Foreign Opinions About America

British thinker Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of 1922 American society came up and this report is just one example. On a speaking tour in the United States, the Cambridge Professor opined that

love of truth [is] obscured in America by commercialism of which pragmatism is the philosophical expression; and love of our neighbor kept in fetters by Puritan morality.

He would have none of the thinking that America’s main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by wounded France and poor little Belgium but was rather an exercise in American self-interest.

More harsh words for Uncle Sam are found in some Brazilian journals, such as the JOURNAL DO PAIZ, which observes:

Happenings like the Negro massacre at Chicago in 1919 are still fresh in our minds; nor must we forget that at the time mentioned many in this country advocated a boycott on all American goods to serve as a protest and a warning to the Unites States.

Click here if you would like to read about the American race riots of 1919.

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.

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.

The author of this piece interviews the poet Robert Nichols (1893 – 1944) and finds the writer was convinced that the differences between the two peoples rests in their understanding of the idea of freedom.