Foreign Opinions About America

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.

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.

Americans Observed…(Yank Magazine, 1945)

While in the process of drawing up the charter for the United Nations, several foreign dignitaries took time out to look around at the citizens of San Francisco and share their candid observations with the editors of YANK MAGAZINE as to what an American is.


During the summer of 1938 the Nazis allowed one of their photo journalists out of the Fatherland to wander the highways and byways of the United States. This is what he saw…

French Amazement at American Esteem for Lafayette
(Current Opinion, 1922)

France has discovered Lafayette in this age only because America never forgot him


This article reports that the Marquis de Lafayettestyle=border:none (Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, 1757-1834), who seemed heaven-sent when he appeared in Philadelphia in order to aid the Americans in their revolt against the British, had been largely forgotten by the French in the Twentieth Century. Indeed, the French were baffled to hear his name invoked as often as it was during the period of America’s participation in the Great War. It was said that some disgruntled wit in the A.E.F. woke up one morning in the trenches and mumbled: Alright, we paid Lafayette back; now what other Frog son-of-a-bitch do we owe? Oddly, there is no mention made whatever of that unique trait so common to the Homo Americanus- selective memory: during the 1870 German invasion of France there seemed to have been no one who recalled Lafayette’s name at all.

American Dominance in Pop-Culture
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

The editors of Stage magazine were dumbfounded when they considered that just ten years after audiences got an earful from the first sound movies, the most consistent characteristic to have been maintained throughout that decade was the box-office dominance of American movie stars, directors and writers. After naming the most prominent of 1930s U.S. movie stars the author declares with certainty that this could not have been an accident.

And the Movies: all them stories, all them fables, all them beautiful women,all them amazing children: Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Jane Withers, Jackie Searl,and the others. Even Europe in the movies is America. Even Charlie Chan is American. Even Mr. Moto is American. Even war in the movies is American, instead of neurotic. And the newsreels: the style of them,the energy and comedy of them: the imitativeness, the invention, and absurdity of them for the sake of comedy. America made these entertainers,and now, very naturally, they are making America.

Scroll to Top