till, dazed by many doubts, he wakes
The drumming guns that have no doubts.S
But even Kipling had no doubts that the American spirit would find
salvation at last.
Lord Bryce, in The American Commonwealth ( 1888 ), wanted the
United States to be a world power and its democratic system to
spread to Europe. Israel Zangwill, an Anglo-Jewish writer, at the end
of the century called America God's crucible, the great melting pot
that would fuse and reform the European peoples, an attitude
reflected by the countless immigrants who flocked to the United
States from Europe during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
The America of fact did not always turn out to be the goldene
medinah, the golden state of the Jews, or the Land der unbeeeneten
Moglichkeiten, the land of unlimited opportunities of the Germans.
Nevertheless, they came by the millionsGermans, Scandinavians,
Irish, and later, people from Eastem and Southern Europe including
Poles, Russians, eews, Italians, and Greeks. At the tum of the century,
there was also a massive increase in the number of Spanish-speaking
people (not so much Spaniards from Europe as Mexicans and, after
World War 11, Puerto Ricans and Cubans), as well as newcomers from
the Far East.
The precise ethnic makeup of the American people is hard to
disentangle because of intermarriage and murky ethnic and racial
boundaries. By the time of the 1980 census, 50 million persons
reportedthemselvestobeofEnglishorigin(thelargestsinglegroup), but
more than half of those listed other ethnic origins as well. The same
applied to the 49 million who put down German and to those who
described themselves as Scottish or Welsh by descent. Three quarters
of the 40 million Americans who categorized themselves as Irish also
reported other ancestries; the same went for 4 million Swedes and
for a majority of the 3.5 million Norwegians. Twelve million said that
they were of Italian origin, but only 7 million of those indicated
exclusively Italian ancestry. A majority of the 8 million who claimed
Polish ancestry also reported forebears of other nationalities:6 But
despite massive recent immigration from Latin America and Asia,
something like four-fifths of the U.S. population remains of European
origin (including that large proportion of Hispanics who describe
themselves as "white" on the census forms). These boundaries remain
tenuous. No matter what their nationality, Americans would marry
whom they pleased (but usually before World War 11 within the same
religious cohort).
Despite their diverse ethnic roots, the great majority of
AN AMEIIVALENT HERITAGE
Americans stayed in the land of their adoption. They took up
citizenship and came to feel at home in a country whose people were
not expected to know their place but would rather make their place.
Immigration created ethnic lobbies of a specifically American kind.
Naturalized citizens used their political influence to help the cause
of their kinfolk in Europe: Irish Americans supported the cause of
Irish independence against Britain; Polish Americans agitated against
the rule of the Russian czars, Jews strove for Israel; and Czechs
moved against the Hapsburgs. Immigration also acted as a spur to
further immigration, as newcomers commonly helped other relatives
and friends to make the long joumey across the Atlantic. Indeed,
immigrants' letters to friends and relatives at home provided more
accurate and relevant information about the United States than a
great many academic tomes on the subject.
The United States thus always seemed a land of opportunity to
foreigners and immigrants seeking the "American dream." The United
States was the flrst great nation to achieve modernization in the
sense of eliminating hereditary class distinctions, reducing class
barriers, opening up equal opportunities, and creating a mass
consumer society.
Of course, there were many critics. From the early beginnings of their
country, Americans were derided as uncouth and lawless; later they
were widely portrayed as nouveaux riches even more than those
wealthy Argentinians and Creoles who were satirized in the light
comedies of nineteenth-century France. Americans were supposedly
materialistic, brash, Philistine. Their society was said to be
artificial, without organic links, lacking both a traditional peasantry
and an aristocracy rooted in the soil. Americans were etemally
restless, always on the move. Americans were reportedly greedy,
crude, devoid of tragic imagination. They had no respect for their
betters. Neither Heinrich Heine, a romantic revolutionary, nor Jakob
Burckhardt, an imaginative conservative, could stand America. "When
good Americans die, they go to Paris," Oscar Wilde scoffed in A
Woman of No Importance. "Indeed? And where do bad Americans go?
Oh, they go to America!" Americans had other supposed failings. They
were insufferable in their moral pretentiousness, a characteristic
that they were thought to share with their English cousins.
"Corruption, Immorality, Irreligion, and
9 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
above all, Self Interest" ruled the United States, argued an
aristocratic British diplomat at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. "There is no faith and no knowledge of the Lord amongst most
of our brethren; in the United States the younger generation inherit
nothing from their parents except what is needed to make their way
in this world," echoed an Orthodox Jewish visitor from Eastern Europe
at the end of the century.7
In theory, the British should have been the most pro-American
among EuropeansBritons and Americans were so-called cousins. As
we pointed out earlier, many Americans were indeed Anglophiles,
especially upper-class people from the East Coast. But their
sentiments were not necessarily reciprocated in Britain. Indeed, the
traditional British establishment was apt to look down on Americans
as brash and uncultured. (Some old-fashioned Tories, for example,
criticized Winston Churchill on the grounds that he was
halfAmerican.) Qualities regarded as virtuous in the United States
enthusiasm, dedication to hard work, openness, and lack of class
consciousnessseemed vices to a great many old-fashioned,
upperclass British people, though not to the bulk of British workers.
Views hostile to the United States were widespread in Europe at
large; indeed, there was a curious continuity in European critiques
concerning America and the Americans. Long before the thirteen
colonies attained their independence, Swiss immigrants found that
alles ist gane anders hier (everything is quite different here). Many
liked the changefreedom from caste distinctions, higher living
standards, personal freedom:
In this country anyone who gains riches, gold and silver, is esteemed
like a lord in Europe.... I shall never return to Switzerland as long as I=
live, for I have come to a goodly land.... Evidently I have done well by
my children in having left my fatherland, and for this I thank God
eternally. We live under a goodly and gentle government. Provisions
are plentiful; there are no tithes and no labor services; speech is
free.6
But there was another side to America. Woe betide those who did
not make good, who missed their families in the old country, or who
longed for security and accepted custom.
AN AMBIVAI.ENT HERITAGE=0910=091=0911=09PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
In this country there are innumerable religionsReformed,
Sabbatarians, Tumblers, Quakers, Atheists who have no religion, no
churches and no schools, who believe neither in God nor the Devil, in
Heaven or Hell. There are also countless tongues here English,
Swedish, Gaelic, High German, Low German, Dutch. . . This is a refuge
for exiled sectarians, an asylum for all manner of evil-doers from
Europe, a confusing Babel, a refuge for unclean spirits, a homestead
for Satan, in truth a new Sodom.
Likewise Charles Dilke, an English Radical who toured the United
States during the 1860s. He described Americans in terms normally
associated with postindustrial America. Americans were foolishly
permissive toward their children, who "never dream of work out of
school hours, or of solid reading that is not compulsory" and, as a
rule, tum out to be "forward, ill mannered, and immoral."9 American
women were too independent; crime was rife in America; American
courts combined excessive legalism with excessive leniency; there
were too many foreign immigrants not likely to be absorbed in the
general population. Americans were addicted to strange cults that
appealed not just to the poor and the ignorant but to solid citizens
who ought to know better. Americans were too soft to fight. (At the
outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, European military
opinion thus widely predicted an American defeat, as did the London
Times.) America offended, above all, the rich and the well-bom. As
Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. minister in London, explained during
the U.S. Civil War, "the great body of the aristocracy and the
commercial classes are anxious to see the United States go to pieces
while the middle and lower classes sympathize with us."'=A1
>From the end of the nineteenth century, there were two new twists to
anti-American sentiment. Americans intervened in countries where
they were not wanted. "To whom do I owe the displeasure of this
intrusion," Dame Europe coldly asks Uncle Sam (according to a British
cartoon of the Cuban war of 1898). "My name is Uncle Sam," goes the
reply. "Any relation of the late Colonel
Monroe?"(PresidentJamesMonroe,frameroftheMonroeDoctrine), Dame
Europe chillingly responds." Above all, there were attacks from the
left. According to Marx, who admired the United States, the American
colonization of Califomia (taken forcibly from
Mexico),theoccupationofAustralia,andtheopeningofChinaand Japan
were progressive developments, part of the historic task incumbent
on the bourgeoisie to establish a world market and a global system of
production.e2 Thereafter, self styled progressive opinion in Europe
underwent a decisive shift, as European socialists debated at length
the contradictions of U.S. monopoly capitalism. They also wondere-d
why an advanced capitalist country such as the United States failed
to develop a great revolutionary movement or at least a solidly
proletarian party among the disinherited mass of immigrants. Few of
these critics accepted the commonsense explanation that the great
majority of immigrants liked what they found and had no wish to
make fundamental political changes. The real or assumed deflciencies
of the American working class were explained in terms of a false
consciousness imposed on them by their masters. The Americanlike
the ]ewwas equated with the city slicker, the huckster, the rootless
cosmopolitan. By the end of the nineteenth century, the entire
ideology and vocabulary of antiAmericanism was already well in
place.
AMERICAN VIEWS OF EUROPE
The Americans were as ambivalent about Europe as Europeans were
about America. Americans were immigrants. Immigrants from
whatever country are apt to look on their own or their ancestors'
homeland with some degree of nostalgia. But immigrants also leave
home for some good causewhether poverty, persecution, or mere
boredom. Thus, the old country may be remembered with dislike, at
times with blank hatred. Europe at its best was respected for culture,
aristocratic elegance, and social prestige. By the end of the last
century, Britain and, to a lesser extent, France had become the mecca
of American artists, literati, social climbers, and millionaires who
married their sons to the daughters of aristocratic families. London
was associated with the best of men's tailoring; Paris, with feminine
elegance and avant-garde art; Berlin and Gottingen, with scholarship.
(Later, in American movies, foreign accents were de rigueur for
wicked countesses, pastry cooks, psychiatrists, and
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE 1e=091=0913=09PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
vampires. ) On a more serious note, Americans owed a profound debt
to European science, art, and scholarship, as well as industrial skills,
business enterprise, and investment. Throughout the nineteenth
century, the United States remained a massive importer of European,
especially British, capital.
>From their country's beginning, Americans had seen themselves as
a new nation, with new laws and a new and free polity. The French
observer Crevecoeur had long ago insisted, in his Letters from an
American Farmer ( 1782), that America had transformed Europeans
into new people unburdened by respect for duchesses, counts, bishops,
or churches. Yet a greaE many American intellectuals did not share his
optimism. They felt they lived in a cultural wilderness that lacked
Europe's great past. For culture and tradition, educated Americans had
long looked to Europe, and thousands had crossed the Atlantic to find
in Europe inspiration, training, or a more sophisticated way of life.
Indeed, it was not until after World War 11 that American culture
became self-confident and assertivein part a reflection of U.S.
military and economic power.
There was, however, another side tO the coin. Europe was also
regarded as a potential menace. Sophisticated and supercilious
European diplomatists were suspected of wishing to involve innocent
Americans in foreign wars not of their making. Popery, libertinism,
and unbelief, in addition to subversion and revolt, were associated at
various times with Europe by frightened nativists. The fear was that
Europe might corrupt America, which was intended by God (claimed
eohn Winthrop) as a "city built upon a hill, the eyes of all people are
upon us." Above all, Americans, themselves descended from
immigrants, have been ambivalent about each generation of new
immigrantsusually poorer and less skilled than the old-timers.
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates
And through them presses a wild and motley throng
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures from the Hoang ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Celt, and Slav
Fleeing the Old World's poverty and scorn.
That poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, written a century ago, struck an
answering chord among many of his countrypeople who dreaded the
strange-looking newcomers from Europe and elsewhere. The
immigrants were feared on many groundsas competitors willing to
depress the American workers' living standards by working for lower
wages and also as potential subversives, "hyphenated Americans,"
with no loyalty to their country of adoption. In fact, these suspicions
were misconceived. Militants among the immigrants formed a small
minority. The great majority had no intention of overthrowing the
republic that had given them refuge; they looked for advancement
through individual effort, not to a revolutionary transformation of
society. Nevertheless, stereotypes concerning subversion,
libertinism, and unbeliefwere at various times associated with
Europe by nativist opinionas was popery, or Catholicism.
Throughout American history, ethnic preferences have shifted in time,
with the most recent arrivals usually being the most unpopular. By
the end of the last century, for example, Scandinavians had found
acceptance; jokes about dumb Swedes were replaced by taunts at
stupid Poles or Italians (who by then did much of the unskilled work
previously associated with Northern European immigrants). Then came
jeers at Jews who were moving into the textile and other light
industries. The foreigners least distmsted by the end of the
nineteenth century were the British. This would have surprised
Americans who had lived through the Revolutionary War or the Anglo-
American War of 1812, at which time patriotic propaganda described
the British as brutal, supercilious, and hypocritical. (Indeed, many
British immigrants, disliking their native country's class structure,
were just as vocal in their criticism.) Anti-British sentiments were
reinforceed during the late nineteenth century by Irish newcomers
full of hatred for their homeland's British oppressors. There was also
trouble during the U. S. Civil War when the British upper class (as
distinct from the workers) was apt to side with the South, while eohn
Bull was denounced in the United States as
Ever victorious
Haughty, vainglorius
Snobbish, censorious,
Great eohn Bull.l3
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
But throughout the nineteenth century British immigrantsfarmers,
professional people, artisans, and skilled workerskept coming to the
United States. (Indeed, far more people migrated to the United States
from the United Kingdom after the United States had attained
independence than before. ) The British immigrants were, on the
average, better educated, better qualified technologically, and
wealthier than newcomers from Eastem and Southem Europe. The
British people who arrived in the United States did not regard
themselves as a minority; their presence in the United States was
regarded by the American White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)
establishment as a welcome counterweight to assorted foreigners
(mostly Catholic) from Eastern and Southem Europe, slightingly
referred to as "dirty whites." The British immigrants helped offset
the anti-British sentiment occasioned by the Civil War in the North
and by a variety of lesser disputes between Britain and the United
States over the Canadian boundary, flshery rights, and suchlike.
But WASP culture had dominated the United States from the
seventeenth century on and shaped the American character, according
to Richard Brookhiser in The Way of the WASP (1991). No immigrant
group has yet been able to establish a rival way of life. The WASPs
had political power, economic dominance, and social prestige. Their
institutions were Ivy League schools, the Episcopal church, Wall
Street, and the State Department. Although elitist, WASPs allowed
people of character and intelligence to join. WASP values, claims
Brookhiser, made America great, wealthy, and independent. The most
important values were success due to hard work, civic-mindedness,
antisensuality, and "conscience watching over everything."
Immigrants to America were expected to adopt these values; they
mostly did, and the country flourished as a result. The white
Protestant establishment weakened after World War 11 and in the
1980s staggered under attacks from multiculturalisma most
unpleasant alternative to the WASPs' culture.
The United States was from its beginnings the immigrants' refuge par
excellence. In this capacity the United States was far more
signiflcant than any other country, be it Australia, Brazil, Canada, or
the Argentine. By contrast, few Americans sought permanent homes
for themselves abroad, except a handful of blacks who went to
Liberia, Finnish Americans who migrated to the Soviet Union,
15 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
and a small number of American Jews who settled in Israel. But
Americans of whatever race, color, or creed rarely changed their U.S.
nationality. Overwhelmingly, they preferred real or alleged domestic
ills to the putative advantages of foreign lands.
There were, of course, exceptions. Not all foreign-born
immigrants to the United States remained in America; some went
back to countries such as Britain, where there was no religious or
racial persecution. The role of the returned American immigrant
British, German, Mexican, Italian, Greek, etc.remains to be studied.
Frequently he or she returned home with new ideas and some
accumulated savings that enabled her or him to rise both socially and
economically. In addition, American entrepreneurs, from the end of
the last century, began to set up affiliates in Europe, especially in
Britain, where U.S. flrms such as Singer and Ford and discount stores
such as Woolworth found no language barriers to impede their work.
>From Britain, American trusts often extended their operations to the
British colonies and the European continent.
AMERICA IN THE GLOBAL ARENA
Relations between Britain and the United States improved in other
ways, too. By the end of the last century, the British government
stood resolved to avoid conflicts with its so-called American cousins
at almost any cost. To Britain, imperial Germany with its great High
Seas Fleet seemed an immeasurably greater menace than the United
States. Hence, the British generally sympathized with the United
States during the Spanish-American War of 1898. (Kipling's
muchmisquoted poem "Take Up the White Man's Burden" was written to
encourage Americans in their imperial venture.)
The Spanlsh-American War formed another watershed in U.S.
relations with foreign countries. Earlier wars fought by the United
States had been confined to the North American land mass, had not
involved transmaritime expansion, and had widened existing rifts
within the U.S. electorate, pitting practitioners of American
realpolitik against those who considered themselves godly. (For
example, the Mexican-American War, 1846-1848, had been popular in
the slave states, unpopular in New England.) The Spanish-
AN AMBIVAI.ENT HERITAGE
American War, by contrast, had more enthusiastic and united support
from Americans than all previous and most subsequent wars engaging
the United States. Chauvinists determined to teach objectionable
Latins a lesson suddenly found themselves in thorough agreement
with humanitarians determined to end Spanish imperialist oppression
in Cuba. (There was, moreover, no Spanish ethnic lobby in the United
States. Spaniards were more likely to emigrate to Latin America than
to the United States, whereas Spanish Americans, including Mexican
Americans, were more apt to side against Spain than with Spain.)
Although the postwar annexation of the Philippines created bitter
divisions, the campaign to expel the Spaniards from the New World
met with almost universal approbation. America now stepped into the
global arena with imperial ambitions and one of the world's major
navies. The Spanish American War thus inaugurated a revolutionary
change in world affairs.
Fear of foreign entanglement was also weakened by the
subsequent war in the Philippine Islands and American participation
intheBoxerreliefexpeditiontoBeijing (1900)actionsunthinkable as
late as 1884, when the U.S. Senate opposed sending observers to the
Berlin conference to discuss African affairs, everi though Americans
were important traders and explorers in the region. When Theodore
Roosevelt became president in 1901, he was determined that the
United States should play a greater role in world affairs. And he saw
to it that it did. Roosevelt was the most activist president in U.S.
history until Woodrow Wilson. For example, in 1904 Roosevelt called
a peace conference to end the Russo-Japanese war in order to
maintain a power equilibrium in Asia. (The desire to maintain a
balance of power was the principal reason for U.S. intervention
against Germany in World Wars I and ll.) At the Algeciras conference,
called in 1906 to discuss Germany and France's quarrel over Morocco,
Roosevelt even got the German kaiser to compromise.
Even more striking was the United States' economic impact overseas.
>From the 1870s onward, American farmers in the Middle West sent
cargoes of grain and meat overseas; improved shipping and methods of
refrigeration cheapened the costs of transport. European producers,
including British aristocrats and Prussian
17 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
Junkers, found it increasingly difficult to comptete with Americans
(and also Argentinians and Australians) . As a manufacturing nation
and as a producer of vital raw materials such as coal, iron, and steel,
the United States began to overshadow the major European countries.
(By 1914, the United States already turned out nearly five times as
much steel as Britain and more than twice as much as the German
Empire. The United States produced nearly three times as much pig
iron as Britain and twice as much as Germany.)le The United States no
longer fitted into the accepted framework of European great power
relationships, a fact as yet unrecognized by most policymakers and
theoreticians on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet American economic
influence was beginning to be apparent, especially in Britain.ls
How would Americans use this enormous might? When World War I
started, the answer seemed clear: the Americans would not use this
power at all but would stay clear of European entanglements.
European affairs no longer seemed the business of a people whose
forebears had left their native shores for good reasons and badto
escape religious persecution, to avoid the draft, to escape poverty, to
evade the unwelcome attention of tax gatherers, rent collectors, or
wronged maidens. Public opinion regarding World War I was,
moreover, divided along cleavages of class and ethnicity that
remained characteristic of American politics. British Americans
naturally sympathized with Britain's cause. The U.S. Eastern
establishmentlinked to the British upper class through ties of trade,
education, and sometimes marriagewas also sympathetic and
receptive to the claim that Britain represented the causes of
parliamentary democracy and small nations. Danes and Norwegians
tended to support the Western allies, as did Italians, Serbs, Czechs,
and Romanians, who were generally hostile to the Hapsburg Empire
allied to Germany.
But there was also substantial support for Germany. Swedes were
often Germanophiles (unlike Danes and Norwegians). Subsequent Nazi
stereotypes notwithstanding, eews were apt to regard the German
cause with sympathy and side with their former countrypeople.
Yiddish-speakers from Eastem Europe found the pogrom-ridden
czarist monarchy more objectionable than the German Empire, which
did not persecute eews and whose citizens
AN AM81VALENT HERITAGE 18=091=0919=09PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
spoke High German, a tongue closely linked to Yiddish. The Irish (about
4.5 million people) likewise formed a major bloc. To most Irish, any
foe of Britain's seemed a friend. Moreover, the Irish, who, like the
Italians and the Jews, had mainly settled in big cities along the
Eastem seaboard, formed an influential lobby, powerful especially in
municipal politics.
Above all, there was a substantial German minority: more than 8
million of America's 105 million people at the time had been bom in
Germany or had at least one German parent. The Germans, who were
concentrated in the Middle West, had long been settled in the United
States (one-tenth of the Union forces during the Civil War consisted
of Germans). Germans as a group had done well in the United States.
The German cultural influence, moreover, had been considerable. The
United States was heavily indebted to German models for the
structure of postgraduate training and for experts and expertise in a
variety of academic disciplines: between 1815 and 1914 an estimated
9,000 to 10,000 Americans went to German universities. Germans
were reputed to be thorough, hard-working, and sentimental. It was a
time when loan words from the German language consisted only of
such friendly sounding ones as Lieder, Kindergarten, and Oktoberfest
Gestapo, Paneer, and Endlosungwere as yet unknown.
The strength of isolationist sentiment in the United States ensured
that the country at first stayed neutral. But when imperial Germany
began to conduct unrestricted warfare against Great Britain, the
United States was drawn in. American lives were lost; American
ships went to the bottom of the sea. To make matters worse, British
intelligence caught Germans in a plot (revealed in the Zimmermann
note) proposing an alliance between Germany, Mexico, and eapan if the
United States went to war. Mexico would then recover the lost
territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, which the United States
had taken after winning the MexicanAmerican War. Ironically,
imperial Germany's military victory over Russiaa feat never
achieved by the Third Reichworsened Germany's political condition.
Once the Romanov dynasty fell, the Westem allies' cause was no
longer tainted by association with czarist absolutism; the allies'
claim to be defending democracy seemed more credible than ever, not
only to people of Anglo-Saxon stock but also to Jews, Poles, Balts,
Finns, and other reluctant subjects of the former czars.
In 1917, the United States entered World War 1. In military terms
alone, the U.S. contribution was not as impressive as that of Britain
or France. In economic and diplomatic terms, however, the
contributions were unmistakable. President Woodrow Wilson issued
his Fourteen Points (proclaiming the right of national
selfdetermination) unilaterally; the United States had become the
world's most productive economy. Having been an importer of capital,
the United States switched to being an exporter. Without American
financial support, Britain could not have continued the war
effectively. By 1917 its gold reserves were virtually exhausted; most
of its American assets had been sold. Even though Britain in 1918
commanded the world's largest navy, the largest air force, the
greatest number of tanks, and the greatest colonial empire, it was
American power that underpinned the alliance.
The global balance of power thereby underwent a decisive shiftone
that German planners were slow to understand. For all the efficiency
of their staffwork, the Germans failed to grasp that the United
States' economic potential now heavily outclassed that of any
European power. Germany, whose priority should have been to keep the
United States out of the war at any cost, instead gravely
underestimated the Americans, a mistake that would continue to be
made for generations to come. World War I also carried other lessons.
Despite its internal divisions, the American Republic rested on much
more solid foundations than its critics imagined. There was social
unrest. But there was never, at any time, the slightest chance of a
social revolution. Moreover, despite its multiethnic character, the
United e3tates developed none of the ethnic flssures that plagued the
czarist, the Hapsburg, and later the Soviet empires.
True enough, the U.S. involvement in World War I led to an outbreak of
anti-German hysteria, with vandalism, the public buming of German
books, and the renaming of towns and even foods (frankfurters became
hot dogs; German cabbage became liberty cabbage). The Germans in the
United States encountered particular animosity for a tim
AN AMeIVALENT HERITAGE as the United States. The German lobby,
moreover, was badly divided into Protestants and Catholics, "church
Germans" and secularists, progressives (such as Govemor John Peter
Altgeld of lllinois), and conservatives. However, once the United
States entered the war, German Americans remained loyal to their
adopted country, and in time anti-German sentiment abated. Whatever
political strength an ethnic lobby in the United States had, such a
lobby would never be used as a fifth column on behalf of a foreign
country.
RETREAT FROM EUROPE
Having played a decisive part in the war, the United States might have
been expected to dominate the peace. Instead, America once more
retreated from Europe, disillusioned with "the war to end all wars."
The United States would not join the League of Nations pioneered by
President Wilson. His Fourteen Points were forgotten. ("Fourteen
Points," scoffed Georges Clemenceau, the great French war leader,
"ten were enough for the Almighty.") The United States refused to
commit itself to future help for Europe; for instance, no guarantees
were given France against future German aggression. There was
contempt in Congress for those European countries (except Finland)
that defaulted, wholly or in part, on their war debts.
Isolationism found expression in restrictions on immigration.
(Those included a quota system, elaborated in 1924, which was
designed to favor Northern Europeans against assorted Slavs, Latins,
Greeks, Jews, and Turks. Chinese and eapanese were excluded
altogether.) Isolationism also went with high tariffs (popular in
particular with Republicans and embodied in legislation such as the
Emergency Tariff Act of 1921). There was bitter hostility toward
those suspected of having "gotten us into war." Critics derived from
everypartoftheAmericanpoliticalspectrum, includingMidwestem
Republicans who denounced Wall Street, the City (London's financial
center), and an intemational cohort of arms manufacturers, the so-
called merchants of death. It became almost a truism that the United
States had gone to war to save the bankers and merchants
PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
who had strained themselves to the utmost to supply Britain and
France with credit and arms. Isolationism was also reflected in U.S.
defense policies. With its huge economic potential, the United States
could easily have become the world's premier naval power. Instead,
the United States, at the Washington Naval Conference (1922), settled
for parity with Britain; the U.S. Air Force remained puny; and the U.S.
Army was reduced to a size that could not have confronted even a
minor European army, such as that of Belgium or Switzerland.
There was no effective political cooperation between the United
States and its former allies after the war or during the Great
Depression or during the rise of nazism. Despite American
isolationism, however, U.S. cultural influence on Europe grew apace.
Americans continued to come to Europe as tourists, performers,
merchants, and students. American artists crossed the Atlantic, as
did American prizefighters and American entertainersj especially
black artists. Hollywood movies conquered the worldneither German
UFA nor Sovfllm could compete on the world market with American
studios. The mass-produced car, cheap enough for ordinary people to
buy, seemed peculiarly American. (In Europe, by contrast, the
automobile long remained the chosen vehicle of the rich.) eazz was
the Americans' music par excellence, no matter how loudly
traditionalists objected; jazz triumphed in the dance halls and even
affected classical music (as in Ernst Krenek's jazz opera Uonny spielt
aufl ) . American performers scored brilliant successes in the
European capitals (even the Nazis, who denounced jazz as the
decadent production of Negro and eewish Untermenschen, had to
permit modified forms of jazz at their receptions). Americans saw
themselves as harbingers of modernity, mass culture, mass
production, and mass consumption. Many European intellectuals shared
these assumptions. "Skyscrapers," eean Paul Sartre reflected, "were
the architecture of the future, just as the cinema was the art and
jazz the music of the future."'6 Meanwhile, American intellectuals
bemoaned the fact that the United States had produced few great
artists, musicians, or writers and depreciated America's cultural
achievements. Not until the 1930s did some Americans begin to
appreciate the richness of American cuiture. But it was the
achievements of World War 11 that produced confidence, optimism,
and a sense of America's greatness.
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
Then as now, of course, the traffic in ideas went both ways.
Americans went to Europe to study German management methods,
nuclear physics, and linguistics; German engineering; French art;
British banking and maritime technology, as well as being Rhodes
Scholars. Americans remained profoundly indebted to European
pioneers in every fleld, from architecture to zoology. In music, even
the saxophone, that quintessentially modern American jazz
instrument, had been invented in Paris by Adolphe Sax, a
contemporary of Richard Wagner's. All the same, the American
contribution was in some ways unique and so was American economic
power. By the mid- 1 920s, when the world economy had temporarily
recovered from World War 1, the United States had become the
world's largest exporter and the principal source of new, as opposed
to existing, capital investments. Roughly half America's new
investments went to Europe, particularly Germany, where U.S. private
investors for a time helped pay for reparations and for the funding of
the Weimar Republic's welfare state. (Most of the war debt was never
repaid.) It was a time when even theeCommunists
withalltheirdislikeofWallStreet,hadasoftspotfor"Fordism,"that
speciflcally American combination of mass production methods and
high wages.
Equally important later on was the impact of the New Deal. Despite
pessimistic forecasts, American capitalism did not collapse as a
result of the Great Depression; communism did not develop into a
mass movement; fascism did not take root among Americans. (Most
Italian Americans stood alooffrom fascism; the great majority of
German Americans had no sympathy for Hitler, whose followers in the
United States, organized in the German-American Bund, never
amounted to much.) The New Deal aroused widespread admiration in
Europe among moderates, conservatives, Social Democrats, and Labour
party supporters alikeAmerica provided public works such as
highways, dams, electrical projects, even mural art but without the
militarism that accompanied such projects in totalitarian countries.
Europeans had other reasons for looking with favor at the United
States. For all its restrictions on immigration, the United States
remained by far the most open country in the world for people seeking
refuge from nazi, fascist, and later communist oppression.
23 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
The newcomers during the 1930s, many of them Jewish or linked to
Jews by ties of friendship or marriage, included famous scientists,
actors, poets, novelists, fllmmakers, physicians, and historians in one
of the great intellectual migrations of European history. A goodly
number came from Britain, but the bulk of them derived from German-
speaking Central Europe, Poland, and the lands of the former Austro-
Hungarian Empire.
The United States was now coming into its own in every sphere of
intellectual endeavor. Up to 1933, when Hitler took over, Germany had
always produced the largest number of Nobel Prize winners in
medicine and the sciences. From then onward the balance of power
irreversibly shifted; henceforth the United States always headed the
list. U.S. predominance continued even after the European refugee
scholars of the 1930s had begun to retire from their positions at U.S.
universities. (Between 1957 and 1990 the United States gained 113
Nobel Prizes in the sciences and economics, as against 53 won by the
European Community [EC] countries and 2 by Japan. ) Not all the
newcomers, of course, liked the United States or remained
permanently; for example, Thomas Mann and Bertold Brecht returned
to Europe after World War ll. Nevertheless, the great migration
strengthened existing intellectual ties between Europe and North
America. American science, technology, and business methods and
organizations had clearly reached world stature.
The United States also became involved in Europe's ideological
struggles. To millions of Americans, the Spanish civil war (193639)
in particular became a conflict between good and evil. No other
foreign civil strife had ever aroused similar passions in America. The
supporters of the Spanish Republic included not merely active
Communists, a small but relatively influential group, but a broad
alliance of moderate socialists, liberals, and self-styled progressive
conservatives. To them, the war meant a crucial struggle against
fascism worldwidea view popularized not only by Ernest Hemingway
and leftist intellectuals but also, later, by popular movie
personalities such as Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Franco supporters were less numerous but also influential. They
derived not so much from declared Fascists but from militant
antiCommunists and Catholics aghast at the persecution of nuns and
priests at the "reds"' behest. Several thousand Americans departed
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE 24
to fight in Spain with the Loyalists in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; to
most American intellectuals the Spanish civil war henceforth
provided a mirror in which world events would continue to be
reflectedwith progress forever arrayed against reaction, vice
against virtue, capitalism against socialism.
Nevertheless, the bulk of the American people remained
neutralist. However much professors and joumalists might argue
about the Spanish civil war or nazism in Germany or Stalinism in
Russia, the mass of the U.S. population wished to remain uninvolved.
Once World War 11 started in Europe, however, the Allied cause
aroused sympathy among the great majority of Americans. But despite
President Roosevelt's endeavors (Lend-Lease Act, 1941) and the
Anglophilia of the old East Coast establishment, the United States
would probably not have entered all-out war but for )apan's attack on
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Germany's declaration of war
against the United States.
RETURN TO EUROPE
Yet once having stepped into the arena, the Americans meant to win
with a resolve never grasped by either German or Japanese
policymakers. The United States rejected an "Asia First" strategy
advocated by traditional isolationists and instead concentrated its
main efforts against Hitler, who was correctly perceived as the main
enemy. The immense resources of the United States proved decisive in
winning the war. After Pearl Harbor, there was in the United States a
political unanimity not witnessed again until the gulf war fifty years
later. American society, though ethnically mixed, displayed its
accustomed cohesion during World War II. German Americans, Italian
Americans, Japanese Americans overwhelmingly proved loyal. The
American way of life made a strong appeal even to German prisoners
of war in the United States. (There were something like 400,000 of
them, as against only 50,000 Italians; of a selected sample of those
retuming to Germany, 74 percent left with friendly feelings toward
the United States. They included men of subsequent prominence in the
Federal Republic of Germany.)
American private enterprise, though controlled and restricted
PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
by extensive governmental regulation, staged a miracle of
mobilization never previously seen in world history. Big science came
into its own, flnanced with huge public grants, linked to the
universities and to a massive industrial complex. The American fleet
became the world's mightiestas if Pearl Harbor had never occurred.
The U.S. Air Force came to dominate the skies. No one who ever saw
the giant air armadas that filled the sky during the invasion of
Normandy will ever forget the sight, a shattering display of American
or American-subsidized British air power. The United States deployed
the greatest army ever sent overseas in world history. The Gl's were
better dressed, better paid, and more expansively equipped than any
European soldiers. In the European imagination the olive-uniformed
Yankstall, gangling, gum chewingappeared astonishing in their
self-confidence. British soldiers might resent the Yanks' superior pay
and their reputation for courting British women with perfume and silk
stockings unavailable in British shops. But though he might scoff at
the Americans, Tommy Atkins (Britain's Gl Joe) was glad at heart that
the Yanks had come. The United States had been the "arsenal of
democracy," and this the Allies appreciated.
The American army, moreover, seemed more democratic than
European armies. There were no separate sergeants' messes in the U.S.
Army, as there were in the British army; proportionately more U.S.
enlisted men became officers than in the British army. Americans
performed impressively, especially at tasks requiring engineering
skills or complex organization of the kind involved in seaborne
landings. Germans soldiers might taunt the Americans for their initial
inexperience or lack of discipline. But members of the Wehrmacht
were impressed by the massive weight of firepower that Americans
could deploy and their ability to learn fast from previous errors.
Every German soldier would infinitely sooner be taken prisoner by the
Americans than by the Russians or even the French; to be sent to a
prisoner-of-war camp in the United States was accounted a first
prize in the Wehrmacht's lottery of defeat. Above all, once the
fighting stopped, Germans without exception preferred to dwell in the
American than the Soviet zone of occupation.
The Americans also consolidated their economic supremacy. Whereas
much of Europe had suffered devastation on an unparalleled
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
scale, the American homeland witnessed an extraordinary growth of
American industrial productivity and an unprecedented rise in the
gross national product (from $11.0 billion, in 1929 prices, in 1939 to
$180.9 billion in 1945). For many Americans, the wardespite its
hardships and dangerstumed into a positive experience, creating an
almost universal labor shortage, which meant that wages rose and
that formerly unemployed workers had money to spend on luxuries as
well as necessities. Millions of black Americans migrated North and
found jobs in industry that had formerly been denied to them.
Hostility, education and job discrimination against Catholics
andJewsdiminished.Millionsofwomenmovedintothelaborforce; many of
them stayed in their newfound posts after the war, with the result
that five million more women were in paid employment by 1946 than
in 1941. In the United States, at war's end prosperity created new
expectations and overall a new sense of optimism and well-being.
By their joint exertions, the United States and Britain restored
the prestige of democratic govemment, badly tamished during the
1930s when nazism and fascism had appeared to be the wave of the
future. American society and the American economy worked. The
intemational effect of U.S. (and British) democracy was enormous.
Unlike Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill
feared plots from theirgenerals. American societybased on a
modified free enterprise principlecreated a productive miracle that
would have appeared improbable even to writers of science flction.
The American and British alone had a credible record of maintaining
civil liberty. (The intemment of Japanese Americans in the United
States and of many German Jewish refugees in Great Britain was a
regrettable departure from the Allies' high standards; however, the
civilian prisoners in every other belligerent country Germany, Japan,
France, the Soviet Unionwould have gladly traded places with those
in Anglo-American hands. )
World War 11 was likewise decisive in shaping future relations
between the United States and its Western Allies. President
Roosevelt's great design (the Atlantic Charter) differed much from
what later. transpired. Roosevelt believed that there could be a
permanent partnership between the United States and the Soviet
Union. Treated with consideration, granted its rightful sphere of
27 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
influence in Eastem Europe, the Soviet Union would collaborate with
Western capitalism in a new world order. This would be run through
the United Nations but would be essentially based on a partnership
between the "Big Four"the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and
Britain. Relations with Britain would be friendly, but the British, as
well as the French and the Dutch, would have to surrender their ill-
gotten empires in the cause of world peace.
In fact there was friction between the United States and the
Soviet Union during the war. By contrast, U.S. ties with Britain (and
the so-called white Dominions, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa), were infinitely tighter than with any other country. U.S. and
British diplomatists might disagree over Soviet ambitions or the
future of the British Empire; U.S. and British strategists might
quarrel over the impending invasion of the European continent; U.S.
and British sailors would customarily get into fights when going
ashore in the same port. But U.S. and British economic and defense
policies were much more closely coordinated than those of any
sovereign allies. This special relationship remains just as real fifty
years laterd7
Relations with France, by contrast, were much worseand remained
so for years to come. Roosevelt personally disliked Charles de Gaulle,
France's wartime leader. Indeed, the two stood worlds apart. De
Gaulle was a proud and touchy soldier, a believer in realpolitik,
intensely preoccupied with his country's prestige, sure that he alone
embodied his country's glory and esprit. Roosevelt, intensely civilian
in his ethos, never awed by martial splendor, was convinced that the
United States should guide the world into a new moral order that
would supersede old world power politics. Roosevelt refused to
regard de Gaulle as France's only legitimate representative.
Roosevelt, moreover, always projected domestic politics on the
foreign screen, there was no French voting lobby in the United States,
as there was a Polish, an Irish, and a Jewish lobby. French interests
thus were held of small account.
U.S. relations with Italy, oddly enough, were easier. The German
alliance was unpopular in Italy; Mussolini's much-heralded "pact of
steel" with Hitler would never have survived a popular referendum.
Once the Allies were firmly entrenched in Italy and Germany's defeat
seemed certain, Mussolini fell and Italy switched sides. The
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
Italians cooperated with the Allies, and the United States began to
render massive aid to its former enemy, a policy welcomed with
special enthusiasm by Italian Americans, by Catholics of all ethnic
backgrounds, and by other enemies of Stalinism who feared the
challenge posed by the powerful Italian Communist party.
U.S. opinion regarding Germany was much more complex. After
World War 1, there had arisen a feeling of guilt among many
intellectuals, a sense that Germany had been victimized by allied
rapacity in the Treaty of Versailles ( 1919). There was no such
proGermanism after World War 11the Nazis, with their murderous
campaigns and death camps, had tOO grossly besmirched their
country's reputation. Indeed it was intellectually fashionable to be
hostile to Germany; sophisticates who would have blanched at
expressing the slightest hostility to Jews or blacks could indulge in
anti-German remarks to their heart's content. Nevertheless,
antiGermanism in the United States never became as powerful as it
did for a time in Britain during World War ll, when leading
intellectuals such as A. J. P. Taylor, Sir Lewis Namier, and Hugh
Dalton became vigorous proponents of anti-Germanism. The United
States, by contrast, never felt in mortal danger of Germany; about
one-fifth of the U.S. population traced their descent wholly or partly
to Germany. German names such as Eisenhower, Spaatz, and Nimitz
were conspicuous among the list of the United States' greatest
commanders; the German impact was profound on the Lutheran
churches and, to a lesser extent, on the Catholic church. Once the war
had ended and the Morgenthau plan to reduce Germany to a "potato
patch" was seen to be a blunder, there was little doubt that a
reformed and repentant Germany would work its way back into
American esteem. West Germany came to be seen as the dynamo for
restructuring Europe and as the shield, with U.S. help, against Soviet
might.
World War 11 was also fraught with other far-reaching consequences.
Americans became convinced that only a united Europe free of
economic nationalism, trade wars, and custom duties would prevent
future European wars; the United States should constitute a model for
Europeans to follow. A political federation, however, would only work
if sustained by a prosperous and expanding economy. Hence U.S.
policymakers became convinced, during the war, that the United
States must provide flnancial aid and that the New
29 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
Deal should be exported to Europe. The Atlantic Charter, the Four
Freedoms, Lend Lease all reflected the Americans' new spirit of
humanitarian interventionism.
By contrast, there was in Europe, when the war ended, a pervasive
pessimism expressed in gloomy philosophies such as existentialism.
Entire cities lay in ruins, millions of people had lost their lives in
battle, in bombing, or in death camps. To return even to prewar
normalcy seemed for many Europeans an unattainable fantasy.
Compared with the Europeans' pessimism, the Americans had a
healthy optimism. The Americans' belief in economic growth, in a
dynamic society sustained by mass production, in mass consumption,
and in social equality provided that element of hope that would prove
essential for Europe's postwar recoveryd8
America also continued to influence Europe's popular culture. Jazz
remained a major contribution of black Americans. U.S. popular music
also derived inspiration from the traditional strains of the American
West (themselves influenced by Mexican corridos, or ballads) and
from tunes brought across the Atlantic by European immigrants
English, Irish, German, Jewish, Italian, and others. American music in
turn spread through the remotest parts of the globe; musicians such
as Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong were acclaimed as much abroad
as at home. Also acclaimed were American movies, some of which
were fantasies that spread disinformation concerning the real
America. American movies and musical comedies similarly supplied
much of Europe's entertainment; all modern fairy-tale characters
Superman, Donald Duck, Bambi, the Wizard of Oz, the heroic cowboy
came from America.
To the old-style European liberal, the United States was the bastion
of freedom. To the refugee scientist of the 1930s, the United States
provided new academic opportunities as well as shelter. To social
reformers (including British Labourites such as Ernest Bevin and
Harold Laski), the United States was the land of the New Deal. To the
efficiency expert, the United States was the country that pioneered
mass production methods. America was also the land in which a
person might redeem failures suffered in the old country.
Alternatively, the "rich uncle from America" appeared in melodrama
as a deus ex machina, ready to help an ambitious young man in his
career. (This theme returned in the 1980s in Heimat, an enormously
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE 30
popular German television series.) And even critics of the United
States such as Bertrand Russell or Arnold Toynbee never hesitated
privately to make money in a country they denigrated in public.
The United States dominated not only Europe but the world. The
United States held a temporary monopoly of nuclear arms. It stood
supreme in the natural and physical sciences. In religious terms
regarding the number of practicing believers and trained personnel
and financial resources, the United States was at once the world's
largest Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish country. America contributed
more to intemational charity than the rest of the world combined:
terms such as "]oint" and ".Care" packages entered the international
vocabulary. Even international bodies such as the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) were largely
financed with the American taxpayers' money.
Overall, American English came to be what Latin had been to the
literate classes of medieval Europethe principal language of
international communications as well as a prestige symbol. (The use
of English spread through textbooks, teacher exchanges, student
travel, tourism, imported fllms, television programs, and jazz and
through English terminology in intemational organizations, banking,
aviation, maritime communications, and the military. English also
dominated in the social sciences and scientiflc and technological
publications.) The role of English became particularly important in
smaller countries such as Sweden and Holland; neither French nor
German could equal the importance of English throughout Europe and
the world at large. American broadcasts also had tremendous political
influence. Few Americans realize the enormous impact that the Voice
of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty (beamed to the
Soviet Union) had on the Soviet satellites.'9
The United States moreover enjoyed special advantages with regard
to its civic culture. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 is the world's
oldest written constitution and has helped make the United States one
of the most politically stable countries in the world. (Even during the
stormy 1960s, hardly any revolutionary professed a willingness to
abolish the Constitution, however much he or she expressed hostility
to the hated "system" in general.) The American Constitution was
studied with interest by the founding fathers of the German Federal
Republic and the Italian Republic after World War
31 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
II and later by scholars and politicians during the Soviet Union's
demise. The Federalist Papers would remain relevant when the works
of Lenin and Stalin were moldering in the attic. American federalism,
the system of checks and balances, of the separation of powers, has
been modifled but has endured and remained a strength of American
democracy. No Marxist-inspired constitution could make a similar
claim. And European Community enthusiasts speak of a federal union
of nations to form a United States of Europe.
At the same time the United States enjoyed a high level of
interest in politics, media attention to political affairs, pride in the
country, a sense of civic duty, and trust in political institutions.
American constitutionalism helped integrate wave after wave of
immigrants into the U.S. political culture. Up to the late 1 960s, U.S.
respondents in public opinion polls thought more highly about their
own political system and displayed more participatory and supportive
attitudes than non Americans. Americans, on the whole, also felt
more certain of their ability to influence governmental action than
most Europeans. Not surprisingly, the United States after World War II
saw itself as the major actor in world history.
The partial Americanization of Europe had begun in wartime and
continued after 1945. The United States, as the "arsenal of
democracy," had equipped its Allies and provided the majority of
forces for the war in the West and in the Pacific. Millions of troops
had been stationed first in Britain, then in occupied Western Europe.
Americans brought new habits, attitudes, and diets to Europeans.
Mores and morals became more open and friendly and less class
biased. Thousands of GI brides linked families across the Atlantic;
sexual liaisons numbered in the millions. The GI's brought new
ambition and appetites to help break down national stereotypes.
Military govemments ruled West Germany, Austria, and Italy, reshaped
their governments, and helped liberalize their education systems and
economies. The Marshall Plan (1947-51) was set up to revitalize
Western Europe, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
was put together to defend the region against the threats of
communism and Germany. The United States had truly come into its
own; as Churchill noted at war's end, "America stands at this moment
at the summit of the world."
AN AMBlVAt,tNT HERITAGE
ATTITUDES WITHIN THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY AFIER 1945
What of the attitudes within the Atlantic community as it evolved
between the end of World War 11 and the 1980s? On both sides of the
Atlantic there remained a good deal of ambivalence. AntiAmericanism
continued to be influentialmuch of it reactionary and antimodern.
Americans were resented for their political and economic power,
their bragging, and their riches. America was identified with the real
or imagined evils alike of urbanism and free enterprise. Some
Europeans were envious and resentful of the United States. The
British Labour party, according to Anthony Crosland, resented the
United States because it took over leadership from the British and
because of the success of capitalism over socialism. Certain British
and European conservatives were anti American because of the U.S.
role in encouraging decolonization. (The 1956 Suez crisis was the
most serious clash between European colonialism and American
anticolonialism.)2=A1 Westem Europe's dependency on the United States
was another source of anguish and resentment. The United States not
only helped Europe recover but also defended it against the Soviet
Union. Dependency hurt some Europeans' pride but helped push them
into working toward a United States of Europe to stand as a third
force between the United States and the USSR.
The partial Americanization of Europe was somewhat balanced by
the increasing influence of Europe on America. The ordinary
immigrant from Western Europe was no longer an unskilled or
semiskilled worker or farmer, as he or she had been in the olden days.
The bulk of European newcomers were highly skilled technicians or
professionals. European professors lectured at U.S. universities;
European scientists worked at U.S. institutes. European investors
played a major part in U.S. economic life. In terms of acquiring
business assets in the United States, British, German, French, and
Dutch investors between them played a much more important role
than the much-discussed Japanese. There was ever-increasing
cooperation between major corporations in the United States and
Europe. For example, Daimler-Benz, a German giant, collaborated with
U.S. corporations such as Westinghouse in manufacturing
33 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
machinery required for mass transit, including engines for subways
and automated train control components. Daimler subsidiaries
manufactured heavy-duty trucks in the United States or turned out
medical equipment. Indeed, Daimler's activities in the United States
became so complex that the company had to open an offlce in
Washington, D.C., just to handle relations with the U.S. govemment. As
Daimler's chairman put it, "collaboration sans frontieres is more and
more becoming an indispensable prerequisite for one's own economic
and technological success."2t
Europe also influenced day-to-day living in the United States to
an extent not understood by professional anti-Americans, who
believed that cultural influence was a one-way street. An American
executive might wake up to the buzz of a German-made Braun alarm
clock, prepare Italian espresso in a German-manufactured Krups
coffee maker, eat a croissant from the French-owned Vie de France
bakery chain, spread butter supplied by the Anglo Dutch Lever Group,
purchased at a Giant supermarket owned by the Dutch Alber Hejn
Group. Thus refreshed, the executive would have a hot shower with
the new Lever 2000 soap, shave with a Norelco shaver from Philips,
then slip into an Italian-made suit from Giorgio Armani. Thereafter he
might ride to the office in a Swedish Volvo filled with gas at a BP
(British Petroleum) station, pick up a Spanish business associate at
the Watergate Hotel (owned by the British Trusthouse Forte Company
), and discuss a new best-seller published by Doubleday (just acquired
by the German firm of Bertelsmann). C'est la vie.
The United States and Europe also came to resemble one another in
more fundamental ways. American life became much more
bureaucratized than in the olden days; U.S. bureaucracies rivaled their
European counterparts in arrogance and complexity. At the same time,
the U.S. intelligentsia assumed a much more prominent place in U.S.
Iife than two generations earliera development already familiar to
Europeans.
Still, to nationalists in Europe, the United States was the dominant
player in world politics, and the Europeans had to depend on the
Americans for their military defense until the collapse of the Warsaw
Pact in 1989. In the twenty-first century the Europeans may become
the world's economic leaders, but they have yet to prove
AN AMeIVALENT HERITAGE
that they have military and political power equal to the United
States or indeed that they can act forcefully as a political unit.22
Charges of economic imperialism were hurled at the United States
throughout the postwar decades. Although the United States saw
itself as an anticolonial power, leftists defined the United States as
imperialistic because of its economic penetration of world markets.
Lenin (Imperialism, 1917) defined imperialism as the last stage of
capitalism; he thus made the United States appear as an imperialist
power even though it had no colonies. West German leftist youths
claimed that the United States had colonized Germany. The French had
long preached against the American challenge, and the British left
widely accepted the Marxist definition of the United States as a
neocolonialist power.-Opposition to American economic takeovers
therefore was widespread in Europe from 1945 on; the European
Economic Community (EEC) adopted a partially protectionist policy in
1958, and American multinationals who set up plants in Europe were
perceived by Jean Louis Servan-Schreiber as embodiments of The
American Challenge (first published in Frerich in 1967).
American self-criticism was the source of much of this
antiAmericanism in Europe. The attacks on American society by
American liberal-left academics and journalists focused on the
failures of capitalism, on the industrial-military complex, on civil
rights abuses, and on the policy of containment. Critics such as Paul
Baran, Noam Chomsky, Herbert Marcuse, Vance Packard, and Susan
Sontag helped convince many Europeans of America's evil. Naive
actresses such as eane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine or Communist
party functionaries such as Angela Davis were believed when they
fantasized about American society. American newspaper columnists
were among the worst America-bashers. Walter Lippmann kept saying
that the cold war was America's fault. Anthony Lewis claimed that
the United States was the most dangerous and destructive power in
the world, and Tom Wicker claimed in the 1980s that the American
system did not workthis at a time of the greatest prosperity and
military power in the country's history.23
Much anti-Americanism in postwar Europe therefore was reinforced
by American movies, television, drama, and popular music,
PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
for these all too often display only the worst aspects of American
societyits criminality, racism, and violence. Nevertheless, many
Americans found it hard to understand why, having saved Europe from
self-destruction in World Wars I and 11 at great loss of American
lives and having then helped rebuild that region after World War ll,
they were resented and treated with distrust.
Given the murderous history of communism, there could be no
objective justiflcation for treating the United States and the USSR as
moral equivalents. Nevertheless, many European and U.S. intellectuals
seldom stopped criticizing the United States, while excusing
communism's failures. Some church officials even claimed that
communism was morally superior to capitalism. Luckily,
antiAmericanism never forced the United States to retreat into
isolation or a "fortress America" mentality. The United States
remained committed to NATO and globally containing communist
expansionnot always with success.
Until the Vietnam War, the majority of Europeans liked the United
States and believed it was seriously committed to their security.
Thereafter, European distrust of U.S. Ieadership and judgment
increased. Public opinion polls in Western Europe from 1954 to 1982
were generally more favorable than unfavorable to the United States
but suspicious of U.S. political judgment.
There was also concern by scholars such as Paul Kennedy (The Rise
and Fall of Great Powers, 1987 ) about the U.S. commitment to be the
world's police force and U.S. ability to sustain its military status as a=
superpower. The United States supposedly had overreached itself by
spending too much on defense at a time when the U.S. economy
suffered from slow growth, a loss of technical super iority in many
fields, national budget deficits, a trade deficit, and the poor
education obtained by so many American high school students. Above
all, the United States encountered criticism from the peace
movements and the various Green parties, which censured the U.S.
policy of nuclear deterrence. There was bitter resentment concerning
the arms buildup initiated by President Carter and accelerated by
President Reagan. Stephen Haseler has best summed up the nature of
European anti Americanism as not just opposition to U.S. policies but
resentment of U.S. power and material success and a feeling of
dependency on this superpower.
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
In the postwar period, many of Europe's elites believed that
American democracy was without real culture and was excess=92vely
individualistic. The United States incurred censure at the same time
for being vulgar and elitist, bellicose and soft, materialistic yet
preachy. Anti-Americanism appealed to those who equated the United
States with modernity in its worst aspectswith the destruction of
customary family and religious ties. But the United States also was
blamed for failing to develop the Third World in an adequate manner,
for hogging too many of the world's resources. Anti-Americanism
pleased nationalists of every description, who
denigratedtheUnitedStatesasacollectionofrootlesscosmopolitans
drawn from every nation on earth. But then the United States was also
lambasted for its real or assumed chauvinism. Anti-Americanism
frequently went with hostility to the Americans' capitalist
ruthlessness. Yet U.S. capitalists were also denounced for their
alleged inability to compete on the world market against Japanese
and German competition.
Anti-Americanism appealed in particular to social elitesnot so much
the traditional upper classes but to leftist television producers,
joumalists, academics, clergy. They took pride not merely in their
assumed superior intellectual ability but also in their social and
aesthetic chic. Hence they widely enjoyed sneering at President
Reagan as a former B-movie actor and at Prime Minister Thatcher for
being a grocer's daughter from Grantham who bought her clothes at
Marks and Spencer's (the British equivalent of Macy's). An American
variant of this creed particularly blamed the WASPs. Thus Charles
Reich's The Greening of America (1970) clailned that Americans found
work empty, pointless, and enslaving, lampooning the WASPs with
special severity. The political traditions of the American bourgeoisie
were widely regarded with contempt; political freedom, personal
liberty, limited government were exposed to ridicule. By contrast,
now-discredited revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara
were held up for emulation.
>From the late 1970s on, the intellectual conhguration of the Westem
world began to change. By that time the prestige of communism was
on the decline; only a handful of true believers and revolutionary
theologians considered that communism represented a superior
morality and superior economic eMciency. Not that anti-
37 PETER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
Americanism ended. The United States did have worse crime and drug
problems than any Western European country. A new breed of European
right wingers resented the United States as the homeland of
feminism, multiculturalism, and other real or reputed cultural ills.
There was also, from the 1980s onward, a new form of
antiAmericanism inconceivable thirty years earlierthe equation of
the United States with inefficient management, shoddy workmanship,
and economic decline a l'anglaise. Exaggerated as those impressions
might be, they derived in part from genuine deficiencies and also from
grave errors in public relations. (It was surely one of President Bush's
major errors to take, on an official trip to Japan, twenty-one
corporate executivesincluding a senior offlcial from General Motors
who had just announced the layoff of 74,000 workers, the closing of
numerous plants, and, in the bargain, an $80 million compensation
package for the upper echelon of management. ) Z4
Above all there was anti-Americanism homemade. Few foreigners
ever denounced the United States with the same passion as Paul
Fussell, an American writer to whom the United States was BAD, in
capital letters, and hell was other Americans.es Such sentiments
widely appealed to a moral coalition whose members drew their
inspiration from three separate traditionsreligious (particularly
Quakers, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Jews); secular humanist (both
Marxist and non-Marxist); and bohemian (including outsiders of every
kind who gloried in their own alienation from society).
Overwhelmingly they rejected the doctrine of original sin; they
repudiated the past and put their trust into a glorious future.
Whatever their philosophical antecedents, they regarded themselves
like seventeenth-century Puritansas a chosen band, a moral
vanguard, destined to lead the oppressed masses from presentday
America, the new Egypt, to a promised land of the vanguard's own
creation.
The impact of anti-Americanism, however, should not be exaggerated.
The history of the Atlantic Community since the end of 1945 had,
after all, been an extraordinary success story, at least for that part
of Westem Europe that, as the British Economist put it, had been
"lucky enough to have been liberated (or defeated) by the Americans."
Whereas the first part of the present century had been
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
a time of disaster, the second had seen a period of peace unmatched
since the post-Napoleonic era. "The average West European's income
(at 1990 prices) has risen more than 300 percent from $4,860 a year
in 1950 to $20,880 in 1990. Life expectancy for West Europeans went
up in that time from 67 to 76 years."26
True enough, both Westem Europe and the United States suffered
from serious social problems. In Westem Europe there were, for
example, new ethnic tensions, as Western Europe became a magnet for
immigrants. By 1992 the share of foreign-born people in many
Western European countries was indeed higher than in the United
States, the world's classic country of refuge. ( In 1991 the share of
foreign-born persons amounted to about 17 percent in Switzerland, 11
percent in France, 9 percent in Belgium, 7.5 percent in Germany, 6.3
percent in Britain as against 6 percent in the United States.) Of
course no European country could compare with the United States as
regards ethnic diversity. The United States in particular continued to
suffer from bitter racial rivalries, as expressed, for example, in the
1992 riots in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, the United States' problems
seem manageable when compared with those of other multiethnic
countries such as Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and many others.
Europeans widely appreciated America's relative tranquillity. Within
the United States the moral coalition proved unexpectedly flssiparous
as militant feminists, ecologists, gays, and minority advocates
increasingly pursued divergent aims. The moral coalition could not
easily gain a mass following in a country whose citizens, in public
opinion polls, overwhelmingly expressed satisfaction with their own
lives. (The same generalization applies to Westem Europe. )
The breakdown of communism in the former Warsaw Pact countries
weakened anti-Americanism both directly and indirectly. The
enormous propaganda campaign directed and financed by the Soviet
Union and its allies suddenly ceased. Marxists of every kind were
suddenly put on the defensive. Why hae they failed to foresee
communism's impending disaster? Why had they so widely failed to
understand the demographic, moral, and economic ravages experienced
by every country that had ever been under communist rule? Moreover,
by the 1980s, even before the breakup of the Soviet Union, some of
the old-fashioned anti-Americanism of the French left had lost its
sting. Jean Paul Sartre, once the country's most
39 PETER DUIGe:AN AND L. H. GANN
influential intellectual, and anti-Americanism, once de rigueur among
the smart set, became pass=8E. From the 1980s onward it became
acceptable among the literati to talk of la France qui gagne (the
France that makes money), to appear preppy (bon chic, bon genre), and
even to praise wines from Califomia. As Richard Bernstein put it, "the
noisome, Sartrean, fashionably leftist jargon that treated the United
States as a bourgeois and therefore philistine tyranny, an
'imperialist' menace posing a threat at least as grave as the one posed
by the Soviet Union has become nngard (fusty, old fashioned in French
youth jargon)."27
As regards the future, the news is both bad and good. The United
States and the Western European countries share comparable social
problems. Voters in most Westem countries faced rising rates of
taxation, budget deficits, rising costs of social services, and
dissatisfaction with the public services states were meant to
deliver. In the United States, as in Europe, television dominated
popular leisure. Religious attendance had widely diminished, and
traditional values were in decline. Unemployment had turned into a
pervasive problem, though generally worse in Westem Europe than in
the United States. Both Europeans and Americans were forced to
adjust to a world where manufacturing industries required far fewer
workers than in the past, a world where job opportunities for the
unskilled, the semiskilled, and the archaically skilled kept
diminishing. On both sides of the Atlantic the number of children born
out of wedlock has greatly increased since the 1960s; it was 25
percent in the United States in 1993. In the United States the
illegitimacy rate for whites now nearly equals the black rate of the
mid-1960s, when scholars such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan flrst
sounded the alarm over the decline of the black family.28 But in
Westem Europe too the traditional family structure has weakened: the
percentage of womenheaded families has gone up and with it, drug
consumption, crime (especially juvenile crime), and the feminization
of poverty. Western Europe, like the United States, must cope with
massive immigration and the resultant ethnic hostilities. In dealing
with these and associated problems, Americans and Europeans can
profit by learning from one another's experiences.
The breakdown of traditional authority has also affected politics on
both sides of the Atlantic. Forty years ago, an Irish workman in
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE
a big American industrial city was likely to vote for the Democratic
party, attend a Catholic church, and loyally support his union. A Welsh
miner would probably vote for the Labour party, attend chapel, and
likewise take pride in being a union man. A Bavarian woman would in
all likelihood support the Christian Democratic party and go to mass.
By contrast, a Walloon steelworker in Belgium would probably be a
loyal socialist in politics and an agnostic in religion; in all likelihood,=
he would make sure that his daughter voted socialist and married a
socialist.
By the l990s, these certainties had greatly weakened. Political
allegiances had become more fluid than in previous generations.
Governing parties were in trouble all over the Atlantic Community.
Besmirched by scandal, the Christian Democratic (CD) party in Italy
had abdicated its leadership, which derived from the CD's opposition
to the once-powerful Italian Communist party. The cold war having
ended, Italian voters now feared the Mafia much more than the
communists, and the Italian judicature had begun a revolutionary
assault against Italy's former "political class." In France, the
Socialist party had, by 1994, been reduced to a shadow of its former
self. In Germany, confidence in the three main political parties had
diminished. In Canada the ruling Progressive Conservative party had
been shattered in the 1993 election. In the United States, the two
major parties were riddled by intemal disputes over issues such as
health care, conservation, and the adoption of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in
1993.0nbothsidesoftheAtlanticethnicandregionaldifferences had
widened within many countriesthis at a time when the Soviet threat
from without had gone. In the United States political arena there were
heightened tensions between whites and blacks, gays and straights,
feminists and traditionalists. Outside the United States regional
loyalties had gained strength in countries as diverse as Belgium,
Spain, Italy, and France. (A French cartoon showed two Frenchmen in
conversation. "I am a xenophobe," proclaims the first. "Of which
region?" asks the second.) Worse offstill was Yugoslavia, which had
turned into a European Lebanon.
But the good news outweighed the bad. The Soviet Empire had joined
the former Western colonial empires in oblivion. The cold war ended.
A "hot war" seemed so unlikely that all NATO members
prTER DUIGNAN AND L. H. GANN
reduced their armed forces. The psychological impact of
decommunization meant that all over Europe, East and West, former
Marxist-Leninists were revising their resum=8Es. Nobody had ever heard
anything, seen anything, said anything, known anything, except for
handful of oldsters now on sickbeds, in their dotage, or in exile.
Communism had ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Academic
Marxism was in the doldrums in every Westem country except the
United States, where left-wingers had been less exposed to the
practice of "real existing socialism" than their colleagues in the
formerly communist countries.
Diplomatic relations between the United States and its Western
European allies were remarkably good. Unlike Britain and France, the
United States had not attempted to place obstacles in the way
ofGermanreunification.GermanyremainedWashington'sprincipal ally in
Europe, as well as a major trading partner. U.S.-British relations did
not remain as close under President Clinton as they had been under
President Bush and even more so under President Reagan. In President
Reagan's day, admiration for Margaret Thatcher nearly equaled the
respect paid to Winston Churchill in World War ll. Nevertheless,
President Clinton took pride in being an Oxford man, and no major
issues divided the two countries. No matter what theoreticians might
say, a "special relationship" continued to link the United States with
Britain and Ireland, the only two European countries where United
States tourists could feel at home without having to leam a new
language. Franco-American relations suffered from disputes over
tariffs (especially those concemed with U.S. farming imports and U.S.
movies). But again, there were no major disputes over principles. The
visceral anti-Americanism of eeanPaul Sartre's day had disappeared.
On the contrary, a reputed familiarity with the writings of Milton
Friedman had become politically acceptable. To be a connoisseur of
California wines was deflnitely chic. Spain's democracy had turned
out to be a striking success, and no one askedas many scholars did in
the 1970s whether it would last. The Portuguese dictatorship had
become a remote memory. Franco German, Anglo-French, or Anglo-
German wars of earlier years had come to seem light years away. The
United States, it was widely believed, would never again have to be
involved in intra-European conflicts.
AN AMBIVALENT HERITAGE 42=09e=0943=09PETER DUIONAN AND L. H. GANN
The United States was also bound to beneflt from the EC's
creation of a single market (flnalized in 1993). The EC stands out as
one of the United States' chief trading partners, and the United States
seems bound to proflt from the EC's transformation into a single
marketwith freedom for people, capital, and services to move within
the EC's border. The United States also is a model for those European
federalists who aim at turning the EC into a United States of Europe.
(The Maastricht Treaty, put into force in 1993, indeed looked to a
superfederation with a uniform currency, a joint foreign and security
policy, and a common social charter.) In our opinion, those goals are
unattainable, and the United States has little interest in supporting
them. No matter what constitutional lawyers might say, effective
sovereignty in the EC would continue to rest with the constituent
statesnot the federal power, as it does in the United States. The
reason for that state of affairs is simple: the EC is a union of twelve
diverse states with different languages and cultures. If push came to
shove, the EC would never go to war to prevent one of its member
states from secedingunlike the Unired States in the Civil War, the
Swiss Corefederation in the so-called Sonderbundskrieg, or Nigeria in
the civil conflict against Ibo secessionists. The United States in
future would have to accept Westem Europe for what it was and what
it remainsan association of states linked both to one another and to
the United States by ties of history, commerce, and a common culture.
Given the state of Europe flfty years ago, this is indeed a mighty
change for the better. The Western world truly has cause to be
grateful.
NOTES
8.
10.
12.
PageSmith,TrialbyFire:
APeople'sHistoryoftheCivilWarandReconstruction (New York, Penguin
Books, 1990), p. 29.
SeePeterDuignanandL.H.Gann,TheRebirthoftheWest:TheAmericanieation
of the Democratic World, t945-1958 (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1992).
Mark P. Lagon and Michel Lind, "American Way: The Enduring Interests
of U. S. Foreign Policy," Policy Review, Summer 1991, pp. 38-44. See
also Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann, The United States and Africa: A
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chap. 5. Alexis
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. e. P. Mayer (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 33. See also Daniel J. Boorstin, America and
the Image of Europe (New York: World Publishing, 1964). "An
American," Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Doubleday,
1910), pp. 97-99. Nathan Glazer, "The Structure of Ethnicity," Public
Opinion, OctoberNovember 1984, pp. 2-5. Cited respectively from
Pierre Berton, The Invasion of Canada, ]812-1813 (Ontario: Penguin
Books, 1988), p. 42, and Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four
Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1989), p. 157.
Leo Schelbert and Hedwing Rappold, eds, Alles ist gane andcrs hier:
Auswanderer-Schicksale in Briefen aus zweieahrhunderten (Olten and
Freiburg: Walter-Verlag, 1977), pp. 42, 67,100,115. Charles
Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in
Englishspeaking Countries during 1866-67 (Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott, 1869), p. 219. eames M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom:
The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 549.
Cartoon reprinted in Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the
American People (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974), p. 467.
Marx to Engels, October 8,1858, in On Colonialism: Articlesfrom the
New York Tribune and other Writings by Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 322. Cited in
David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart: The Relationship
between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Random House, 1988), p. 25. A. e. P. Taylor, The Struegle for the
Mastery of Europe 1848-1918 eOxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1954),
pp. xxlx-xxx, for detailed flgures. Cited by Dimbleby and Reynolds, An
Ocean Apart, pp. 44.
QuotedbyFrankCostiglolia,AwkwardDominion:AmericanPolitical,
Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919-1933 (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 178.
AN AMEUVALENT HERITAGE
17.
18.
20.
Dimbleby and Reynolds, An Ocean Apart, pp. 335-36. David Ellwood,
"The American Challenge and the Origins of the Politics of Growth," in
M. L. Smith and Peter M. R. Stirk, eds., Making the New Europe: European
Unity and the Second World War (London: Pinter, 1990), pp. 184200.
See also Duignan and Gann, The Rebirth of the West, chaps. I and Z.
Richard Grenier, "Around the World in American Ways," Public Opinion,
March 1986, pp. 3-5. Paul Hollander, Anti Americanism: Critiques at
Home and Abroad: 1965-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991). Stephen Haseler, AntiAmericanism: Steps in a Dangerous Path
(London: Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies, 1986).
Steve Dryden, "Europe in America," Europe, June 1991, pp. 6-8. Peter
S. Rashid, "Made in Europe," Europe-, June 1991, pp. 11-12. Haseler,
Anti-Americanism, pp. 17-18. Ibid., pp. 24-25. Sidney Blumenthal,
"Short-Termers: Bush and the CEO's," New Republic, 27 eanuary 1992,
pp. 15-16. Paul Fussell, BAD: Or the Dumbing of America (New York:
Summit Books, 1991). "Europe's Open Future," The Economist, 22
February 1992, p. 47. "European Immigration," Christian Science
Monitor, August 1991, p. 22. Richard Bernstein, Fragile Glory: A
Portrait of France and the French (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p.
144. Forsurvey,seeCharlesMurray,LosingGround(NewYork:BasicBooks),
1984.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PETER DUIGNAN took his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Stanford University
and lectured for three years there before joining the Hoover
Institution in 1960. He is now Lillick Curator and senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution, where he directs a program of European studies.
He has been awarded Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller fellowships,
was a visiting scholar at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and atJesus
College, Cambridge, and was elected a member of the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, for 1987. He is general editor of Western
European Studies and has coedited Politics in Western Europe in that
series. He has written, with L. H. Gann, The Rebirth oftheWest:
TheAmericanieationoftheDemocraticWorld, 1945-1958 (1991) and,
with L. H. Gann, the forthcoming The U.S . and the New Europe,
19451993 (Blackwell Publisher).
LEwls H. GANN is a senior fellow and Western European curator at the
Hoover Institution. He is a historian, author, coauthor, or coeditor of
some thirty published works, the most recent of which is The Rebirth
of the West: The Americanieation of the Democratic World, 1945-
1958 ( I 99 I ), with Peter Duignan. Gann is a former Domus Scholar of
Balliol College, Oxford, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
His past posts include visiting appointments at St. Antony's College,
Oxford, the Historische Kommission zu Berline, the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, and Regensburg University, Germany.
------------------------------------------
Matthew E. Jerde
ri088146@udlapvms.pue.udlap.mx
Universidad de las Americas - Puebla
Departamento de Relaciones Internacionales
------------------------------------------