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Images of the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America
Public lecture, 8 May 2008
Nicola Miller
This is a comparative history project with 7 case studies; one that could only be done
collaboratively
Participants and corresponding case studies:
PI: Prof. Nicola Miller, Professor of Latin American History, UCL: Argentina and Cuba
CI: Dr Axel Korner, Reader in Modern European History, UCL: Italy
CI: Dr Adam Smith, Senior Lecturer in US History, UCL: Britain
Research Assistant: Dr Kate Ferris, UCL [at University of St Andrews from September
2009]: Spain
PhD studentships: Maike Their, working on France and Natalia Bas on Brazil
During the first year, Dr Stephen Wilkinson worked on the project as a Research
Assistant, collecting material on Argentina and Cuba.
The purpose of this project is to explore the role played by images of the United States in
debates in these seven societies about what it meant to be modern.
Perhaps even more than is usually the case, each of the key words in the title of this
lecture evokes a series of questions:
1. Images – why focus on images, why do we see them as a historical source of special
significance?
-- We’re looking not just at visual images but textual ones too.
There is a widespread tendency to think of images in terms of the visual, but pictures can
be vividly conveyed in words too; drawing on W.J.T Mitchell’s argument: ‘there are no
“purely” visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central
utopian gestures of modernism’, our images are both textual and visual – indeed, the
power of many of them derives from the fact that they are both, so that their effects are
created through an interaction between the visual and the textual.
This is not to say that form and genre are irrelevant -- of course, it matters whether
someone chooses to convey an image visually or verbally; of course, there are
particularities to the interpretation of visual images – societies create norms about seeing
– visual intelligibility – but overall, we resist the tendency to oppose visual image and
text.
We also see the creation and the reception of images as related processes, each shaped
and affected by the other. We therefore seek to overcome the divide in the literature
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which tends to separate out the study of US self-projections from perceptions of the US
in other societies.
Images are in several senses associated with falsifying, deception, artificiality,
superficiality, even in the positive sense of idealisations – yet they are also carriers of
what many deem to be a greater truth: symbols and signs of hopes and dreams, desires,
assumptions, prejudices and expectations. Images constitute sites where the interplay
between views from within (how you see yourself) and views from without (how you are
seen) is momentarily frozen and illuminated; they are, therefore, a source for exploring
what Charles Taylor called the social imaginary – the ‘self-conceptions, modes of
understanding’ that constitute the background experience of social practice or what
Koselleck referred to as spaces of experience and horizons of expectation.
We see images as Walter Benjamin’s ‘constellations saturated with tensions’, where the
synchronic and the diachronic intersect; they are sites of contemporary preoccupations
and accumulated impressions – in short, they are bearers of history. They are therefore
valuable historical sources for that subjective element without which it is hard to
understand why the idea of being modern has proved to have such lasting and
widespread appeal
In sum, we are taking ‘the United States’ as a metaphor for the aspiration to become
modern.
2. Nineteenth century
Why the nineteenth century?
Specifically, it’s the later 19th century that we chose to focus upon, from the Civil War to
the Spanish-American War, i.e., some time after some of the most famous images of the
United States had already been created, such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s, Democracy in
America, 1835-40; or, to mention a couple familiar to British audiences: Mrs Frances
Trollope’s, Domestic Manners of the Americans of 1832; or Dickens’s American Notes,
1842.
We deliberately chose to focus upon the period before the US became hegemonic in Latin
America; before the US projection overseas becomes a sustained and concerted process;
before the US starts official large-scale programmes of sending its people abroad – as
marines, missionaries and magnates.
Yet this is also an era of increasing circulation of people, goods, ideas -- primarily
because of technological and economic changes:
–1860s: trans-Atlantic cable; volume of mail across the Atlantic doubled (Britain and
USA); circulation of periodicals, newspapers and literature increases rapidly; more longdistance travel (mainly elites for leisure/pleasure but far more extensively than hitherto
by migrants in search as a better life). Such developments were by no means confined to
Europe: there is plenty of evidence now for quite a remarkable expansion of modern
associational life in Latin America during this period; press – newspapers to add to the
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already extensive periodical literature (primarily urban, to be sure); religious festivals and
community celebrations, not to mention state-organized commemorations added to the
creation of a public life enacted in public spaces.
We found – somewhat to our relief – that images of United States were indeed ubiquitous
in the public spaces of the late nineteenth century – especially in Britain, as you’d expect,
but it was found to be so in all of the case studies, at least for certain periods.
During this period, America is a place people feel they know – it is part of their own
experience, at least their imagined life; above all, perhaps in Britain, where a selfconsciously transatlantic intellectual community develops, but certainly also in Cuba and,
to a lesser but still significant extent elsewhere. In some of our case studies, this is true
mainly for the elites – e.g. Spain – but we found surprising social depth in others, e.g.
Britain, Cuba and Italy.
Thus, we chose to concentrate upon the late nineteenth century because we are interested
in what happened before the projects, missions that have been the focus of much recent
work on reception of the US abroad (most of it on the twentieth century); we seek to
explore all the less willed and organised ways in which perceptions and ideas migrate and
are translated, transposed—that is what our project is about.
First, it was necessary to map images of the United States in all the different countries
studied, which we did through a wide range of sources: parliamentary/congressional
debates, learned journals, periodicals, newspapers, novels, poetry, popular magazines,
graphics, cartoons, photography, memoirs/chronicles, travel writing, essays, visual art,
theatre, music, plus materials on exhibitions, parks, streets, shops, arcades, posters, public
buildings and the design of museums.
This enabled us to address the question: What factors shape extent to which images of
US were more or less affected by events in US itself or in other country?
-- distance?
-- volume of contacts e.g. lots of Americans visited Cuba from 1830s, including some
redoutable women, e.g. the Peabody sisters -- Sophia, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Mary, wife of Horace Mann, went 1833-4; Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle
Hymn of the Republic”, went in 1859. Who were the North Americans that people
actually encountered? In Latin America, they were mainly engineers, entrepreneurs and
filibusters, with few cultural figures at that time.
-- information – distance, quantity, quality; assassination of Garfield (1881) – big impact
in Britain (real time news) and France; itineraries – travel or of the imagination – where
in the States did people choose to go? gracious Boston and Philadelphia or brash,
confident Chicago; New York or Texas? Several of the most influential commentators
on the United States never actually went there: e.g. Gladstone – ‘Kin beyond Sea’, 1878
article in North American Review; John Bright; Edouard Laboulaye, whose Histoire des
Etats-Unis (based on lectures at the Collège de France, 1848-9) was more widely read in
France than de Tocqueville.
-- who carries the images, how and why; where is their cultural capital invested?
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-- where disseminated? and to which audiences?
-- what were the main debates in the receiving society?; what were social conditions there
and how did they shape reception?
For example, the Cuban independence leader José Martí became famous in the twentieth
century, especially after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, for having disseminated informed
criticism of the United States from his time living there in the 1880s and early 1890s, so
the tendency has been to assume that but the evidence is that his articles were far more
influential outside Cuba than in it until the 1920s, when disaffection about the US role in
Cuba became widespread; positive images of the US were prevalent until late into 1890s,
even after the Spanish—American War.
We identify key figures and touchstone texts, the most ubiquitous of which was Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, translated in 1852 into French (Harriet Beecher Stowe had a highly
successful visit to Paris) and in 1853 into Portuguese; it continued to be repeatedly
referred to in all the countries studied throughout our period. Another touchstone text
was Edouard Laboulaye’s Histoire des Etats Unis (1867), which vividly illustrates how
different contexts shaped different responses: in Spain, his discussion of the military
received a lot of attention, as did his material on the institutions of civil society; Spanish
liberals were less interested in his discussion of the Constitution, unlike in Argentina,
where readers of Laboulaye did pick up on what he said about constitutionalism. In
France, the focus was quite different: French readers were mainly interested in
Laboulaye’s emphasis on US as a race apart – ‘la race americaine’.
It is harder to do, but we also aimed to identify not only what did get translated,
circulated and transferred but also what did not – e.g. the USA developed a vigorous proslavery discourse based on the claim that forced labour was reconcilable with modernity,
which was not manifest in Brazil; both pro-slavery and abolitionist discourses steeped in
religion in the United States, a factor disregarded in both Brazil and Spain.
The extent to which US expansionism was discussed varied widely, as did which aspects
of it were noticed. In Britain, for example, it was remarkable how even in the racially
aware radical press, there was complete indifference to massacres of native Americans;
the Mexican-American War featured prominently in France, but was barely mentioned in
Argentina.
Our focus, then, is on the internal dynamics; on how ‘the American way of life’ was
integrated into debates about very particular national concerns. Such an approach poses a
series of challenges to existing historiography.
-- It has a particular ideological charge in Latin America, the countries of which are
often assumed to be ‘dependent societies’ with histories explained (away) by relations
with external powers. Our approach also has implications for the historiography of
Europe, which has an opposing tendency to underestimate the significance of external
reference points.
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-- We also challenge the prevailing tendency to assume that the presence of American
culture leads to Americanization, e.g. in Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in
Bologna: The Americanization of the World, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005.
-- Our work questions any assumptions about absolute attitudes towards the United States
– love or loathing; uncritical emulation or contemptuous rejection; Americanism/antiAmericanism. In most places, at most times, positive and negative images were
juxtaposed – we are trying to map how these were affected by class, race, gender,
politics, events, and how they changed over time. We also question the assumption that
images and identities were constituted mainly bi-laterally (between the United States and
any particular country), arguing for a more complex set of exchanges involving other
participants from both Europe and the Americas.
-- Our work poses a challenge to the view that the second half of the 19th c. was merely a
prelude to empire (‘The Road to Empire’ or variations on it often being the title of the
chapter on this period in histories of the United States), and to a corresponding sense of
the inevitability of US territorial  commercial  cultural expansionism.
The third term in the title of this lecture that requires elaboration is:
3. Europe
Europe and Latin America were selected for this project as the two areas of the world
most closely connected to the United States by history.
The rationale for our choice of case studies is set out below, illustrated with some images
to give you a sense of how they relate to national debates.
[Please see the accompanying Powerpoint presentation, which shows all the images
discussed below]
Britain: US practices a crucial referent in political debates – not only among the
political classes but in working-class organisations, too – e.g. Durham miners’ leader
who worked in Pennsylvania, for whom time in US is key reference point; Tyneside
mobilisation against the Ku Klux Klan Act, petitioning US Congress – sense that had
right to do so;
Extraordinary persistence in Britain of idea of US as a land of opportunity, esp. among
working class, evident in mass circulation newspapers, with radical leanings – even after
Haymarket (4 May 1886)
Overall, a juxtaposition of negative and positive images; some division along political
lines; if a chronological shift can be discerned, it was from negative to positive images
Strong sense of ambivalence about whether the US was truly other, foreign
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Anglo-Saxon racial kinship served as a powerful framework for understanding English
images of the United States
Image: The Graphic, 6 April 1872; a self-consciously respectable news and literary
weekly;
Allegory alludes to the Chicago fire of 1871 and the Lancashire ‘cotton famine’ during
the Civil War in order to ‘effect a reconciliation’ between ‘the two Great Englishspeaking nations of the world’. The central figure is the Angel of Peace; to the left,
Britannia administers aid to the victims of the Chicago fire, with flames behind; to the
right, Columbia gives food to starving cotton mill operatives (who issued statements of
support for the Union despite the hardships caused to them by the lack of cotton to
weave), with a spinning jenny behind. The point of the image is that despite tensions
caused by the Alabama claims (British-built warships used by the Confederacy), the two
nations are bound by their common characteristics of charity and commitment to peace;
the settlement of the dispute – by arbitration – presented by both parties as a model of
conflict resolution
France – as France moved towards democracy from 1848 into the Third Republic, the
United States offered a comparison of a model republic – the revolution that did not lapse
back into reaction – when discussing US politics, the French emphasis was less on the
constitution (as in Spain) or the institutions (as in Cuba) but rather on civil society –
mainly through Laboulaye; a feature already highlighted by de Tocqueville (similar
emphasis in Argentina). Images of the United States were highly politicised in France –
can legitimately talk about a war of images. England and Germany remained crucial other
referents, but the US was important; images were by no means all positive -- even the
liberals, who admired US politics, despised the culture – the specifically French concept
of ‘culture’ became the terrain upon which French difference—from the United States
and from Anglo-Saxonness more broadly -- was marked out
One revealing case study concerns the phylloxera crisis, which used to be viewed as an
episode of botanical or agricultural history, but which Maike’s research shows to be
deeply imbued with conflicts about cultural identity. Phylloxera is a bug that kills vines;
it came from the United States, arrived in the 1860s and reached epidemic proportions in
the 1870s, with devastating effects for French viticulture. There were two possible
cures: one to treat the infected vines with sulphur; the other to plant US vines, which had
greater resistance, or graft French vines on to them. A scientific dispute ensued between
Américanistes and the sulphuristes; the former won out in the end, but not without bitter
resistance. These debates about the applicability of American ways of doing things were
conducted not just in scientific terms but in broader cultural terms, positing ‘essential
differences’ between America and Europe – all of which played a crucial part in creating
the mythology of wine and its connaisseurship as quintessentially French. Both the
disease of phylloxera and its cure came from the United States – capturing the
widespread sense in France that the United States had the potential both to corrupt and to
cleanse, morally, culturally and politically.
Images: phylloxera bug; wine label; cartoon
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Italy – the case study where the US was perhaps the least salient presence – politically,
there was far more preoccupation with European affairs; even so, images of the United
States did feature in Italian cultural and political life, not least because the Italians
claimed Columbus as their own, promoting him as the archetype of the Italian humanist
genius; so that even though the Italian states were politically detached from trans-Atlantic
exploration, ideas about the New World animated intellectual and philosophical debates.
What is particularly interesting is the extent to which exoticised images of the New
World featured in the operas and ballets that became Italy’s principal art forms during the
late seventeenth century. What started in 1690 with Ottoboni’s Il Colombo was still
popular in the nineteenth century: Donizetti wrote a Columbus opera and in 1894 in
Bologna Toscanini conducted Alberto Franchetti’s Colombo (1892). Even more curious
in this context is the extraordinary popular success of the ballet stagings of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin during the 1850s, at La Scala as well as in the Papal States – these shows were
received among Italians as indicative of conflicts that US society was unable to resolve.
As a political model (successful revolution) images of the United States became
prominent during the events of 1848-9; later, the Risorgimento and the specific search for
a constitution for the new Italy stimulated a strong interest in the US model of federalism.
It is also noteworthy that there was some active US support for the Risorgimento, esp.
from Presbyterians, who endorsed the anti-papal emphasis; for Italians, this was a source
of contrast – Italians represented themselves as anti-papal but not anti-Catholic.
Learned journals and intellectuals such as the leading Republican poet Carducci
condemned the positivism and materialism they associated with the United States, at a
time when Italian intellectuals were drawn to Hegel’s idealism. On the extreme Left,
towards the end of the century, the fate of Italian emigrants to the United States was
frequently compared to that of the ‘negroes’. However, on a more popular level, the
image of the land of opportunities remained powerful and was frequently evoked in
illustrated magazines. A particularly popular image of the self-made man was that of
Benjamin Franklin
Image: Franklin, from Illustrazione Popolare of November 1874
In general, in Italy, positive and negative images of the United States coexisted in equal
measure throughout the late nineteenth century;
Even positive images tended to have negative edge—liberal periodicals of the 1860s
carried articles endorsing the federal model but lamenting what they saw as the rise of
cultural mediocrity
Spain –US images became very prominent during what was known as the revolutionary
or democratic sexenio (6 years) of 1868-74, a period of political upheaval created by
attempt to implement liberal republicanism – the first republic lasted only 11 months, and
this period used to be seen as an episode of failure in a long trajectory of decline
culminating in civil war and Francoism, but revisionist historians have recently
emphasised the importance of the sexenio in the process of modernising Spain; images of
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the US, particularly as a constitutional model, had high status and impact at this time
(although out of date images – de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America); as model of
abolition
Competition from the British model, especially after the restoration of the Bourbon
monarchy in 1875; praise for US often proxy for admiration of Britain – US as translator
of British principles; culturally, France the major point of reference
Ambivalence throughout; positives strongest during First Republic (1868-74); growing
mistrust towards end of century, but still quite nuanced interpretations – even as late as
1895, some positive views
Images:
-- Edison’s phonograph
-- máquina para fabricar yanquis (Yankee-making machine) from satirical illustrated
journal, Blanco y negro, 11 April 1896
The Spanish had long demonstrated a fascination with US capacity for invention –
Edison’s phonograph, in particular, was greatly admired when first patented in 1878 and
Edison acclaimed in Spain as archetypal US inventor with a sharp eye for business, a
combination that meant his inventions would change the world. As tensions between
Spain and the United States rose over Cuba, after the second war of independence was
launched in 1895, the Spanish press became increasingly antagonistic towards the United
States and their admiration turned to uneasy mockery – inflected by concerns about the
potential impact the US capacity for mechanical invention could have for the waging of
war. The Spanish press were quick to point out the superior size, newness and
technological sophistication of the US fleet. But even contraptions apparently entirely
unrelated to war were satirised as evidence of US belligerence, particularly in the leading
satirical journal, Blanco y negro.
Here, for example, is Edison’s phonograph, in a cartoon of 1897, turned into a combative
device. Ministers of the Spanish govenrment, witnessing a demonstration of the marvels
of Edison’s device for relaying sound, find, on close inspection, that the machine can
play only one tune, the ‘vulgar song of senators Morgan, Sherman, Cullom etc.’ – who
were the most prominent and vocal supporters of the Cuban independence fighters,
unremittingly hostile to colonial Spain. The phonograph’s repertoire consisted only of
‘an anti-Spain speech’, then ‘the second act of the same’, third, ‘a continuation of the
previous’ and finally ‘the same as the first’. The accompanying text asserts that the
machine’s inventor would soon have his come-uppance: ‘The day will come when they
will come a cropper with all their machinery, and he’ll be told to get lost, the phonograph
guy, the Yankee who shows all these marvels’ .
Another example from the same magazine parodied US inventiveness with a machine to
make yankees. From ‘cheap’ materials, including ‘filth’, ‘fat’, ‘sawdust’ and ‘left over
bits of cork’, the whirring and whisking of the steam-driven machine produced identikit
‘yankees’ in top hat and tails. Thus, the Spanish satirists tapped into the association of
the US with inventions and innovations not only to disparage the perceived US character
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– uniform, vulgar and aggressive – but also in order to demarcate Spain’s difference as a
nation unimpressed by such modern methods of mass production – in the face of the
increasing enmity and evident military superiority of the United States.
4. Latin America
Argentina: the US symbolised what its own Revolución de mayo of 1810 meant, namely
the Enlightenment of the masses
Often thought to be the Latin American country most closely comparable to the United
States; comparable economies (temperate agriculture), immigration etc.
Four aspects of the US had particular resonance in Argentina: i) universal education;
several Argentine visitors highly impressed by US commitment to widespread literacy:
‘el unico pueblo del mundo que lee en masa’ (Sarmiento, Viajes, 1845, 99); ii)
agricultural practice; iii) aspects of the political system -- famously, the Argentine
Constitution of 1853 drew in important respects on the US constitution (also California),
but emphasis in Argentine debates was on civil liberties – partiuclarly religious freedom - rather than institutional arrangements, which they came to see as a negative model - by
1870s Argentines were arguing that when they had adopted US political models and
British economic ones, they had got it the wrong way round; iv) increasingly, image of
US rapaciousness
The key figure in creating Argentine images of the United States was Domingo F.
Sarmiento, leading liberal intellectual – who was president 1868-74; a founding father -who – despite quite a lot of revisionist work – is still widely characterised as an imitator
of the United States, with all the associations of Argentina being behind, backward, etc. –
this is a retrospective view and you cannot understand the history of Argentina in the
nineteenth century from that perspective
As an examples of textual images: Sarmiento, ‘North and South America’, A speech
given to the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1865.
-- US as nation bedazzled by the founding modernity of its constitution – ‘without
precedent’ for its commitment to justice—but blind to the fact that modernity is relative,
that it has constantly to be striven for, that it is not an absolute; US has failed to take on
board that pursuing its own expansionist policies ‘was to turn back to two thousand years
ago, and utterly to renounce the initiation of the new reconstruction of human society’ .
Grossness: ‘it is dangerous to convert the Federal System into an invading republic,
swallowing ever, without being able to digest’;
-- US as a nation that does not know itself, does not understand its power, does not
appreciate its impact upon the rest of the world – obsession with self-sufficiency means
that it is not open to the other and therefore has little gauge of self. Earlier in its history,
US more receptive to others, including LA, therefore had greater self-knowledge (esp.
1820s).
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Precursor of the US as blundering monster; Cyclops; it was in Argentina that the
characterisation of the United States as Caliban, the incarnation of barbarism, first began
-- US as nation with its ideals in the past, whereas the Argentine Republic has its ideals in
the future
Argentina: marked chronological shift in mostly positive  mostly negative images by
the 1890s;
Brazil: key issue was abolition; War of the Triple Alliance (1864/5-70) opened up
debates about modernisation of Brazil – images of US played meaningful role; like
Argentina, Brazil saw itself as rival embodiment of modernity in the Americas
Image: ‘Chegada do paquete City of Rio de Janeiro’, Revista Illustrada, 1 July 1878
The arrival in Rio de Janeiro on 29 May 1878 of the first steamer owned by the Roach
Company was celebrated as a national event that marked the beginning of a new era of
commercial intercourse between Brazil and the United States. Leading Brazilian
newspapers welcomed the contract with the Roach Company, presenting it as a harbinger
of prosperity and the success of the other great undertaking with the United States,
namely the attempts to attract skilled US farm workers to Brazil.
By the mid 19th c. literary Romanticism had established the figure of the indigenous as
the prototype and symbol of what was authentically Brazilian. The representation of
Brazil as an indigenous male became common – a graphic convention ubiquitous in the
illustrated press. In this example, what is intriguing is that the vigorous Brazilian
indigenous male is represented as standing on equal footing with another equally
powerful native male figure representing the other great American power.
The composition of the two American powers shaking hands suggests a symbolic break
with the traditional bonding with Europe and the prospect of a mutually beneficial trading
relationship with the United States. It unveils Brazil’s own claims to being the South
American version of the US experience of modernity (claims that were contested by
Argentina). This aspiration, fed in part by some historic similarities – continental size,
colonial experience, Eruopean immigration, displacement of native peoples, slavery,
vicinity of Hispanic America – was a Brazilian ambition since the aftermath of the
Paraguayan War. The image of the United States encapsulated what Brazil wished itself
to become – an industrialised, business civilization – but more civilised, more humane,
more authentic than the United States
Chronological shift in Brazilian images of the United States from positive to negative.
Cuba: US as increasingly viable alternative to Spain as possible model for the future
nation; long history of self-representation as interpreter of US and LA to each other; the
triangular dynamic of Cuba/Spain/US established early: José Maria Heredia and Félix
Varela to US 1823 – ‘the land of liberty’ and ‘an immense place of refuge for all the
oppressed’ (1826) – and lasted longer in Cuba than other Latin American countries; even
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though that same year John Quincy Adams famously described Cuba as the apple waiting
to fall from the tree of Spain into the lap of the USA (one of the earliest, starkest
statements of US expansionist impulse) and despite failure of US to help Cubans in their
first war of independence; images of the United States resonant among separatists,
autonomists, annexationists and also among some supporters of Spanish rule, who were
correspondingly critical of the United States;
Cuba: overwhelmingly positive for a long time; late shift from positive to negative
Image: Cuba: translation of Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy, trans. by autonomista
(advocate of autonomy from Spain) Raimundo Cabrera in 1886, author of the best-selling
Cuba y sus jueces (1887) – an analysis of Cuba’s failings and inadequacies that
established the United States as the key comparison for Cuban self-perceptions;
published as Los Estados Unidos – only about half of the original text; reordered quite a
lot -- a manifesto for self-government as ‘what determines the progress and happiness of
peoples’.
_____________________________________________________________
Illustrations of comparative perspective
Two levels of comparison: within Europe and Latin America; between Europe and Latin
America
To give an example of comparisons within Europe, let’s take the inescapable event of the
period, the US Civil War
Received:
-- in Britain as: indication of US capacity to overcome obstacles and consolidate strong
nation-state – for conservatives, especially, showed the importance of solid, durable
institutions (Bryce, The American Commonwealth); for radicals, revived Paine-ite view
of US as crucible of freedom and democracy – overwhelming importance of Lincoln
-- in Italy as sign that US no longer a valid model for republicanism; feuilleton stories
about murderous housewives in the Wild West during the Civil War; Italy’s decision to
centralise rather than become a federation a lot to do with horror at the excesses of the
civil war
-- in France, by the Left, struggle of the North seen as metaphor for their own resistance,
continuing defence of the values of revolution (US a revolution brought to a successful
conclusion); abolition not perceived to be the main motivation, but expansionism of
North; popular opinion abolitionist, but pro-South –> a position sustained by the rather
tortuous argument that slaves in the South treated better than freemen in the North
-- in Spain, by conservatives, who were against both republicanism and colonial reform,
as evidence of US 'barbarism' and its inappropriateness as a role model for Spain.
Progressives, who advocated US-style abolition and/or a federal republic for Spain, either
skirted around the issue of the civil war or, when they did acknowledge it, painted it as a
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simple, polarised battle between a 'good' abolitionist north and a 'bad' slave-owning
south. They also seem to have swallowed - at least they often repeated it - what Adam
said was the US's 'spin' on the civil war - that it had been a kind of ultimate test of the
US's values and institutions, and these had emerged from the war all the stronger.
Our main route to comparison and identification of transnational networks is through
themes:
Latinity and Anglo-Saxonism
A powerful illustration of the entanglement of images
In France, around mid-century, debates shift from earlier de Tocquevillian images of the
US as a country of advanced democratic practices and highly developed political
institutions into the creation of the Anglo-Saxon Americans as the antithesis of a race
latine, an idea linking French people to Italy, Spain, Portugal and their descendants in the
Americas. Invented in the context of French debates about identity in relation to both
England and the United States, Latinity became an imperialistic idea with Bonepartist
expansionism  in 1860s, French attempts to establish empire in Mexico  hostile
reactions there and elsewhere in LA; but some intellectuals in LA, drawn to French
culture, pick up upon the idea and there is increasing evidence of its presence in various
parts of LA from the mid-19th c. onwards – although I still think it’s accurate to claim
that it doesn’t achieve widespread impact until after Spanish-American War, when
repackaged as route to differentiation of common community to unite against danger of
US expansionism
Connects to the construction of the Black Legend of Spanish rule from wihtin the United
States, which was part of the separation of America into the Americas – North and South,
or Anglo-Saxon and Latin; and the appropriation by the United States of the utopian
promise earlier attached to the Americas as a whole; brings out how images of the other
conditioned not only by own self-images but also by the other’s images of yourself
By mid-19th c. US perceived Latin Americans as effeminate, irrational and inferior – not
manly and rational (O’Brien, 5); Latinity embraced in a complex sequence of
repositioning in relation to France, Spain, the United States – also England – French
Latinity was very anti-English, but in Latin America most of the negative qualities of
Anglo-Saxonness were acquired in transit across the Atlantic Ocean
Latinity also fed into Spanish self-definitions, which in turn affected thinking in Spanish
America
Anglo-Saxonism received positively in Britain but negatively  Yankeeism in France,
Spain Argentina,
Images of the South: after c. 1877, the South disappears off the radar in Britain;
southerners not really part of the Anglo-Saxon community;
In Italy, seen as brutal – compared to the Italian South (not good enough to be part of
Italy) – a wild lawless place, where promiscuous women roamed unchecked;
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in France, southerners not seen as part of the Anglo-Saxon race; in Spain, widespread
commitment to abolition complicated by interest in free trade – the south seen as
progressive because of freetrade policies; in Brazil, the Southerners’ defeat seen as what
would happen to Brn elite if took relaxed attitude towards abolition
Grotesqueness of the northerners and their manners/ contrasted by Latin American
visitors, particualrly women, with graciousness, attractiveness and hospitality of the
South;
Other themes – to be explored in the workshop tomorrow:
Land of opportunity
Barbarous America
Constitutionalism, republicanism and democratic practice – civil society (non-state
institutions seen as important in France; Argentina; Britain)
Models of abolition
Domesticity, women and the social order
Could also discuss: technology, urban models, religiosity
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Returning the idea of the US as a metaphor, we can see the range and diversity of its
meanings:
Britain – for institutional legitimacy; for the seemingly endless potential of progress
Italy – for co-existence of progress/liberty and vulgarity/barbarity
Argentina – for founding ideals (the Enlightenment: reason as guiding force of the affairs
of the republic; popular sovereignty; education of the masses for citizenship) – and their
betrayal;
Brazil – for the promise of science and technology
Cuba – for the promise of political liberty and prosperity through autonomy as a nationstate – for the possibilities of sovereignty (almost exclusively political)
Spain – for an ideal republic – in theory if not in practice; an unnatural modernity –
technological success at expense of culture and harmony with nature;
France – a revolution that fulfilled its promise; avoided reaction; achieved a successful
outcome
The United States as the site of multiple possible futures -- ‘a fictional space’ – onto
which the diverse dreams of modernity -- and its nightmares -- have been projected
I’ve tended to emphasise the differences in the role of images of the United States in
different contexts, but there are some points of similarity
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-- US as culturally lacking – good at distribution (literacy, schools, libraries) but not
production – strong in France, Italy, Argentina, Brazil; evident in Britain, Spain and
Cuba; idealist intellectuals – yes in Spain, LA (Emerson) not in Italy (only Poe!)
-- what makes the US attractive is what it produces – goods for comfort, ease,
entertainment – making life enjoyable for everybody – the idea that modernity should be
for all – in this sense, democratic – far more important than right to vote
Anthony Trollope, North America, 1862: ‘The great glory of the Americans in in their
wondrous contrivances,--in their patent remedies for the usually troublous operations of
life’ (120)
Great and enduring appeal of the American Way of Life (the power of the American
model; the force of its example) – not pioneering conquests of the wilderness, or all the
bigness of the United States, but rather its success in making everyday life easier, more
pleasurable; ‘America’ is other is all sorts of big and alarming ways, but the same in
certain comforting small ways
-- Key element of its attractiveness = capacity to absorb and revive elements of the
European – which is further confirmation of the value of the transnational and
comparative approaches that will be explored in the workshop tomorrow.