Here is a book review from the mid-war period covering The American by historian James Truslow Adams (1878 – 1949). Adams attempts to tackle the age old question as to why Americans are different from everyone else. The reviewer quotes the observations of Crèvecoeur, among others, before delving into the meat of Adams study.
“A very angry Canadian firebrand hurls some painful truths at the smug belief we have in our own greatness.”
This gag concerns itself with another kind of American Expeditionary Force; when Pershing’s Doughboys left, they were replaced by the American tourists. The U.S. had had invented a new category of tourist that the world had never seen before, and they must have been a site to behold: middle class tourists.
There is another article on this site (click here) that states a popular belief held by the Europeans of 1919 that American men were all clean shaven, tended to sport gold teeth, and were most easily recognized by their big tortoise shell glasses (a strikingly accurate description of this site’s editor!); however, this is the first visual manifestation of this caricature that we could find. This Punch cartoonist did not simply believe that this was a fitting description of the white guys, but black guys, too -and the white women as well; an entire nation resembling Harold Lloyd.
Click here to read about Punch Magazine.
This article was penned in 1912 by a Mexican editorial writer who shared his countryman’s deep distrust of American motives and believed that the United States is the natural enemy of Mexico:
No other people can have less friendship for this hostile neighbor than the Mexicans.
Envy and admiration as well as ridicule and praise are found in the many articles the European press devoted to this country. Our big business astonishes them, our so-called lack of culture inspires thinly veiled contempt, while our homicide records lead some rather irascible English critics to speak of the United States as ‘the Land of Liberty – for the murderer.’
Yet for all their contempt there was one thing they couldn’t live without: click here to read an article about how much the Europeans loved American silent comedies.
The very funny Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869 – 1944) diagnosed many of the character traits that make Americans what they are. Although written eighty years ago, many of these observations are still true to this day:
Americans are a queer people: they can’t read.
They have more schools, and better schools, and spend more money on schools and colleges than all of Europe.
But they can’t read.
They print more books in one year than the French print in ten.
But they can’t read.
They cover their country with 100,000 tons of Sunday newspapers every week.
But they don’t read them.
They’re too busy. They use them for fires and to make more paper with.
They buy eagerly thousands of new novels at two dollars each. But they only read page one…
But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn; don’t need to; never did need to.
That is their salvation.
Pio Ballesteros, Proud Spaniard, wrote this editorial in a 1910 issue of Espanña Moderna in which he lamented the long-favored practice of viewing the United States as the elder sister of the Latin-American republics and ignoring a strong sensation that all Spanish-speaking people are kin and should be united against the Anglo-Saxons.
H.L. Mencken rarely passed up an opportunity to impugn the sincerity of his fellow Americans; in this small piece he expressed his doubt as to whether they really embraced the concept of full equality as it was written in the constitution.
The United States has always viewed the other American countries…with an invincible disdain – a disdain that could not remain a secret to the Young Latins, since it cannot be readily concealed; or, to speak more exactly it has never regarded the nations of Spanish and Portuguese origin as really it’s equal.
George Jean Nathan (1882 – 1958) and H.L. Mencken 
-Read an Article About the First World War and the Gratitude of France-
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.
What our most famous literary expatriate really thought of her country.
Attached is a review of The Imperial Dollar
by Hiram Motherwell.
Motherwell wrote the book in 1929 not simply to impress his peers but also to provide them with an outline that illustrated America’s progress in achieving world domination. The author examined subjects such as why America alone, of all the nations on earth, tended to believe itself to be a non-imperialistic one.
Attached is a review of The Imperial Dollar
by Hiram Motherwell.
Motherwell wrote the book in 1929 not simply to impress his peers but also to provide them with an outline that illustrated America’s progress in achieving world domination. The author examined subjects such as why America alone, of all the nations on earth, tended to believe itself to be a non-imperialistic one.
Attached is a review of The Imperial Dollar
by Hiram Motherwell.
Motherwell wrote the book in 1929 not simply to impress his peers but also to provide them with an outline that illustrated America’s progress in achieving world domination. The author examined subjects such as why America alone, of all the nations on earth, tended to believe itself to be a non-imperialistic one.
