Foreign Opinions About America

Salty Opinions from a Frenchman (Literary Digest, 1920)

Attached are the rantings of one Frenchman on the matter of American gullibility, solipsism and naive stupidity. While recognizing an innate sense of optimism that seemed natural to Americans, the Gaul also believed that within the American culture the seed of tyranny had been planted and would one day bloom.

And in this new and vigorous country they are going to make nationalism a great religion, the supreme intellectual and social motive. This means Prussianizing, pure and simple.

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Things ‘Americain’ in France (Literary Digest, 1927)

Whether for good or for ill, the American people have left their thumb print on much of the French language – the liberal sprinkling of the adjective Americain was ever present in 1927, as it is today. This article seeks to explain the meanings and origins of such French expressions as Oncle D’Amerique or Homard a l’Americaine -among other assorted phrases inspired by the free and the brave.

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American Womanhood Slandered (Review of Reviews, 1910)

Attached is a 1910 article that rambles on for two columns and offers the reader nothing but nasty, vile insulting remarks regarding the character and appearance of American women. The article lays bare the low opinions conceived by an assortment of well-traveled, high-born, hot-headed-Hindus from way-down-East-India-way. AND the abuse of American women and their free press wasn’t enough for them; they had to drag American men into their tirade as well:

The women of your big, vast, young country, I confess, disappoint me…they are less chic, they are tactless, they are ignorant…I understand that some American women make the proposal of marriage. That I do not doubt after watching them make themselves ‘agreeable’ to a man at dinner. I am not surprised that American men do not make love well. The women save them the trouble.

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The British View of Religious America (Literary Digest, 1913)

…Christianity in America is divided into two camps. The one is orthodox. It’s orthodoxy is apt to degenerate into the senile attachment to the letter of Scripture…There is a lack of mental breadth, of intellectual enlightenment, about the members of this school which is a little disheartening to one who is in agreement with them on the central matters…The other school seems to have sacrificed almost everything which makes Christianity distinct from a temporary philosophy. It’s members have the bad habit of preaching eugenics or sociology in place of the Gospel. They appear to be afraid of the great epistles and the nobler passages of the Gospels, and are apt to speak in terms which would suggest that there was nothing distinctive in Christianity which can make it an absolute and universal faith.

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