Abstract
Alongside established images of the United States as the epitome of a positively defined modernity, a model republic, and a land of opportunities, America was also seen as a barbarous country, the very negation of European cultural values. In these images barbarism could take the form of the sheer brutality associated with life in the United States, but it also appeared, perhaps more often, as an absence of civilization. Claims in the existing historiography about the prevalence of positive images of America are often based on the notion of people “voting with their feet,” whereby patterns of migration are read as proof of widespread admiration for the United States.2 This chapter takes a typical emigrant society—Italy—as a starting point to challenge such accounts and, through a comparative analysis of images, to demonstrate that there were many people throughout Europe and Latin America who rejected the United States as a model, instead stigmatizing it as a barbarous repudiation of everything that mattered in the Old World.
L’America a ci acconza e a ci uasta!
(America accommodates some and ruins others!)
Proverb from Basilicata, Southern Italy1
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Notes
John Ruskin, in Munera Pulveris (1863), reprinted in Works, vol. II (Orpington, Kent, 1872), 130.
Giuseppe Rota (music by Paolo Giorza), Bianchi e Neri (Milano: Teatro alla Scala, 1853): New York Public Library (NYPL), Walter Toscanini Collection, Libretti da Ballo, nos. 809 and 939. The ballet was also performed under the titles La Capanna di Tom (Bologna) or I Bianchi e I Negri (Torino).
G. B. Valebona, Il Teatro Carlo Felice. Cronistoria di un secolo, 1828–1928 (Genova: Cooperativa Fascista Poligrafici, 1928), 348–57. On the three versions in Naples in 1853, one in local dialect, see Rossi, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Protestantism in Italy,” 418. The fact that many of Italy’s smaller theaters did not stage the piece had more to do with the fact that its cast of several hundred participants was too expensive for the smaller houses than with any lack of public interest.
Carlo Gatti, Il Teatro alla Scala nella Storia e nell’arte. Cronologia (Milano: Ricordi, 1964), 195, 200;
Carlo Marinelli Roscioni, ed., Il Teatro di San Carlo (Napoli: Guida, 1988), Vol. 2, 361.
Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Vanni, 1947), 6.
Erwin Strittmatter, Der Laden (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1984), 189.
Dumanoir and Adolphe D’Ennery, La case de l’Oncle Tom. Drame en huite actes (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1853).
Edmond Texier and Léonde Wailly, L’Oncle Tom. Drame en cinq actes et neuf tableaux (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1853).
D. E Sarmiento, Viajes en Europa, Africa y América (Buenos Aires: no publisher given, 1854), xxviii.
Paologiovanni Maione and Francesca Seller, “Cristoforo Colombo o sia la scoperta dell’America di Donizetti,” Studi Musicali 34, no. 2 (2005), 421–49. For on overview of operas on the New World see Polzonetti, Italian Opera. Heck, “Toward a Bibliography of Operas on Columbus.” Idem., “The Operatic Christopher Columbus.”
For American themes in ballet see also Raimondo Fidanza’s Colombo, ossia La Scoperta del Nuovo Mondo (Genoa, 1802);
Selma Jeanne Cohen, “Feme di Gelosia! Italian Ballet Librettos, 1766–1865,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 67, no. 9 (November 1963), 555–64, 558.
Quoted in Rossi, The Image of America, 5, 14. See also Denis Mack Smith, Italy. A Modern History (New edition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), 13–14.
See in this context also the monarchical-federal pamphlet by Alessandro Luigi Bargani, Progetto di costituzione dei Regni Uniti d’Italia offerto ai circoli politici e federativi degli Stati italiani da un cittadino degli Stati Uniti d’America. (Turin, 1848).
Giovanni Capellini, Ricordi di un viaggio scientifico nell’America settentrionale nel1863 (Bologna: Vitali, 1867), 20–1.
Rafael Puig y Valls, Viaje á América (Barcelona, 1894), 210;
Juan Bustamante y Campuzano, Del Atlántico al Pacífico. Apuntes e impresiones de un viaje a través de los Estados Unidos (Madrid, 1885), 76–7.
Antoine Etex, Essai d’une revue synthétique sur l’Exposition Universelle de 1855 suivi d’un coup d’oeil jeté sur l’état des beaux-arts aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Chez l’auteur/Martinet, 1856), 90.
Henri Tresca, Visite à l’Exposition Universelle de Paris de 1855 (Paris: Hachette, 1855), 132.
Juan B. Justo, En los Estados Unidos. Apuntes escritos en 1895 para un periódico obrero (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Jacobo Peuser, 1898), 64.
For example, Gabriel Deville, “La sociedad sin estado,” La Montana. Periódico socialista revolucionario 1, no. 1 (April 1, 1897), 12–16 (facsimile edition, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Buenos Aires, 2nd edn. 1998).
Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe: sa vie et ses ouvrages, Constantin Tacou and Stéphanie de La Rochefoucauld, eds. (Collection Confidences; Paris: La Herne, 1994).
Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (1876–97) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 90, 128.
Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles (1901/1903) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 273.
See, for instance, Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class. Elementi di Scienza Politica (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 477.
According to Bologna’s Resto del Carlino, anarchist circles in the United States had spent months preparing the assassination of the Italian king: Resto del Carlino, August 1, 1900. See also Cesare Causa, Giovanni Passanante condannato a morte per avere attentato alla vita di S.M. Umberto I Re d’Italia (Firenze: Adriano Salani, 1879). Lombroso argued that crime rates in the United States were particularly high in cities with an elevated rate of Italian and Irish immigration: Lombroso, Criminal Man, 317–18. On the connection between Italian and American anarchism see in particular Pernicone, “Luigi Galleani and Italian Anarchist Terrorism in the United States.”
Francisco Bilbao, « Iniciativa de la América. Idea de un Congreso Federal de las repúblicas » (1856), in Obras completas, Manuel Bilbao, ed. (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Buenos Aires, 1866), vol. I, 285–304, esp. 289–90.
Rubén Darío, “El triunfo de Calibán,” in Escritos inéditos, E. K. Mapes, ed. (New York: Instituto de las Españas, 1938), 160–2. Darío had been calling the United States Caliban since the early 1890s: see, for example, “Polilogia Yankee,” La Habana Elegante, Año 9, no. 31, August 6, 1893, 5–7.
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© 2012 Axel Körner, Nicola Miller, and Adam I. P. Smith
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Körner, A. (2012). Barbarous America. In: Körner, A., Miller, N., Smith, A.I.P. (eds) America Imagined. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137018984_5
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