If there used to be nothing more ludicrous than the English people in one of its periodic fits of morality, as Macaulay put it, these have been replaced in this century by the spectacle of the American people—at least a vocal section of it—in one of its periodic fits of self-mortification. If not ludicrous, at any rate, they are vacant; they seem to have no intention; when they are over, they leave no issue. As Philip Guedalla, then one of the liveliest British commenators on the contemporary scene, wrote in 1933: “The fierce alacrity with which American citizens denounce their institutions without the slightest effort to improve them is a perennial surprise.” More than intermittently it is also a bore.

I am not speaking of the steady criticism that any nation—and in particular its intellectuals—ought to maintain of its own society, but of a virulence of tone—a kind of bile—which seems to spring from self-doubt into self-hate. In the late 1960's, a British journalist, Ferdinand Mount, who was visiting the United States, said: “You can't stop people hating themselves if that is their preferred choice. . . . [But] even the strain of the Vietnam war does not explain why, for the first time, this cyclically recurrent self-doubt should have weakened the universality of belief in the American ideal.” Well, he was wrong in one respect, of course: it was not the first time that the universality of this belief had been eroded. But it is true that, during the late 1960's and to some extent since then, whatever the provocations, the repulsion of many Americans from their own country and its total experience has been not merely virulent, not only monotonous, but itself a kind of sickness, which in turn needs diagnosis.

The capacity of Americans for self-criticism has often been noted by outsiders. “Nowhere else is national self-criticism practiced with a severity so relentless and a mockery so bitter,” wrote L. P. Jacks in 1933. “Thoughtful people are to be met with all over the country whose minds seems to be constantly exercised in the diagnosis of the national disease.” Cyril Connolly said twenty years later: “At a time when the American way, backed by American resources, has made the country into the greatest power the world has known, there has never been more doubting and questioning of the purpose of the American process; the higher up one goes the more searching becomes the self-criticism, the deeper the thirst for a valid mystique of humanity.” Twenty years later still, in Love-Hate Relations, Stephen Spender has talked of “that passionate hatred of their own country which sometimes affects the most cultivated (and perhaps deeply patriotic) Americans.” And the quotations could be multiplied.

What does it all signify? I was about to say that there have been times when French writers have been as uniformly and virulently critical of France as American writers of their own country, but as one begins to write the sentence, one checks it. Because there is no way in which the French can in this manner be critical of France. France is too old, it has already been too many things, its defeats have been as numerous as its victories, its culture has been too varied and its society too local, too many harvests (as Marc Bloch put it) have been lifted from its soil, for a French writer to be anti-French in the way in which an American writer is able to be anti-American. The bitterness of French intellectual life during the Algerian war (when for a time I was reporting from both France and Algeria) was not anti-France in the same way in which American intellectual life was so bitterly anti-America—as if indeed it was Amerika—during the Vietnam war.

But to the American, his country is so self-contained in space and in time that he can think of it—it sometimes seems, only think of it—as one. There it is, bounded by its oceans, separated from Europe and Asia and Africa, all of which are joined: from what was conceived to be the Orbis Terrarum of the Old World. Its birthday is known—when it was conceived, when it was born—as no great country of Europe has a birthday; in fact, it is the only great country in the world that has a birth certificate. Everything that has happened to it, that now happens, that yet will happen, can therefore be understood as happening in this unit of space, this unit of time. Everything can be shown to have led from there to here, from then to now, so that the whole historical experience of the country can be indiscriminately condemned. If there is sin, it is original sin; if a cause, an original cause; and so it can be argued, as it in fact has been argued, that from Salem the road led directly and inevitably to Saigon.

The criticism of his own country by the American can therefore take two forms that are not so available, and in most cases not available at all, to others. He can express his bitterness that the performance of America has not fulfilled its promise—that it has not done what it was created to do, or become what it was bidden to be—or, if that still leaves the possibility of too much hope, he can reach back from some present evil and say that there, in the beginning, was the precursor of this sinfulness: we persecuted witches, we killed Indians, we raped the land, we enslaved Negroes, we shot Wobblies, we assassinated Presidents, and so—this the lever for the virulence—we bombed peasants, and there is no health in us.

Of course, there is no “and so”; history is not like that, not even American history. As far as I know—and I am ready to trust my knowledge on this—no one in France thought of tracing the savageries of the Algerian war to Joan of Arc or the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and no one in Britain imagined that the Suez adventure was the result of a ferocious streak in the British character which has been there since Queen Boadicea attached knives to the wheels of her chariots to cut the Roman legionaries off at the knees, which after all was not exactly cricket. But to the American anti-American—who makes the historical country itself the target of his complaints—this confusion of past and present is necessary. The anti-American lives outside his country's present, in a myth of its past; and from this myth, he condemns what ought to be the numerous possibilities of its future to be those only of repetition, a curse that is never to be lifted.

This is not criticism of one's society, in fact it prohibits just and effective criticism; it is a tremor in the mind of the country, which is never stilled and at times of difficulty can send a shock through the whole land. One reason why it can have this effect is that anti-Americanism in America (and this is to some extent, as we will see, true also of it abroad) is in some of its aspects a reflection of Americanism. It is as agitated by the symbols and myths and metaphors of the “American experience” as others, the Lions or the DAR or the Kiwanis, are consoled by them. Both seem tempted to reduce the whole of American history to a metaphor that will comprehend it all, then personally to be experienced—one might even say appropriated—by them; its story, their story.

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Every American in each generation, it appears, must regard himself as responsible for all that his society has done, does, and will do; and in this manner the anti-American in America is able to argue that because America—i.e., he—enslaved the Negroes, it was inevitable that he—i.e., America—shot Martin Luther King. In fact, American history seems often to be conceived as a kind of psychiatric case history, doomed to be repeated in every American in each generation; as if the United States must continually pass through Erik Erikson's “Eight Stages of Man,” constantly being returned to the first stage, “Basic Trust vs. Basic Mistrust,” from there to repeat its journey.

No American alive today enslaved the Negroes, or was a slaveholder, just as no Englishman alive today carried on the slave trade with all the lust and greed that made Britain in its time the greatest slaving nation in the world. Yet, whereas no Englishman today feels any guilt or other responsibility for the deeds of his ancestors, the American is apparently expected to go on—and on—crying mea culpa for every misdeed that has been performed in his land since Christopher Newport turned his three ships into the James River almost four hundred years ago. One must be cautious of the Marxist assertion that one cannot blame the slaveholder because he was acting only as a slaveholder must in a slaveholding society. Its traps may be seen most recently in E. H. Carr's notorious work, What Is History?, in which his serious polemical purpose seems to be to exonerate each and every Bolshevik who performed any atrocity. Nevertheless, the Marxist correction is needed in America if its historical society is to be perceived as existing and developing in historical time.

To take another example, a favorite one with the anti-American: it simply is not true that America is a more violent society than others. William R. Brock, one of the best of British scholars in American studies—they are rare birds, but there are such people—has written, with the past decade in mind:

It is frequently said that the American people are a violent people, and this is stated as though it explains much. . . . A candid examination may throw doubt on these beliefs and it is doubtful whether the American character is specially prone to violence; indeed the long record of peaceful settlement and growth, together with an almost superstitious reverence for the law and constitutions, might suggest the opposite. It is true that Americans have often been singularly negligent in their provisions for law enforcement; but this is to say that government failed, not that people were abnormally addicted to violence. . . . The American tradition of violence is thus a convention rather than a historical truth.

I do not understand how any serious person could want to change even an inflection in those careful words. Yet the fact is that Rap Brown had only to say, “Violence is necessary and it's as American as cherry pie,” for the myth to be given an almost sacral significance, which at times has seemed to constitute the whole of the scripture of the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.

It is worth going back a few years to the introduction which that great but still perverse historian, Richard Hofstadter, wrote in 1970 to a “documentary history” of American Violence. Again and again, he faces the fact that violence in America has not, in comparison with other societies, past and present, been exceptional; again and again, he must reach to some argument to prove that nevertheless it has been phenomenal. His almost opening words reveal his difficulty: “The United States, it has been said, has a history but not a tradition of domestic violence.” What do the words “a history” mean in that sentence? Nothing that merits them. There have just been a collection of violent deeds which have no historical connection. The “documents” in the “documentary history” should not have been gathered into one volume; they have no thematic relevance to each other.

But there's the rub. Theme. . . . Theme. . . . Theme. American history must be shown to have a theme, for better (Americanism) or for worse (anti-Americanism). That there was once slave-holding in some of the states means that the white can never deal justly with the black; that Bacon rebelled in 1676 means that someone must raise a gun to a President in 1976; that someone cut down a few trees to build a log cabin in Jamestown means that Americans are doomed always to rape their landscape. At its most strenuous but also its most irritating, this feeling of personal guilt for the historical past, even for historical accident, is to be found in the poetry of Robert Lowell, from For the Union Dead right through to Notebooks, the series of poems he wrote during 1967-68. He must be confessional even about his ancestors, his country's past; and the fact that he often reaches, for his symbols, beyond the American experience to Europe only compounds the sense of imprisonment in a theme. “I sat in the sunset / shade of their Bastille, the Pentagon, / nursing leg- and arch-cramps”—one almost has the violent feeling in response that it was his mind that had the cramps. The very fact that he had to spell out the symbol, “Bastille=Pentagon,” demonstrates its weakness, and one may add that the analogy is a frivolous diminishment of the symbolic significance. Of the Bastille in European history.

There is something very tiring in so often being asked to think of a rather ordinary demonstration in front of the Department of Defense in terms of Robert Lowell's strained feet or Norman Mailer's strained digestion. Yet this is very American, and therefore it is very anti-American. One is always there in America, usually in both roles: always Indian and Cowboy, in a way in which one is not Saxon and Norman in England, or Cavalier and Roundhead. One is always role-playing, always mythical, always the Whale, or Ahab, or Ishmael, or Melville, or even the Sea itself. One remembers Mary McCarthy's request some years ago that literature should return from the pole of myth to the pole of journalism; yet in her own journalism—on Vietnam, for example—she resorts to myth. She is often very journalistic in her fiction; in her journalism she gets on the back of that Whale.

Another British scholar in American studies, Marcus Cunliffe, has put it well, not an original point, but a point stated with an unnervous simplicity:

For some observers the American Dream has been the American Nightmare. In either case it has supplied an extraordinary drama (or melodrama) peopled with scouts and trappers, Yankees and Cavaliers, cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and badmen, Huck Finns and Nigger Jims, Abe Lincolns and Huey Longs, preachers and robber barons, do-gooders and con-men, Al Capones and J. Edgar Hoovers, hobos and work-bosses, loners and Babbitts. No other nation has produced so rich a cast of symbolic characters for modern times. There are South American epics in prose and poetry celebrating the heroic gaucho. For all I know they are finer than anything written about the United States. But they have not made a mark on the world's imagination. Perhaps Canadian history is full of stories waiting to be told. But I suspect they would require too many footnotes to get much beyond the walls of academe. The Mounties are picturesque, yet too trim and decent to linger in one's fantasies. Territorially, Canada and Brazil are as big as the United States, but their historical folklore has been far smaller.

He is absolutely right; and the adversary characters that he lists are again a reflection of the persistent intertwining of Americanism with anti-Americanism. Yet it is the fact that they are mythical—characters in “drama” or “melodrama”—and not (even when they are actual persons) historical or journalistic, that is at the core of it all.

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But let us look overseas, using the British example as an instruction, not merely because it is the one with which I am most familiar, but because the very closeness of the English connection with American history tells its own fruitful tale.

The most expected ingredient in anti-Americanism abroad has been a response of the older nations to their declining power, and the passing of that power, in the case of the British, to their “daughter,” to their “son,” or to “Jonathan,” as they used rather disdainfully to call the United States in the 19th century. “The dislike of America which has grown up in England,” wrote Bertrand Russell in 1927, “is due to the fact that world empire has now passed from Lombard Street to Wall Street. The British navy, it is true, is still nominally ours, but we dare not employ it in any way displeasing to Washingon.” Some twenty years later, in 1949, Isaiah Berlin said that “British irritation with America . . . goes beyond the norm to be expected of a people so naturally reluctant to recognize a shift in world balance as we obviously are.” And he added: “It is an irritation which arises partly from a lack of historical imagination, which is a faculty born of the buffetings of fortune, from which this island has long been mercifully preserved.”

More recently, Donald Davie, a British literary critic, has translated these political comments into a cultural comment: “It is now British culture which is haunted by the fear that it is only a colonial culture, a dependency of the U.S. . . . As we find them in British intellectual life, pro-Americanism and anti-Americanism are alike symptoms of sickness, of a failure of nerve, a loss of conviction in ourselves and our past.” But the British case, precisely because of the exceptional character of the relationship between the two countries, itself largely the result of their common language, can be instructive of more than itself. The “Love-Hate Relations” in the title of Stephen Spender's book are of considerable subtlety, and they extend beyond English and American literature.¹

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It is important, if one is to understand the meaning of American power, to understand the meaning for other nations of the decline of their own power. The first outburst of anti-Americanism in Britain after the cooperation during World War II occurred between the end of that war and the fiasco of the British adventure at Suez. The decline of British power and influence was being sharply felt even before the steepness of that decline was finally revealed in the Middle East. It was not only irksome to find that Britain was increasingly unable to rule its empire effectively; it was even more irksome to find that the United States had increasingly the power and especially the influence to make the continuation of that rule even more difficult.

The first and most long-lasting of all the occasions for such irritation and even bitterness had, of course, been Britain's handling of the Irish question. The English historian, J. A. Froude, although himself a critic of English rule in Ireland, felt it his duty to go to the United States in 1872 and try to counter the propaganda there of the Irish nationalists. At that time, the Irish Americans were to the English the same bogey as were the American Jews, later on, during Britain's “troubles” in Palestine; and with a high sense of responsibility, which nothing ever diminished in him, Froude set out solemnly on his mission. “I go like an Arab of the desert,” he wrote in a letter before his departure; “my hand will be against everyone, and therefore everyman's hand will be against me . . . my hope will be, like St. Paul's, to fling some word or words among them which will set them by the ears among themselves.” After he had given some of his lectures, he wrote home: “The Irish are furious. . . . The American Irish are mad.” He believed that his life was in danger.

As late as 1937, Rudyard Kipling wrote of his years in America at the end of the 19th century: “When the [American] people looked, which was seldom, outside their own borders, England was still the dark and dreadful enemy to be feared and guarded against. The Irish, whose creed is Hate; the history books in schools; the Orators; the eminent Senators; and above all, the Press; saw to that.” There was an echo of this in the fierceness and virtual unanimity of the British reaction a few years ago when Edward Kennedy criticized the English handling of the Irish question today, even though the British at the time were free with their criticisms, not only of American intervention in Vietnam, but also of America's handling of its own racial problems.

A few years later, the Irish question was replaced by the Indian question. India was becoming difficult to rule, the Americans made it no easier, and again the English traveler to America tried gamely to keep his end up. Harold Nicolson in 1930 at last lost his patience in Dayton, Ohio, when a woman in the audience asked the inevitable question about the “fate of the poor Indians,” to which up till then he had given a moderate and civil reply, but this time answered: “Which Indians?—yours or ours? You must realize that the two problems are distinct. For whereas we educated and multiplied our Indians, you practically exterminated yours. It would be very difficult for us at this date to adopt the solution which has proved so successful in your country and to confine the aborigines of India to reserves.” And this voice was to remain the same as the Indian question was replaced by the Palestine question, the Palestine question by the Suez question, and the Suez question by the question of the African colonies.

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Always the Americans lectured the British, and it is hardly surprising that, in the past quarter of a century, some Englishmen and, perhaps even more, some Frenchmen have enjoyed the fact that the roles have been reversed: that it is now America that must act, and Britain and Europe that can criticize. Even sympathy for the Americans can take the patronizing form of saying that it is now their turn to take it on the chin. During the period of its supremacy, says Harold Macmillan, “Britain was hated, reviled, and intrigued against in all the chancelleries of Europe and outside. Now the torch has passed largely into American hands. Now they in turn are reapers of the same harvest. That is the ‘price of admiralty.’” Moreover, there is a counterpoint to this, evident since the collapse of the American position in Vietnam: the persistent doubt whether the United States will be willing to bear that price in the defense of Europe; in particular, the constant reproach of the English against the Americans, that they will not now manfully bear the odium that once attached to “perfidious Albion,” as it kept the peace of the world in the Pax Britannica.

All of this may seem obvious. But there is a coda to it that makes the question more interesting. Froude had doubts whether America would prove to be the hoped-for savior of civilization, because the Anglo-American spirit there was being overwhelmed by the mass immigration from other parts of Europe, a view which was forcibly argued in 1868 by the erratically visionary statesman, Charles Wentworth Dilke:

While the Celtic men are pouring into New York and Boston, the New Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. They are not dying. . . . They are going West. . . .

The Saxons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the Spaniards have gone from Mexico. The Irish are beating down the English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. . . .

The matter is grave enough already. Ten years ago, the third and fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia, were as English as London: the one is Irish now; the other all but German. Not that the Quaker city will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too, are going out upon the land; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues English: a fierce and easily-aroused people will throng the cities, while the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our relations with America are matters of small moment by the side of the one great question: Who are the Americans to be?

The obvious answer, and one that was to become even more clear during the next forty years of the immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, was that the Americans were not going to be Englishmen, and with that a dream faded.

By the 1870's, Britain was beginning to feel its weakness in the face of the rising power of Germany as well as of the United States, and it was the English and not the Americans who then began to speak urgently of a special relationship. “Once for all,” proclaimed Froude in New York, “I insist that England and America do not stand to one another as foreign nations: foreign in the sense that France or Russia is foreign to us both. Politically separate we may be, but we cannot shake off our relationship. . . . We may quarrel, and when we quarrel it will be with the peculiar bitterness which distinguishes family disputes. But the very acrimony is itself an evidence of the closeness of the tie which binds us.” From then on this was to be one of the main English themes, and the foundation of English policy. The English let slip no opportunity of demonstrating their sympathy with the United States: there was an astonishing outburst of it at the death of James Garfield, when the editor of the Contemporary Review wrote of the “wholly unobstructed play of the natural sympathies of kinship between the two English-speaking peoples”; and from then on the theme and the hope were steadily elaborated: that Britain might continue to “rule” the world, as one of the two leaders of the Anglo-Saxon race, in alliance and even in federation with America.

This was the significance of the emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon race, even at the very moment at which the mass immigration was gathering. “They [the United States] are a powerful and generous nation,” said Joseph Chamberlain in 1898. “They speak our language, they are bred of our race. . . . And I will even go so far as to say that, terrible as war may be, even war itself would be cheaply purchased if in a great and noble cause the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon alliance.” He did not live to see his hope terribly realized in the trenches of World War I.

The Americans were surprised and delighted at the unanimous support which the English people gave them in the Spanish-American war, but the British public mind had been moving rapidly from the awareness of Britain's increasing weakness to the need for an American alliance. In a letter in 1898, Edward Dowden was explicit: “My sympathies are rather with the country of Mark Twain than with that of Cervantes—partly, I fear, because it seems to be for the advantage of England to draw close to the United States.”

The two obvious examples of this alliance were the Anglo-American cooperation in the two world wars, especially in World War II, because Britain's solitary position after the collapse of France made it the only Western ally of America—the alliance with Russia was of a very different nature—in a way in which it had not been in World War I. And from this cooperation the legend of the “special relationship” was perpetuated until Suez. “It is a marriage,” said Isaiah Berlin, as late as 1949, even after the collapse of British power in the Eastern Mediterranean, “from which, in the view of one of the partners at least—the Americans—there is no hope, or fear, of ultimate divorce. The marriage may at times be unhappy, but it cannot be annulled without destroying both partners equally.” But this was wishful thinking, soon to be exposed by John Foster Dulles.²

But what one must hold on to in all this—for it is not simply a story, instructive as it is, of what a shift in the balance of power can mean to once great nations which are losing their advantage—is the troubled question of Dilke a century ago: “Who are the Americans to be?” He may have put it in terms of the “Anglo-Saxon” race, but it is a question that the Old World keeps putting about—and to—the New World, believing that it really is new. One can hear it, not only from old Europe, but from old Russia; from old China, and the whole of old Asia; even from old Africa: from all the Orbis Terrarum of the Old World, wondering what this New World yet will be, fearing and hoping at the same time, anxious but still looking to be saved.

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For the pro-Americanism and the anti-Americanism in these attitudes are again interwoven. The problem was described well more than twenty years ago in an article in Encounter by Peregrine Worsthorne, who had by that time been a British correspondent in America during the period of anti-American feeling in the early 1950's. He pointed out that the United States had in the past been widely regarded as the European conscience. It had ideals which Europe, if it had ever possessed them, had long since had to sacrifice; it could afford to have ideals'—its remoteness and its isolation, to say nothing of its own ideology and experience, meant that it could be a teacher and an exemplar to the Old World, however unwilling the Europeans were to be obedient pupils.

Worsthorne was right in this. Not every Englishman has felt as certain and enthusiastic as John Bright, but he was uttering a general conviction and hope, when he wrote to John Cobden in September 1860:

What a glorious isolation is that of the United States. Until we adopt this principle, I see no security for us or for Europe—for until then, every disturbance in Europe is made the pretext for a greater expenditure here, and we are constantly in a state of preparation to plunge into the chaos of any Continental entanglement.

The example of America, even without its exertions, might yet save the world. “To any intelligent European who comes to the United States fresh from the distractions, despairs, and inanities of the Old World,” wrote Bertrand Russell around 1938, “it is evident that the future of civilization and the chief possibility of hope for mankind is to be found in America.” In spite of every disappointment, the hope always returns, for, if one cannot look to America for that hope, where on earth may it be found?

But as Worsthorne pointed out in his Encounter article:

Since the Second World War . . . [the United States] has become the European shield instead of the European conscience. The two functions are mutually incompatible. The responsibilities of the United States for the defense of the free world inevitably tend to weaken her potency as the symbol and touchstone of political liberty, and her role as the conscience of Europe inevitably tends to weaken the effectiveness of the shield.

He went on to make the point that Europe has always expected of the United States an exceptional standard of behavior:

For some reason, Europe accepts the idea that America is a country with a difference, from whom it is reasonable to demand an exceptionally altruistic standard of behavior. It feels perfectly justified in pouring obloquy on shortcomings from the ideal; and alas, perhaps inevitably, it seems to enjoy every example of a fall from grace which contemporary America provides.

This is why there is an edge to every other country's criticisms of the United States and its conduct, which is not to be found in the criticism of any other country. The hope that it will be different is there, as William Clarke wrote in 1881:

The standing armies, the monarchies, the aristocracies, the huge debts, the crushing taxation, the old inveterate abuses, which flourish in Europe, can take no root in the New World. The continent of America is consecrated to simple humanity, and its institutions exist for the progress and happiness of the whole people.

But there now are the standing armies of America; there now is something that, from time to time, looks very like a monarchy; there now is a permitted degree of inherited wealth that is creating some of the elements of an aristocracy; there now is taxation that is crushing: is that all, then, that it has come to, a repetition in the New World of the inveterate abuses of the Old?

The hope, and the anxiety that it will be disappointed—that there will be found in America as in Europe only fear and failure at the heart of the world—is one of the roots of anti-Americanism, making it again a phenomenon of its own, and giving it a peculiar acrimony. Is this last and best hope of mankind, this last new civilization, this final empire, only to go the way of all others? And there is in this form of anti-Americanism abroad something of the same unhistorical attitude to American history that is to be found in the anti-American within the United States. The idea that there is a manifest destiny for the United States to fulfill is not one that has been confined to the Americans, or that has taken only one form. Anti-Americanism is in this form a protest, not against Americanism, but against its apparent failure.

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But the ambivalence drives deeper than that. When the news of the Boston Massacre reached London in 1770, Horace Walpole said of America, even before it was a nation, “I have many visions about that country”; and he wrote six months before the Declaration of Independence: “Europe is very worn out. It is America's turn to be fertile of genius.” When he visited the United States in 1853, W. M. Thackeray wrote to Lady Stanley: “Here is the future: here is the great English empire to be when the Gauls and Cossacks have trampled on our freedom.” A little later, Matthew Arnold said: “I speak with more than respect, with warm interest, of a great nation of English blood, and with which, in large measure, rests the future of the world.” Twenty years later still, Herbert Spencer was unreserved: “It may, I think, be concluded that, both because of its size and the heterogeneity of its components, the American nation will be a long time in evolving its ultimate form, but that its ultimate form will be high. . . . I think that whatever difficulties they may have to surmount, and whatever tribulations they may have to pass through, the Americans may reasonably look forward to a time when they will have produced a civilization grander than any the world has known.”

The voices are powerful, and their hope confident. Yet the idea has also persisted—even though, as Worsthorne said, “American cultural dominance is nearly complete”—that the United States may not really be civilized, that it cannot really be trusted with either its cultural inheritance from Europe, or even its own new culture, that “the spirit cannot live there,” as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson once put it in a letter to E. M. Forster; in short, that the Americans are today the Romans—no one seems to deny that—to whom the English and Europeans are the Greeks.

Harold Macmillan was always fond of drawing this parallel—he would speak of John Kennedy as if he were some upstart Roman emperor who had been thrust to power by his legions in a remote province—and he used to utter this sentiment, not only with a world-weariness that suggested that European and English culture had all the time in the world to civilize the New World, but as if the analogy were his own invention. Yet it has often been used. In 1913, Rupert Brooke wrote to Edward Marsh from San Francisco: “I can't for the life of me help moving about like a metropolitan among rustics, or an Athenian in Thrace. Their wide-mouthed awe at England is so touching—they really are merely a colony of ours still. That they should be speaking to a man who knows Lowes Dickinson, who has met Galsworthy, who once saw Belloc plain!” He might have been speaking as a representative of the Hellenistic civilization that for so long dominated the Roman world; as either Diogenes or Carneades or Critolaus, the three Greek philosophers who went to Rome from Athens in 155 B.C.E.

In 1929, another English writer, W. M. Lloyd, said: “Greece, as we know, made a captive of her conquerors, and there is hope that European culture will achieve a like triumph.” A few days before the assassination of John Kennedy, T. H. White, who delighted in the variety and energy of American life, could nevertheless imagine the Roman parallel with great elaboration:

America is a bit like ancient Rome. She has her Senators and Presidents from families of power and riches. Roosevelts and Kennedys might just as well be Claudians and Aurelians. We are their cultivated Greeks, they are our powerful Romans. . . .

I foresee a time when the President of the United States will be as powerful and vicious as Caligula. We are in Republican Rome at present, the Emperors of America have yet to seize power. . . .

Our first step will have to be an Augustan. Kennedy, a venerable statesman who has completed his seventh term of office and preserved the nation from the atomic bomb, will reluctantly accept the title of Father of his Country. Intrigue, regicide, and absolute power will set in. It won't be far after that to reach Nero Capone, say a hundred and fifty years from now.

“The humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime,” wrote John Keats to his brother and sister-in-law (emigrants to America) in 1818. To Ruskin, America was only an imitator: “England taught the Americans all they have of speech or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds.” Lowes Dickinson thought that America was laying the foundations of a city, but “my interest is in the songs that are one day to be sung in it—when? Generations hence, if ever.” And so the voices in the chorus could be multiplied into this century.

Cyril Connolly was one of the first to question the parallel with Greece and Rome:

Now I am afraid it is only in America that the European races may grow to the full moral and mental stature of which they are capable. We are fond of making a wrong historical analogy: we talk of Europe which is about to be taken over by America as if it were Greece about to be conquered by Rome or Macedonia, in order to make the point that, with out superior civilization, we shall civilize our conquerors. But I am more inclined to see Washington as Byzantium. Washington may preserve the culture of the West for 1,000 years. . . . We are in no position to resist or blame. . . . The fallen Sampson can only exclaim to the American Delilah in Milton's words: I led the way, bitter reproach, but true; / I to myself was false, ere thou to me.

Even for the anti-American, there is perhaps more consolation in this than there at first seems, since recent scholarship and reinterpretations have made the Byzantine achievement seem much more considerable and aesthetically much more brilliant in its own right than it was once thought to be.

But there is something deeper in all this than a mere feeling of the superiority of European civilization; and it helps to explain the uneasiness that remains even when American art and literature have proved their command. In 1925, at about the same time as Ortega y Gasset was making much the same point, Osbert Burdett wrote:

America is remarkable because there we find European human nature in the raw, namely, modern man as he is, apart from ancient traditions, ancestral customs, inherited memories, or a great past; transplanted to a soil in which his ancestors did not grow or live, or fight or die, but orphaned. The American is, thus, a civilized man without a civilization . . . uneasy till at last he, shall have re-fashioned, on foundations laid at last, the index by which Europe and Asia find their way through the labyrinth of human existence: a sense of attachment to the past arising from a long sojourn in one place.

There is in fact a persisting belief—not that America is young, that is not the point—but that there is some experience that it has not yet suffered as have other nations, and which may even be denied to it; and once again this is a link between anti-Americanism and Americanism, at home and abroad, a cause of anxiety about its ability to comprehend its own challenge and opportunities.

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That it has not suffered: that is the point made again and again. “America is only starting its history. It is only now that its trials, its dissensions, its conflicts are beginning,” wrote Ortega y Gasset in Revolt of the Masses seventy years after the Civil War. “America has not yet suffered. It is an illusion to think it can possess the power of command.” Matthew Arnold greeted the news of the assassination of Lincoln with an almost unbelievable outburst in a letter to his wife: “What tremendous news this is about Lincoln . . . this assassination brings into their history something of that dash of the tragic, romantic, and imaginative, which it has had so little of.” As one could expect, Carlyle was as dourly threatening as ever. “America,” he wrote in 1898, “. . . will have to crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestles with the Pythus and mud-demons, before it can become a habitation for the gods. America's battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowing though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it . . . she will have her own agony. . . .” The theme was even extended by Bertrand Russell to the character of American women, which he found more “frivolous, more superficial, more pusillanimous” than that of European women who “have gone through the experience of many years' voluntary endurance of torture, which has given a depth and a richness to their natures that your easy-going, pleasure-loving women cannot imagine.” It is the siren voice of the Old World at its most tempting.

Incredible as it may seem after the experiences of the past fifteen years, it can still be claimed that the United States has not yet suffered. At the bottom of many attitudes to America, there still lies the feeling that it shrugs or shuffles off its own agonies, that frivolously it even now engages in the Pursuit of Happiness, that it will not abandon its optimism, that it goes on believing that it can solve any problem, that the idea of Progress is not yet alien to it. But equally, when this notion is stood on its head—as in much of American literature in this century, and in the interpretations of American literature of the last century—as grotesque a myth can be sustained: as if a sense of tragedy must be forced into the American mind if it is to mature, as if the idea of original sin must be reinvented in America, as if it must be demonstrated that American history has been and will be like the history of the Old World, the nation forever torn in a conflict between the extremities of good and evil before it can find its soul; that, pray heaven, the road from Salem will lead to Saigon, that America may soon enjoy its decline, and pile its own ruins upon ruins as in Europe; and so be as blessed.

Whichever way one looks at it, one seems always to be standing at the pole of myth. The country is not allowed to be historical; the diurnal is not given the flavor of journalism; the attention to the quotidian—by which in fact the society from day to day survives—is diminished or rejected. Very little of what America has actually been or now actually is can be found reported in its literature. Even the history and journalism of and about America, as I have suggested, seem to slither all too easily into myth. One asks for bread, and is given a confection. A young teacher in American studies in Britain visited me not long ago, preparing to write something about American violence. With the help of a few “facts” from Time, he was constructing the whole of his thesis out of Poe, out of Whitman, out of Melville, and I could not help wondering why he did not throw in Cooper and Leatherstocking. But he is not to be blamed when this is how Americans themselves image their society. “Novels like Germinal and The Jungle are not to be despised,” Doris Lessing has said; and it is indeed true that if one wants to think about “violence in America,” The Jungle is still not a bad place to start. Neither are the streets of Ulster, where many more people have been killed than in all the street riots in America in the past decade.

One can watch the myths as they are manufactured. The revisionist history to which American historians are so addicted today is all too often only the replacement of one myth by another. If they are not careful, they will succeed in making the Tory Loyalists the heroes of the bicentennial. The treatment of the Indians in America is being taken out of its historical context, with no reference to what was done to the Maoris in New Zealand or the Aborigines in Australia, or for that matter in this century to the Kurds in Russia. It may be all very well to bury one's heart at Wounded Knee; it seems an unnecessary sacrifice of one's good sense to bury one's mind there. It is a left-wing English critic, T. R. Fyvel, who has written: “A truth for American radicals to face is that were the Indians still roaming from Wounded Knee across the prairies of America where the wheat-fields today [1973] extend, many millions of people in Asia and even in European Soviet Russia, would this year have gone hungry.” This may not excuse, but it does help to explain; and one may recall in this context the observation of Oscar Wilde that “English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization.”

What is more, that civilization is usually described only in material terms. The fact that this material progress has been inspired by two ideas—that men may act beneficently in their environment and their own circumstances, and that the benefits of this material progress can be made accessible to all—is ignored. The improvement of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, which has owed so much to the inspiration of America, is disparaged. Moreover, with this material progress there has been carried also the idea that culture might equally be made accessible to all. As soon as a mining town like Central City in Colorado was settled, it built an opera house. The rude miners of Leadville, 10,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains, invited Oscar Wilde very early to lecture them on “The Ethics of Art.” Even high culture was not presumed to be only for a minority, and this again has been an American influence on modern civilization.

The wish that America should suffer—more than in the harrowing early years in Jamestown? more than on the frontier of Massachusetts? more than Jonathan Edwards? more than Roger Williams? more than in the heroic endurance of the pioneers? more than in the Civil War? more than in the suffering of the immigrants? more than in the Depression? more than John Kennedy? more than Robert Kennedy? more than in Vietnam?—is in part the voice of the dying civilization of the Old World, which has wished to be saved by the New World—there is no doubt about that—but to preserve its own civilization, all that used to be understood as Christendom, and not to have to acknowledge that another civilization may have come into being.

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Much of our art and literature today is the art and literature of Europe in its decline; and one often wonders why the art and literature of America in this century has seemed so determined to follow its lead. Perhaps the most athletic worshipper of art in our time, Herbert Read, said that modern art “shares those elements of revolt and dissolution, of violence and fragmentation, of destruction and reconstruction, that give the political development of Europe in our time its intrinsic meaning.” That may well be true of Europe. Life is short, it cries at the end of its millennial supremacy, so let art be shorter, that it may correspond; broken and fragmented, let it mirror our shiftiness.

Yet in its decline, it does not trust because it cannot comprehend the new civilization that has grown outside the Orbis Terrarum. The future of the world lies with America—that has not been questioned for two centuries—yet in America the life of the spirit is killed “not accidentally or temporarily, but inevitably and eternally,” as Lowes Dickinson again put it. If one believes this to be true, the prospect is bleak, and much of the despairing literature of Europe during the past two centuries, the literature of the “decline of the West,” may be explained in terms of this overwheming recognition, on the one hand, that it is in the United States that “the burden of world history shall reveal itself,” as Hegel said, and the no less overwhelming (and demoralizing) belief that in America the life of. the spirit, nourished for so long by Europe, will at last be extinguished. To understand that the leadership of the West had passed to the United States, but not to believe in the spirit of America, or even that the spirit could live in America: was this not the empty valley of the hollow men, the broken columns, the lost kingdoms, the dead land, the broken jaw, the whimper at the world's end? The decline of the West, as it was described by Speng-ler at the end of World War I, was the decline of Europe; he barely mentioned the United States. Morever, the American himself seems to be made anxious by the thought that the European culture to which he feels drawn, even as he pulls away from it, may in fact be dead, leaving him alone; and rather than bear this final separation, he too will take his stand on the ruins among which the European moves.

Both in America and abroad, one of the explanations of anti-Americanism is that Europe in its death throes still has its fingers at America's throat. The American experience is still not allowed to speak separately to the European experience. “Is this not the essence of the modern belief about the artist,” Lionel Trilling asked of The Heart of Darkness, “the man who goes down into the hell which is the historical beginning of the human soul?”: finding it in the primitive life in the jungle. But Trilling ignores something in Conrad—that is also present very strongly in Kipling—which marks a difference between the European experience and the American. In its failing years, with a failing strength, Europe went forth to subdue the continents to which it had roamed, and it encountered their vastness and intractability: the menace of the jungle and the desert, the sierra and the pampas. What a speck of dust blown down the khud, as Kipling said, was the civilized European man before these inert continental masses of the wilderness and the primitive, and they stood dumbfounded before their terrors. But that was not the experience of the American; he gazed on his continent and its wilderness, and determined that it should be civilized, won, and farmed. No matter what the cost in human life, that was his achievement.

Whenever he strayed from the garden that he had made in his island peninsula, the European was in danger of being overcome by terror and superstition: but not the European who became an American. It was not by superstition or myth that America was made, but by the rejection of them; not out of a nightmare of “that hell which is the historical beginning of the human soul,” but out of the awakening of the human reason which was the historical beginning of our democratic societies. The history of the United States has yet to be long; its art and its literature should be preparing to be long as well, to be marching with it in step, and not always to be shifting their feet from experiment to experiment, fragment to fragment, accomplishing only their own ruins, only an imitation of the ruins among which the ghosts of European culture are now doomed to exercise.

There is a deep importance in the fact that anti-Americanism abroad tends to be strongest when America itself seems to have lost confidence in its own idea. Why should the world trust America if it does not trust itself? Why should it welcome the new civilization, and find hope in it, if the Americans themselves are already imagining its decay and dissolution? Why should they understand what it means to be “Americanized,” as the world is being Americanized, when the Americans themselves seem to be unsure that they like being Americans? Anti-Americanism in the rest of the world returns in cycles, because cycles of self-doubt, as I said at the beginning, keep returning in the public mind of America.

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For at the root of all anti-Americanism, and of the expressions of it which have been explored here, is both the understanding that the world is being Americanized and a fear of the process. In short, anti-Americanism is a response to the strength of Americanism, the awareness of a new and powerful force in the world; and this is one reason why it is a phenomenon with no parallel in the past.

For example, the English have always been darkly suspicious of foreigners; far more than the French themselves, they have adopted the French proverb that good fences make good neighbors. When I was a schoolboy, the phrase that “all niggers begin at Calais” was still heard. The French were Frogs, the Germans were Boches, the Italians were Wops, and everyone east and south of Naples was a Wog. There were reasons for this. Ever since the brilliant flowering of the English national spirit in the Elizabeth age, England had again and again to save herself “by her exertions,” and Europe “by her example”—from Philip II of Spain, from Louis XIV and Napoleon of France, from Wilhelm II and Hitler of Germany. Why should it not be suspicious of foreigners? After all, “God is an Englishman,” a clergyman had proclaimed in the 16th century, and this was not a boast. How else could one imagine God—as a Spaniard?

But the suspicion of these foreigners was never an -ism. French culture might sometimes rule London, German philosophy was known to seize otherwise strong and healthy minds, Italy even before it was Italy was now and then the arbiter of English taste, and these were all resisted. But they were not -isms against which to be anti-; and the true significance of anti-Americanism as a phenomenon is that the phrase—with its ism—implies that there has been, and that there is, more to be resisted than the immense power and wealth of another nation, more even than the cultural imports that used to come to England from Europe, to be modified and absorbed, but a new and other civilization, whose existence is alternately denied and distrusted.

Anti-Americanism abroad, whatever the occasions for its expression, is merely one form of the continuing interest in and debate about the nature of Americanism, and of its power to Americanize. On various occasions and at exacerbating moments, it may seem more widespread and more vehement than at others. But the debate goes on, at the root of it the question to which most foreign observers have addressed themselves: what is the American to be?, and since we are becoming like Americans, what will we become?

It is the impact of Americanization that is at the core of anti-Americanism, where there is more than a scribble on a wall, “Yankee Go Home.” One may think that Communism may spread from Russia or China to the rest of the globe; but no one thinks in terms of the “Russification” or “Chinafication” of the world. Even when French was the lingua franca of the Western world, and French culture held sway, as the American-English language and American culture today do, no one really felt that his own country was being “Frenchified.” For more than a century, Britain strode the world, but there was never as strong a sense of “Anglicization” as there is now of Americanization; not even when the British empire was most far-flung, and the British were teaching the Indians and West Indians to speak English and read Spenser, play cricket and be gentlemen.

Yet it obviously makes sense, from London to Rome to Cairo to Colombo to Singapore to Tokyo to Sydney to say that the world is being Americanized. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things to notice in the television reports that Shirley MacLaine made on China—a point which of course she did not make—was how Westernized—in other words, how Americanized—the Chinese people, especially the younger ones, have become, as if dressed from Woolworth's. This process is usually observed only in its material manifestations, and it is overlooked that, with the traffic of its commerce and its arms, America carries also an idea. The energy of the American presence in the world is both welcomed and feared, both a cause of hope and a source of anxiety, because with its idea it keeps on unsettling the established forms of the past. Not merely old but ancient customs are surrendering to a presence that is not imposed and yet seems irresistible, to an idea that appears to be more powerful than the slogans of any revolution. “All American influence on Europe,” said Cyril Connolly, “however vulgar, brings with it an improvement in the standard of living and dissipates certain age-old desires.” While these are wanted, they are also resisted and questioned.

It is my own belief that the mere presence of America, what Americans have become and achieved in their own country, has done more to change the world, and improve the life of its peoples, than any revolution in the past two centuries. “An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land will lie revealed.” Against this prophecy of Seneca, the son of Christopher Columbus wrote: “This prophecy was fulfilled by my father . . . the Admiral in the year 1492.” But the prophecy is still being fulfilled in an even deeper sense; the American is still loosening the chains of things, not merely in his own continent, but in that very Orbis Terrarum in which the whole of the Old World was contained. In spite of the progress of Americanization, the influence still seems strange, precisely because it comes from elsewhere than the Orbis Terrarum, from that still New World.

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If this is understood, anti-Americanism becomes much more interesting than is usually recognized. Was America a mistake? That is the question that can be asked, as it cannot be asked of any old country. It was seriously, even if one cannot say deeply, debated by the philosophes of the 18th century. Most of them had not been to the New World, but that did not prevent them, as it has not prevented others in later years, from commenting freely on its conditions. Horace Walpole was at least momentarily affected by the opinion of the Comte de Buffon, that America was degenerate, that in that continent, “Nature is weaker, less active, and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions.” And what was the evidence? Well, Buffon was obsessed by the fact that the tapir, although it looked like an elephant, was smaller than an elephant. “This animal, the elephant of the New World, exceeds not the size of a calf of six months old, or a very small mule.” Great minds can sometimes be easily diverted.

The interest of their musings is the sensation, once more, that America was a new phenomenon in the world, for good or for ill. Those who feared the results of its discovery were afraid that the degeneracy of the New World would return to corrupt the Old; that its wealth would cause inflation in Europe and therefore in the end impoverishment, and that it would be morally calamitous by flooding the Old World with articles that were either useless, such as furs and gems, or pernicious, such as tobacco. The general influence of America, in short, would be like the particular influence of venereal disease. In fact, what we find in the responses of some of the philosophes is an early expression of the fear that the Old World would be Americanized; a fear that turned to welcome in 1776.

In this perspective, the phenomenon of anti-Americanism in the rest of the world is hardly to be feared, as long as it is understood. In a profound sense, it is the rest of the world asking of itself the question of Crèvecoeur: “Who is the American, this new man?” What is to be feared is the anti-Americanism in America itself which returns no answer from the experience of the new man in his own continent; from the historical experience of the country itself, its actual achievements and its actual failures; but instead sedulously and virulently retreats to a mythical interpretation of that experience which has no historical reality.

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¹ For all its many insights, I think that Spender's analysis of “English and American sensibilities” in the end fails, and one of the reasons is an error that he would not have committed in the 1930's or even the 1940's: he contrasts the literatures of the two countries in isolation from any political or social context. Literature, art, culture, are granted an autonomy which they do not possess, although they now claim it, and our age allows it to them. (The symbol of this in America, of course, is the Hamptons in summer, where it is never very clear whether the art critic created the artists, or the artist created his own work. That art should live in some sort of community with the whole society is disdained.) I have forgotten who it was, but someone once protested against the fact that we are today more inclined to take our picture of, say, Dublin in 1916 from a novel by James Joyce than from the newspaper accounts of the time, or the reports of the lieutenant-governor of the day, or the journal of the Archbishop of Dublin, or the actual memories of one of the “rebels.” We automatically believe the literary account more than the factual accounts; and there is something very misleading in seeing, so to speak, two literatures, English and American, carrying on their own debate, with little or no reference to the actual conditions of their societies, but solely as a kind of contest between various myths of those societies, which it is then easy to “polarize.”

² As far as I know, no one has properly investigated the fact that the Republican party during the past half-century has been fundamentally “anti-European,” thus explaining, in spite of the rest of its “ideology,” its isolationism in the 1920's and 1930's, the ease with which Dulles took the same stance as Russia at the time of Suez and now the “detente” with Russia and China since 1969. In contrast, Dean Acheson was as a Democrat typically a “European.”

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