A World Apart, a Race Apart?

Abstract

During the course of the twentieth century, the discourse of “Anti-Americanism” became the dominant mode of articulating difference from or even outright opposition to the United States and the “American way of life.”² The standard French dictionary of the late nineteenth century, however, did not even recognize the term “Anti-Americanism.” It offered only “Americanist: partisan of the Americans; someone who loves, who affects their manners, their customs” and “Américomanie: affected, ridiculous admiration for everything associated with America.”³ It does not follow, however, that nineteenth-century images of the United States were wholly or mainly positive, either in France or elsewhere. While a handful of individuals might have been infected by Américomanie, more often than not the US experiment was examined rather more critically. In general, however, the nineteenth-century discourse on the pros and cons of the American way life relied on a different terminology from the one we are familiar with today. Designations such as “le frère Jonathan,” “Uncle Sam,” or “el yanqui” were popular colloquialisms. Yet, when it came to explaining American society or identifying its particularities, such labels proved insufficient. More commonly, both Europeans and Latin Americans applied the binary concepts of “Anglo-Saxonism” and “Latinity” to make sense of the “American way of life” and to explain its distinctiveness from their own societies: the United States was imagined in terms of a conception of cultural and historical difference as determined by a society’s “racial” properties.

The two branches [of Europe], Latin and German, are reproduced in the New World. South America is Latin and Catholic like Southern Europe. North America belongs to a Protestant and Anglo-Saxon population.

Michel Chevalier, Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord, 1836 ¹