Around 1902, an editor in France, Germany, or England knew that a sure recipe for a bestseller was to use the catchword of the day, “American danger.” Indeed, the number of books that dealt with the subject increased considerably at the time. Was this outburst of consternation just another episode in the long history of European anti-Americanism, a trend present in European thought from the beginning of the nineteenth century with roots across the political spectrum from conservative opponents of the republican regime to Jacobins opposed to American liberalism? Whatever the origins of a particular version of anti-Americanism, most European criticisms of the United States shared a cultural judgment. Europeans accused the United States of being the land of materialism, which to them meant that an individual's place in the American society depended only upon his material wealth, an accusation summed up in the French derogatory expression “la république des épiciers.” This criticism was nurtured by a feeling of resentment toward a nation largely built upon reaction against the Old World: from the start, European anti-Americanism drew its strength in part from the United States’ own confrontational relationship with Europe. At the same time, any study of European anti-Americanism needs to mention that Europeans and Americans remained acutely aware of belonging to the same civilization, at least until the late twentieth century. This feeling of kinship was enhanced on both sides of the Atlantic by continual intellectual, economic, and artistic exchange, which fueled the idea that there was such a reality as a “transatlantic world.”
While acknowledging this larger context, there is still something specific about the “American danger” proclaimed, and denounced, in Europe around 1900. At the time, contemporaries chose this slogan to label what they deemed to be a new discourse about the United States.Footnote 1 Propaganda campaigns launched in Germany, France, or Great Britain targeted the new ambitions of the United States, an emerging economic power whose threat to the Old World was symbolized by the massive increase of its exports on the European market. Campaigns against the “American danger” had two goals. On a national scale, they aimed at the mobilization of economic interests, while on a European scale, the threat posed by the United States seemed to proponents of a closer European union to provide an incentive for implementing their ideas.
The notion of an American danger was also, in some ways, a reaction to those American expansionists who asserted that the time for deferring to Europe as the cradle of civilization and the center of culture was past—that the United States, youthful and full of energy, was taking center stage. Such proclamations from across the Atlantic were all the more hurtful to those Europeans who imagined that their own domination of the world was so great that it could only be the sign that they had reached the climax of their power. The laws of history would inevitably make Europe ever more the Old Continent, in contrast with new, emerging countries in America and Asia. Thus, the episode of the “American Danger” could be analyzed on the surface as a prelude to what would be called, after World War II, the “American Century,” an outlook on shifting economic and cultural power prefigured in the interwar years by European debates over Taylorism, mass production, and American industrial organization in general.
However plausible, the mix of explanations above is unsatisfactory. To prophesize the rise of America to world power had been a cliché in European discourse since Tocqueville's time. The political and economic changes in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century did not appear so huge or abrupt as to justify such a sudden sense of emergency on the part of Europeans. Another objection emerges: if the “American danger” discourse was a harbinger of an “American century,” how can we explain the disaffection for this slogan after 1905–1907 and the rise of a new discourse that pointed to American weaknesses, a backlash that in turn suggests that the evocation of an “American danger” was met with utter skepticism?
This essay will examine the slogan “American danger” as a distinct episode, which to some degree reflected the propaganda of vested interests within Europe but which nevertheless became fashionable briefly because it seemed to illustrate Europe's growing vulnerability. The main interest of this phase of anti-American discourse lay in the debate that ensued over the seriousness of the alleged danger and over proposed remedies.
German writers on discourse about the United States during the Wilhelmine era already recognize the early twentieth-century “American danger” as a distinct phase. These studies explain the episode's brevity by depicting it as an instrument created by agrarian and industrial interests to manipulate public opinion in favor of a more stringent protectionist policy.Footnote 2 Such a perspective tends to overestimate the power of vested interests to orient the public discourse and cannot explain why, if these interests had been so successful in their propaganda, they failed to change policies. Analysis of the era's political discourse is not of much help either.Footnote 3 It comes as no surprise that at the start of the twentieth century, European conservatives were on the whole critical on the United States, as were socialists, whereas liberals proved to be more divided in their stance. In fact, political or economic interests alone prove insufficient to explain what appears to have been a brief but real social phenomenon that led to such diverse themes as trusts, colonies, or consumption being considered in light of the “American danger.”
Furthermore, such explanations neglect the fact that the theme appeared in countries besides Germany and do not take into consideration the cultural and the geopolitical dimensions of the discussion. This is a point worth insisting upon: the “American danger” must be examined in its European dimension. Until now, German, English, or French scholars have examined this phenomenon within a firm national frame. When English historians mention it, they place it in the context of Joseph Chamberlain's Greater Britain propaganda. French historians bring up the subject when analyzing the philosophical rivalry between the United States and France, with both countries claiming to be the birthplace of the democratic spirit. German historians are mostly interested in this wave of concern over the United States in the context of competition between German and American economies and controversies over tariff policies.
If the subject has not been analyzed on a European scale, this may of course reflect the difficulty of producing a transnational European history that requires mastering not only different languagesFootnote 4 but also different and complex historiographies.Footnote 5 But another explanation can be given: the European nature of the “American danger” is difficult to assess because around 1900, Europe was far less a reality than it was a political concept used by Europeans as well as by Americans.
The purpose of this paper, then, is to disentangle the episode of the “American danger” from the larger narrative of anti-Americanism, but first and foremost to integrate this episode into the fears and doubts but also the hopes of the EuropeansFootnote 6 at the turn of the twentieth century—feelings that are far more diverse than the study of “apocalyptic discourse” usually implies. In fact, in so doing, this paper shall question historiography that considers the “American danger,” along with the “yellow peril” and the “Muslim threat,” mostly as part of a general sense of impending doom in Europe.Footnote 7 I will examine anxieties expressed about the United States in the context of a variety of fears that flourished in Europe—and elsewhere—around 1900. The “American danger,” for example, was to some degree related to English discourse on the “made in Germany.” But one can overemphasize such parallels. The “American danger” gave rise to distinctive emotions,Footnote 8 and it is important to understand its features and limits in various European powers, while shedding light above all on the particular relationship that Germany, the main European rival of the United States, entertained with the North American republic around 1900.
EUROPEAN PERCEPTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: A TALE OF ANTI-AMERICANISM?
European anti-Americanism is an old tradition that some historians date back to the beginnings of the American Republic or even to the discovery of the New World.Footnote 9 Indeed, one might understand anti-Americanism defined as a feeling of hostility toward these new territories because they presented a real alternative. But there is a danger in considering, as Paul Hollander for example does, that anti-Americanism means the rejection of what America is.Footnote 10 Such reasoning is ahistorical, as it implies an immutable American identity different and even opposite of the definition Europeans would give of themselves through different centuries. This vision of American exceptionalism triumphed first after the Second World War and then again after 9/11.Footnote 11 Still, such an outlook has been contested since the 1980s, in part through the efforts of American historians to weave U.S. history more into world history.Footnote 12 Far from being new, this trend has something in common with the intuitions some American historians developed during the nineteenth century when they insisted on the European origins of their young nation, research that ran counter to the idea of a break with Europe that is evident by the 1890s in the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, and others.Footnote 13
Rob Kroes seems to offer a more cautious explanation when he writes that “historically, both Europe and the United States have functioned as each other's ‘significant Other.’”Footnote 14 Until recent decades, the United States and Europe represented the “Other” to one another far more than Asia or Africa did to either Americans or Europeans. But this implies the existence of a European entity, comparable to the United States, whereas Europe remained largely, until the1950s, a geographical and cultural concept.Footnote 15 As the United States evolved as a nation–state, European countries developed perceptions of this American entity that varied from country to country and which depended on the particular relationship each nation had with the Americans. Thus, it is no wonder that at the time of Friedrich List, the proponent of economic nationalism whose influence crossed the Atlantic from the 1820s to the 1840s, German and American perceptions of the danger of English power came so close.Footnote 16 But one should not forget that the American view of a peaceful, romantic Germany was shared by the English for a large part of the nineteenth century, which further complicates understanding of mutual perceptions of Europeans and Americans of one another.
The usual way for historians to emphasize the anti-Americanism of Europeans travelers to the United States is to list their use of negative stereotypes. The materialism of American culture (“King Dollar”) and the corruption of the political lifeFootnote 17 are clichés that one can find throughout the nineteenth century in most of these writings. These recurring themes were meant to prove the inferiority of the United States as compared with the civilization and the institutions of the “Old World.” Yet, such commonplace national stereotyping reveals little about the particularities of European perceptions of Americans. Quite the contrary: since antiquity but above all since the Renaissance, national stereotypes have functioned to define one's own country as much as someone else's. Increased mobility during the eighteenth century and the context of the Enlightenment reinforced such stereotypes that one can find in travel literature as well as diplomatic correspondence.Footnote 18
The United States could not stand apart from this trend for two reasons. First, the growing use of national stereotypes was the consequence of the growing importance of national identity in the nineteenth century. Migration, professional travel, and tourism contributed a sense of one's own nation in contrast to others, as did the diffusion of literacy among populations and its correlate, the increasing importance of the press—and of caricature. The second reason is more interesting: stereotypes concerning one particular nation emerge when that country gains recognition from the others. That explains, for example, why French stereotypes of England, which had been fairly common during the Middle Ages, declined during the sixteenth century and the first part of the seventeenth century, whereas French stereotypes of the Spanish flourished at a time when Spain was the prime rival of France in Europe.Footnote 19 The multiplication of negative stereotypes about the United States is explained by its growing interest, as a country for immigration and as a commercial partner and potential rival.
Thus, anti-Americanism as an analytical concept becomes more sustainable when it is considered in the context of the other national stereotypes that proliferated during the nineteenth century. The notion becomes useless, however, when one traces post-1945 anti-Americanism back in the past. Negative stereotypes of the United States have to be understood as part of a complex net of cross-references that were also created by Americans, as they became more interested in European and Asian countries.Footnote 20
Finally, stereotypes of the United States were not always negative: in fact, writing about America as a model was for a long time a useful tool in political and economic controversies. The most striking example is the myriad references to the United States Constitution in the political discussions that spread across Europe in the 1820s and 1830s. These references were essential to legitimate proposal for constitutional government and establishment of a republic that would have nothing to do with the French revolutionary precedent. But they were also a trick to deceive censors: the frequency of German publications on the U.S. Constitution before 1848 is explained by the fact that by analyzing a foreign experience, the authors could get around the interdiction of such sensitive matters easier than if they have tried to write directly about them.Footnote 21 Another case of the usefulness of the American model, far less known, dates to the 1880s, when some European authors tried to import the model of the Homestead Act of 1862. Different groups of European conservatives, often drawn to the ideas of Frederic Le Play,Footnote 22 cited the homestead principle as a model for the defense of small peasantry and the conservation of rural family values against the migration to cities and industry.Footnote 23
It is true that, as this discussion in Germany and France took shape, the American reference disappeared gradually. The reason in this case, as in other examples, is that the function of referring to the U.S. experience was to prove an idea is realistic because it has already been implemented. But when the idea begins to be accepted in the public opinion as something debatable, the foreign reference, American or otherwise, has to fade away, and arguments must become indigenous to prove that they are adapted to the national context.Footnote 24 That does not mean that the reference to the United States was equivalent to others: during the 1880s, U.S. economic growth and diplomatic neutrality was a mix that attracted many Germans, who saw the United States as an ideal alternative to the English model, in particular, on sensitive subjects such as protectionism and bimetallism. That is also the reason why, during the 1870s and the 1880s, German industrialists felt comfortable claiming that they wanted to emulate American industry. The latter, being focused on its home market, was not a competitor. Thus, one could celebrate U.S. successes and try to imitate them at a time when German industry wanted to upgrade the quality of its production.
Yet the American economy was beginning to present a challenge to some German sectors. In agriculture, the United States was clearly exposed as a dangerous competitor: low-cost imports of American wheat since 1876 had created a political shock and had been an incentive for increased tariffs at the end of the 1870s, in Germany as well as in France or in Italy.Footnote 25 In this economic context, a group of German—but especially Austrian—economists and agrarians proposed the creation of a “protectionist fortress” that would encompass the countries of Mitteleuropa as the only solution against the American menace. This episode seems to anticipate the turn-of-the-century debate over the “American danger,” all the more as the project had a geopolitical dimension. Its chief promoter, Alexander Peez, used not only American imports but also the protectionist policies and pan-American ambitions of Secretary of State James Blaine as an argument for a European Zollverein.Footnote 26 Peez's perspective was quite unusual at the time, since European governments were not yet much preoccupied with the implications for Europe of an assertive, expansive United States. His plan met with little interest even in Germany; it faded away rather quickly after 1882. The Peez proposal was too dependent on sectional interests within Germany and looked too much like the old dream of a greater German state encompassing Germany and all the territories of the Habsburg monarchy, even if Peez mentioned an alliance with France and Belgium.Footnote 27 It was out of step with the success that Germany, built around Prussia, had enjoyed since its foundation in 1871. Another reason for this quick failure is the fact that, in the 1880s, the United States was still considered a kind of Eldorado for German businessmen such as Werner Siemens. Finally, liberal discourse prevailed, with economists explaining that the new American competition made sense inside the frame of an international commerce as conceived by Ricardo: the income earned by farmers in the United States but also in Latin America and Australia would serve to buy more European industrial products.
In fact, national stereotypes that defined the United States were not different from the ones that developed at the same time inside the European sphere. They differ, however, from the ones the Europeans used toward the peoples they came to dominate. To talk about “anti-Americanism” is to forget these connections and to risk an anachronism: the notion of anti-Americanism implies a feeling of resentment toward a dominant power. But the United States didn't have this status before 1914: quite the contrary, the American republic stayed on the margins of international politics for most of the nineteenth century. It is only around 1900 that the potentially competitive great power triangle appeared comprised of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.Footnote 28 Rising American influence had the drawback of making the United States lose its specificity: the country could no longer be seen as an alternative to the English model, as when the United States was not in direct competition with European countries such as Germany. The “American danger” appeared because the United States was no longer different.
THE “AMERICAN DANGER”: A EUROPEAN ISSUE?
Between 1898 and 1902, stereotypes about the United States transformed. The variety of contradictory or at least incoherent images changed into a discourse about the direct, immediate, and global danger that the United States presented for the Old World. This danger was analyzed as a concerted offensive that targeted Europe as a whole. In a way, the Americans created Europe by considering it as a unit and by prompting Europeans to feel collectively vulnerable. Europeans now had to think more about their commonalities in the face of the American danger, while promoters of pan-European projects had new incentives to present their ideas as the only solution for the future of European countries.
The American economic context is thus essential to understand Europeans’ changing perspective. Badly hit by the crisis of 1893, industrial sectors in the United States that previously sold only on the home market had to develop an interest in export. This translated into industrial products making up a growing proportion of American exports, dominated until then by agricultural products and raw materials.Footnote 29 U.S. industrialists increasingly demanded public sector help with gaining access to foreign markets, at a time when the role of the state in the economy was revalued. American industrialists were not alone in making such demands; on the contrary, Americans sought models of state support to exporters in Europe, particularly in Germany. It was precisely this eagerness to learn from them that contributed to the anxiety of the Germans and of the Europeans in general. Such worries were also fed by ambitious declarations from several American personalities, who were quick to proclaim a kind of new world order. Footnote 30 The article of Franck A. Vanderlip, a former secretary of the Treasury, “The American Invasion of Europe,” published in the Scribner's Magazine in 1902, was widely and quickly translated and attracted much comment. Germans could read it in their language just months after its original publication. Other texts that revealed American ambitions became quickly available across the Atlantic. For example Theodore Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life was available to German and French readers in their own language one or two years after its 1900 publication in the United States.Footnote 31 For European observers, the most striking thing about these ambitions was how, far from discussing them quietly in political circles, Americans boasted of them in front of foreign officials. When the brother of the kaiser, Prince Henry of Prussia, visited the Capitol during a U.S. goodwill tour, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge asserted to him, with some exaggeration, that the time of the American indebtedness to Europe was over and that the United States had become the creditors of the world.Footnote 32 The tone and intent seemed different from earlier criticisms of Europe, such as those written by Andrew Carnegie in the 1880s.Footnote 33 For Europeans, the Americans seemed to have embarked on a coherent policy, of which the Spanish-American War was one of the first steps.
However, if it is possible to detect a European dimension to the rhetoric of the “American danger,” it is not only because this discourse appeared simultaneously in a number of countries, but also because these national discourses shared a common analysis of some features of the American scene, the most important at the time being the question of the trusts and their differences from European cartels. Indeed, the debate did not reveal national differences between countries but rather political differences that crossed borders and that sometimes crossed the Atlantic. This was the case for the liberals: they opposed coalitions of industrial interests on principle and therefore condemned both American trusts and German cartels, on the grounds that both forms of economic alliance manipulated prices, practiced dumping on foreign markets, and fixed prices high at home, so that national consumers ended paying for the exports.Footnote 34
This was also the case with the socialists who developed an ideology-based discourse. The French Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, is a case in point. Lafargue wrote an important book about American trusts in 1903 without having visited the country, relying on “bourgeois” authors such as the liberal economist Paul de Rousiers.Footnote 35 Lafargue had an easy time drawing upon academic and press accounts to support a socialist analysis of American corporate capitalism as another step in the direction of a socialist future. The argument went thus: Trusts were a financial construct that furthered the rationalization of the economy. In this way, they represented a positive evolution, all the more because the accompanying concentration of wealth and the development of finance capitalism opened the prospect of a rather painless socialization of the means of production. Trusts had already been, in a way, confiscated by the financiers from the producers. These arguments could be found in the book of the Austrian Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (1910), but Daniel De Leon counted among the American socialists who held similar views.
Thus it remained the task of the proponents of protectionist policies to develop a distinctively European discourse, since unlike the liberals and the socialists, they insisted on the difference between cartels and trusts, with the latter viewed as the spearhead of the “American” invasion of Europe. There were two kinds of European critics of trusts. The first dealt with their structure: European opponents of the trusts explained that these were only financial structures, whereas they viewed cartels as an answer to industrial problems such as the need to organize markets in order to avoid crisis created by the liberal logic of the competition of all against all. Despite being somewhat schematic, this argument met with great success, in part because it gave a frame to an ongoing discussion about the difference between preferred shares and common shares, an important subject in the economic literature because of its consequences for the European investors.”Footnote 36 Such views were linked to another popular theme—the fragility of the trusts—illustrated by the popular (and biblical) picture of a colossus with feet of clay, a device that expressed a kind of resentment toward American economic growth. The other category of criticism was more philosophical, with commentators assigning political meaning to the difference between cartels and trusts. The argument went thus: the identity of each enterprise belonging to the cartel was preserved, thus testifying of the democratic spirit of the institution as opposed to the despotism that prevailed in the American trust.Footnote 37
Overall, the argumentation lacked internal coherence, but that did not matter much: the goal was far less to analyze a danger in all its details as it was to use the American situation as a counter-model in order to present the cartels as a modern solution that would benefit the whole national economic community. So, for example, the harsh criticism that developed in France and in Germany against Standard Oil or U.S. Steel must be understood in this context.Footnote 38
Yet, the fact that this discussion extended across countries does not prove the existence of a European-wide public sphere. First, it did not take root in Great Britain, where the liberal opinion rejected very quickly both trusts and cartels as foreign to the national spirit. More importantly, if the “American danger” became a popular theme in several European countries, it is striking to see the national differences in motivations.Footnote 39
In Germany, the debate about der amerikanische Gefahr was born from the controversy that started in 1897 over the renewal of tariffs. The tensions grew rapidly because of conflicts of interest between agrarians and industrial exporters, but also—and this has been emphasized in recent historiographyFootnote 40—because Germany had little room for negotiation. Largely embedded in international commerce and, more generally, in globalization, the country could allow itself no false diplomatic move that would have endangered its position. In this context, the United States was special, not only because of its high protectionism, but because it had chosen to be particularly intransigent toward the Reich. The Americans refused to concede to Germany the same advantages that had been given to France. The United States had the upper hand; American imports were vital for German industry, whereas many German products exported to the United States could be bought elsewhere. The Americans could thus insist on being given most-favored-nation treatment and the end of sanitary interdiction on its meat exports in exchange for minor concessions. A last reason for German anxiety toward the United States was the strong growth of American exports to South America, an important market for German—and English—exporters at a time when the German economy suffered a slowdown.Footnote 41 It was this double threat that Germans denounced, though the American share of world exports increased faster between 1870 and 1880—from 7.9 percent to 13.2 percent—when between 1880 and 1900, the increase was only from 13.2 percent to 15 percent.Footnote 42
In France, the controversy over the péril américain was not based on tariff problems. Commercial exchanges between the two countries were not on the same level, and the weak distribution of French exports on world markets prevented French firms from competing effectively with their American counterparts in third countries.Footnote 43 Furthermore, the tariff question had been solved with the signing of a treaty in 1899 that was quite favorable to France. This was not the result of an American francophilia—wine, a strategic sector for the French, remained heavily taxed—but the consequence of fierce German-American competition, as Washington sought to favor Germany's rivals.Footnote 44 The reason why the debate over the American danger began in France has to be found in the Spanish-American War. The French press, in part because it was bribed by Spain, criticized the United States vehemently, and this violence was only equaled by French bashing in the American press during the summer of 1898.Footnote 45 But what really sparked off the controversy was the Treaty of Paris, signed that December, which allowed the United States not only to dominate Cuba and take Puerto Rico but also to annex the island of Guam and the Philippines in spite of the advice of the French government, which insisted that the Americans should show consideration for foreign public opinion.
A few months later, Octave Noël published in a conservative newspaper an article entitled, “Le péril américain,” emulating the views already expressed by other authors.Footnote 46 The common French conclusion was that because of their foolish protectionism, the Americans had no other choice but to invade foreign markets with their surpluses in a never-ending expansion that would threaten the rest of the world.Footnote 47 This campaign proved to be both excessive and short lived. By 1903, several French books had already appeared that insisted on putting this “danger” in perspective, as no sign of it had materialized. Henri Hauser, the first professor of economic history at the Sorbonne, was among the authors that denounced the “American danger” largely as an imposture.Footnote 48 Not only did the United States not represent a political menace, but even their commercial successes inside the American hemisphere were limited in scope, as the South American markets remained largely dominated by the English and the Germans.
Great Britain represents the third variant of the “American danger.” The political element was secondary when compared with France. The British bristled at what they perceived as American pretentions in disputes during the 1890s and 1900s over Canada or Venezuela.Footnote 49 But even amid these quarrels, the United Kingdom pursued the goal of an informal alliance with the United States. So did France, but London had the advantage of having public opinion generally receptive to the idea of community of race. Thus, from a British perspective, the “American danger” was mainly about the economy, though in a different way from Germany. Historians are now reluctant to use “decline” to sum up British economy around 1900,Footnote 50 but at the time, contemporaries had much to say about what they felt was a growing vulnerability of their country in the face of such fierce competitors as the United States and Germany.Footnote 51 Indeed, these two “dangers” had much in common as illustrated by a comparison between a passage from Ernest Williams, “Made in Germany” published in 1896, and one from F. A. McKenzie, The American Invaders, written six years later. First Williams:
You pick out of the grate the paper wrappings from a book consignment and they [also] are “made in Germany.” You stuff them into the fire, and reflect that the poker in your hand was forged in Germany. As you rise from your hearthrug you knock over an ornament on your mantelpiece; picking up the pieces you read, on the bit that formed the base, “Manufactured in Germany.” And you jot your dismal reflections down with a pencil that was made in Germany….
At Midnight, your wife comes home from an opera which was made in Germany, has been here enacted by singers and conductor and players made in Germany, with the aid of instruments and sheets of music made in Germany.Footnote 52
And McKenzie:
In the domestic life we have almost got to this: the average man wakes in the morning from his New England sheets, and shaves with his New York soap and a Yankee safety razor.…
At his office of course everything is American. He sits on a Nebraskan swivel chair, before a Michigan roll-top desk, writes his letters on a Syracuse typewriter, signing them with a New York fountain pen and drying them with a blotting sheet from New England.
When evening comes he seeks relaxation at the latest Adelphi melodrama or Drury Lane startler, both made in America, or goes to a more frivolous theater, controlled by the great American Trust, where he hears the latest American musical comedy, acted by young ladies and thin men with pronounced nasal accents.Footnote 53
Ernest Williams himself pointed to the parallel in 1902, when preparing an update of his book, remarking that he needed to mention the new “American danger” alongside the German one. Yet, for Williams, the economic threat from across the Atlantic did not override the one from across the North Sea. The “fiscal reform association” that Williams helped to create was directed against the “German peril,” even if the “American danger” was more fashionable at the time.Footnote 54
In fact, British analysis did not concentrate on the similarities between the two perils because of the differences in British relations with the two countries. When William Stead wrote his famous book, The Americanization of the World, his conclusion was optimistic, as he thought that the Americans’ new ambitions presented a unique opportunity for the union of the two English-speaking countries.Footnote 55 Andrew Carnegie, on the American side, had come to the same conclusion in An American Four-in-Hand in Britain. Even if the Anglo-American project was short lived, with the theme of racial exceptionalism quickly fading in the United States in favor of a renewed sense of American exceptionalism,Footnote 56 English public opinion remained committed to the idea of a kinship grounded in the conviction that the two countries shared the same liberal viewsFootnote 57 and had the same selfless ambition of leading the way to human progress in the world.Footnote 58 This, more than anything else, prevented the “American danger” from rising to the same level as the peril of “Made in Germany.”Footnote 59
At the beginning of the twentieth century, comparison between the threats posed by Germany and the United States in France and in England had the effect of maintaining the preeminence of the German peril. But the reasons were less political than economic. At least until the first Moroccan crisis of 1905, the Reich was not perceived as a major menace for England, which was far more preoccupied with Russia.Footnote 60 In the same way, French-German relationships were at the time more peaceful than at many other moments. But German exports to these two countries were constantly growing and presented a constant challenge to national industries that struggled not only to keep their advantages on their home market but also—at least for the English—to compete on a relative equal level on third markets. In this particular context, what was the meaning of the “American danger” for Germany itself?
HOW SCARY WAS THE “AMERICAN DANGER”? THE CASE OF GERMANY
The question seems legitimate when one considers how easily the theme lost strength after 1904–1905. Yet, tariff problems were far from having disappeared: in November 1906 President Roosevelt showed a willingness to conclude a general treaty on commercial matters by sending the North Commission to Berlin. But the next year saw only the signing of a provisional treaty that did not concede real tariff reductions to German imports, though American imports received a more favorable treatment. Worse, in 1910, the situation deteriorated further, with an increase on American duties for industrial products, which constituted the bulk of German exports to the United States, whereas American exports did not suffer such a fate. Historian Cornelius Torp explains that this German inability to negotiate a more favorable compromise resulted from differences between the two countries’ integration in world commerce and from the fact that the United States exported raw materials essential to German industry. These persistent difficulties make it all the more difficult to explain why the discourse on the “American danger” lost so quickly its edge inside the Reich.
A first way to explain this paradox is to evaluate the actual repercussions of the theme on policies and thus, to measure its real importance. For this, the study of the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein [Central European economic association] seems a good starting point because this association was founded to promote a European economic union amid the dangers of globalization and, more precisely, the menace of an American economic domination. Furthermore, the prestige of some of the group's initial members seemed to demonstrate its political importance.Footnote 61 The Verein was created in 1904 by an Austrian economist, Julius Wolf, who promoted its foundations through a number of writings in 1901–1902. This initiative built upon pan-European projects fostered by Austrian agrarians during the 1880s against the menace of American agricultural exports. Though Wolf faced demands from some members of the association to emphasize Russia or the Greater Britain project of Chamberlain as greater dangers than the Americans, the economist, along with the majority of members, insisted on standing by the idea that United States remained the main challenge for European countries.
Yet, a reading of the Verein's bulletins published between 1904 and 1914 reveals no substantial progress toward the economic region that was supposed to counterbalance the growing influence of the United States.Footnote 62 Furthermore, the close exam of published arguments shows that the theme of the “American danger” seemed less and less useful. Especially in the German case, the threats that American industrial products were supposed to pose to the German home markets proved to be false, and the same was true for the challenge the Americans would present to the Germans on third markets, whether in Europe or in South America. This explains why the “American danger” progressively faded into the background, whereas new arguments emerged, more technical but also more positive, such as the economic gains envisioned from the harmonization of posts, transports, and administrative formalities concerning commerce inside Europe. The project of Mitteleuropa ended up merging with the technocratic internationalism that had appeared at the end of the nineteenth century,Footnote 63 making it a good example of the relationship between European regionalism and universalist thought.Footnote 64
Did Wolf try to use the “American danger” as a bogeyman to stir up anxiety in German public opinion? One could see his action as sheer lobbying: like Alexander Peez in his time, one of the prime goals of members of the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein was to promote the interests of certain sectors, such as heavy industry and large-scale agriculture, in discussions about tariffs and in economic debates. But it would be misleading to label the Verein's rhetoric as mere manipulation. Wolf's ambition was bigger, and he tended to integrate his lobbying into a vast effort of propaganda with the goal of converting public opinion to the necessity of reinforcing economic ties inside a European regional space.Footnote 65 Thus, the “American danger” appeared to be an opportunity for those who defended the idea of Europe as a regional entity capable of counterbalancing the world powers that experts predicted the United States, Russia, or Greater Britain would become.Footnote 66 One can find this idea—with varied success—in countries such as Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, but also France, where a congress was organized in 1900 on the subject, and naturally Austria-Hungary and Germany where Julius Wolf's project gained the most support.
Two reasons explain the failure of this propaganda. The first is that mixing lobbying for a few economic sectors and propaganda about an allegedly pressing international issue proved awkward. Inevitably, lobbying compelled the Verein to oppose some sectors threatened by American competition and thus were asking for more protection to others that saw their exports grow and wanted to limit protectionist politics. Even inside each sector, national competition was fierce: Hungarian cereal growers resisted their home market being opened to Prussian agrarians, as it would have occurred if a regional customs union had been formed.Footnote 67
Another reason that could explain the premature failure of propaganda for multinational action to protect central Europe against outside economic threats is the message it conveyed. If one compares this episode to another propaganda campaign, that which converted England to free trade, one can observe that many elements of success were missing.Footnote 68 The theme was too general, which meant that within each country, the customs union proposal threatened any number of politic and economic interests. Wolf did not offer an obvious answer to a critical situation—in the British case, the year before the repeal of the Corn Laws had been marked by poor harvests—and his group was neither clear nor coherent in its goals, as it was supported by two groups with divergent agendas: those who wanted to build a protectionist fortress and those who saw European economic cooperation as a first step toward a peaceful global order.Footnote 69 Finally, on the practical side, the European movement was supported mostly by academics, but not by political or economic leaders, and it had neither money nor a unified organization, the discourse varying much between countries.
European cotton manufacturers offer another example of a European sectoral interest group that tried to make common cause by using the “American danger”Footnote 70: in this case, they put forward the U.S. quasi monopoly on cotton production, in a context of rising prices, as a direct threat against their industry. The Americans were suspected of wanting to keep the bulk of the country's cotton crop for their own cotton industry, which, from the European point of view, was developing at an alarming pace. European manufacturers made an alliance with colonial interest groups, who wanted to raise public awareness of the economic profitability of the colonies and were more than happy to use the catchword, “American danger,” as a way to promote their cause. But, as in the case of the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein, the attempt failed. Not only did cotton culture in the colonies prove generally disappointing, but the European unity forged for this occasion did not succeed in disentangling the various economic interests that crossed the Atlantic, though a sense of common identity did grow between English, French, or German colonial interests, who had been largely shunted to the margins of their respective national economic communities.
However, before jumping to the conclusion that the “American danger” was mostly a bogeyman used by economic and politic interests to defend their particular agendas or political projects, one has to remember that many Europeans fantasized the United States as the future of their own civilization, epitomized by its urban life and its industrial achievements.Footnote 71 For most of the nineteenth century, the European stereotype of the United States as “the country of the future” had mainly political and social meanings, but in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, it developed an economic content that went with a sense of urgency in the new context of the first globalization. European fascination with the United States reveals itself to be a complex set of sentiments, which “fear” cannot really sum up.
The United States was the favorite target of those adhering to what was called in Germany Kulturpessimismus. Despising a modernity that was celebrated, for example, during the world exhibitions, those with this cast of mind claimed among their intellectual references men such as the Swiss Jakob Burckhardt, who as heir of Basel patricians, rejected equally the materialism and egalitarianism of United States and the despotism of Russia. This weltanschauung inspired particularly critical impressions of the big cities that European travelers encountered at their arrival in New York, where a subculture seemed to develop centered on the entertainment for the masses and not their education.Footnote 72 These metropolises were deemed the symbols of capitalism, consumerism, and cosmopolitism, which together would ultimately ruin civilization.Footnote 73
Yet the existence of this way of thought is not enough to prove any intense fear of American modernity specifically because this criticism developed by the Bildungsbürgertum was not centered on the United States: it was the state of modern Germany that preoccupied them above all. The exploding urbanization of the Reich and the turmoil it provoked impressed many European observers.Footnote 74 Berlin in particular was considered the European equivalent of Chicago, a city without history—the opposite of Paris, London, or Rome.Footnote 75 With its industries, entertainments, and population of ambitious newcomers, Berlin seemed to turn entirely toward the future, which meant also, for some visitors, that it was a city without soul, a criticism often made as well against American cities.Footnote 76 Berlin in Europe as well as the great American cities symbolized the reign of the anonymous and atomized crowd, denounced in France by Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, who like their German counterparts considered this crowd dangerous because of its propensity for uniformity and for collective imitation.Footnote 77
Not only had European critics of modernity no need of the United States for their denunciations, but the American proponents of modernity turned their eye toward Europe in search of solutions. Many of them considered, for example, that, when it came to urban issues, their own country was late in the “progress race.” The study of innovative municipal policies in Europe was supposed to help them convince their countrymen that the reforms they promoted were long overdue.Footnote 78 Chicago skyscrapers did impress European visitors, but they were not sure whether it was a sign of modernity or a distinctive American phenomenon. By contrast, the installation of electrical tramways, the development of urban hygienism, the municipalization of services to improve their efficiency, and the treatment of the social question through housing were considered by the vast majority of town planners on each side of the Atlantic as indubitable signs of modernity, for which German cities presented at least a partial model.
Perhaps the fears of American modernity expressed by Europeans had around the turn of the century represented a reaction to U.S. technological advances? This is the meaning often given to the word “Americanization,” and it is true that among the stereotypes most often found in the writings of European travelers to the United States, one finds the importance of the machines in all the sectors of economic life. In the German world of engineers, the “American system of production” had already moved to the center of attention by the 1870s. Ludwig Loewe is a good example; he precisely reproduced installations seen in the United States in order to mass produce sewing machines.Footnote 79 His experience in turn inspired Werner Siemens, who created an “American room” in his own enterprise. This interest in American production methods continued throughout the period, but criticisms came more and more to the forefront. Thus, when Frederick Taylor's methods began to be introduced in Germany, one of its main promoters, Paul Moeller, could at the time still subscribe to the idea, common among German engineers since the 1890s, that mass production was best suited to the specific conditions in the United States. They thought that German exports were so successful around the world precisely because they were unique in the way they were adapted to the needs of customers.Footnote 80
This discourse was based only partly on knowledge of what actually took place in American firms; it also reflected the technological pride of German engineers as well as the Bildungsbürgertum's suspicion of an American society that defined itself as being classless. However, this was not solely a German point of view; one can find it in France during the same period, and some Americans made the same analysis.Footnote 81 Taylor's ideas appeared in Europe around the time of the controversy over the “American danger,” but they did not suffer from the connection. The reason is that these new methods won acceptance among engineers as an important but not unique contribution to transnational debates over the rationalization of production and over the engineer's role in economic and social progress.Footnote 82
One could object that these were analyses from specialists who did not necessarily reflect public opinion. To have a better look at the latter, one could examine an episode little known to historians, a set of brief scares over “American espionage.”Footnote 83 In 1907 and again in 1911, which is after the wave of publications on the “American danger” had ended but nonetheless linked to it, a number of small and mid-sized enterprises around Leipzig, Dresden, and Nuremberg sent letters to their chambers of commerce and to their trade associations in order to complain about American agents sent by the U.S. Customs Bureau with the goal of confirming the real value of their production. These entrepreneurs believed that the details of the questionnaire they were asked to complete were to be used by their American competitors to help them imitate German products.Footnote 84 The complaints went public when local newspapers picked up on this cause and encouraged the chambers of commerce and trade associations to put pressure on the government, with the result that the Ministry for Foreign Affairs felt compelled to send an inquiry to the German General Consul in New York. However, the affair did not morph into a national scandal, a “tribunal of opinion” did not form, and the problem was finally solved through negotiations and compromise.Footnote 85 The reason is that at the heart of the episode was not a set of emotions and attitudes evoked by the specter of the United States but a bundle of definable problems and claims. What was really at stake in the espionage campaign was the fragility of regional economic networks as well as what small exporters deemed to be insufficient support from the German state for small exporters. Nevertheless the fact that in this case, regional firms and commercial organizations perceived the “American danger” as a real possibility reveals a great deal about the self-esteem of German producers and of their idea of the nature of American competition.
Historians often use the title of Ludwig Max Goldberger's book, Das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten (The Land of Unlimited Possibilities), published at the peak of the debate about the “American danger,” to prove that Germans truly feared American progress. Goldeberger's study was a modified version of a report written for the government to assess the strengths of the new economic power. Its content, far more precise in some aspects than other books on the subject, did not differ in its conclusions: the United States was impressive but Germany retained strong advantages. Assuming that the national economic community rallied to meet this challenge, Germany had nothing to fear. In fact, the government made no use of this report, which the General Consul in New York criticized as full of inaccuracies. The title—helped by the prominence of the author, a well-known figure in economic circles in Berlin—made the book famous. But one forgets the end of this story: in 1912, about ten years after his first use of this expression, Goldberger sent a letter to one of the most influential German reviews of the time, Preussische Jahrbücher, explaining that all he had ever wanted to do was to point to the natural resources of the United States. He had never believed in an actual “American danger,” he claimed, nor had he wanted to create a feeling of fear among his readers.
Finally, would it be easier to ask if the Germans were even afraid of the future? Nothing is less certain when one considers the popularity of science fiction in prewar Germany. This literary genre was widely read, largely (as in the United States) in the form of cheap editions sold by peddlers or at newsstands or as serialized novels in pulp magazines.Footnote 86 Their subjects were wide ranging, from celebrations of the engineer or the industrialist as heroes of modern times—this literature could also be read by an educated public—to war novels about future conflicts, whether between the great powers or against aliens. Most important was that this literature valued science and technological progress as the way to enhance the international status of Germany, for sure, but also to improve the world and eventually help to establish a universal peace. This suggests an underlying consensus in German society over an optimistic vision of technology, sentiments probably more widespread than the anxieties of the Bildungsbürgertum about social transformation according to an American model.
CONCLUSION
The expression “American danger” briefly became popular in many European countries as a device for denouncing the risks associated with the growing power of the United States and the new ambitions that came with it. But the agitation associated with this term did not create a strong feeling of fear in public opinion, a conclusion confirmed in two different ways. First, in most of the books written on the subject, the real goal was less to offer a thorough analysis as it was to present the solutions the author thought necessary to preserve the preeminence of his country. Thus, the “American danger” can better be described as a foil that sheds a light on a variety of political positions. It is striking to note that works in this genre, especially in Germany, concluded with a call to action and reassurance that the country had the capacity to overcome the challenge from across the Atlantic. Second, one must stress that the “American danger” did not exert nearly as strong a hold on European popular imagination as did other perils during the same period. The parallel with the yellow peril is illuminating: the latter appeared as the supreme menace in many science-fiction stories, and there was a broad consensus among Western powers on its reality.Footnote 87 In contrast, the “American danger” lacked many elements to be felt as a real threat. The “yellow peril” combined a military component (supposedly, Japan was arming China as a prelude to their common invasion Europe), an economic dimension (Asiatic labor taking the work of white people in their own countries), and of course a cultural aspect. Since the eighteenth century, Europeans stressed personal responsibility and individual accomplishment as key elements of the democratic modernity. These virtues appeared as the opposite of the authoritarian bureaucracy of the former absolutist regimes. This vision contributed to a new European discourse on Asia, which was seen as a repository of despotism and inaction.Footnote 88 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the figure of the Asiatic as the Other was completely integrated into the Western weltanschauung. This Other was both despised and feared. The Asiatic's demographic vitality was, in the age of science, associated with a pandemic that should be eradicated.Footnote 89
The United States did not represent the otherness for Europe and thus could not provoke these types of fears. There was another reason that the American republic did not really seem threatening: the United States had no enemies among the European powers. When one again examines science fiction, it is remarkable that in about four hundred novels dealing with invasion scares, the main countries presented as potential invaders are France, England, and Germany. For example, until 1903, when Germany began to displace it, France was considered in this literature as the most likely invader of England.Footnote 90 The figure of the hereditary enemy was still the most efficient to mobilize the emotions of public opinion. The same pattern was evident in French writing, with England gradually displaced as the probable enermy by Germany.Footnote 91
Propaganda about the “American danger” reflected circumstances in Europe as well as in the United States, but the strength of this agitation in Germany has to do with the fact that it was considered a useful tool to mobilize the national economic community. This was not the case in England and France because in these countries that part was already played by Germany itself. The United States, which was far less aggressive in its exports, did not provide a threatening enough alternative. In Germany, on account of its economic superiority within Europe, the “American danger” was the only argument that could be used to rally different economic interests against a common threat. Thus, it would be misleading to interpret this “danger” as an expression of any special “German angst.”Footnote 92 Rather, it was a particular manifestation of a general aspiration, in a democratic era that legitimized political opposition, to forge national unity, economic as well as political.
In Germany, a widespread conviction had taken hold that the national economy had to be challenged in order to grow, which explains how easily the United States became a substitute for an apparently stagnant England, which remained by the way the most important political and cultural competitor for the Germans. This challenge does not seem to have inculcated any deep sense of fear in the German public, but maybe one should not seek such feelings to demonstrate the effectiveness of the “American danger.” As Uffa Jensen remarks, “There has been too much attention in the study of emotions to ‘strong emotions’ such as hate, fear, anger….Of course, this is easier to investigate, analyze and categorize. But it seems to me that most of our personal lives are spent having moods, sentiments or feelings, not such strong emotions.”Footnote 93 Science-fiction literature has been used in this study to better understand the fears at work inside public opinion, but at the same time, one should not forget that this was also entertainment literature. In the context of a Europe full of its successes, writers and readers could play with feelings of fear. The dominant mood was optimism, defined as the conviction that one could improve one's situation by one's own means. Germany was fully European in this respect. Germans were keen on cultivating a discourse of vulnerability as a way to underline the difference between their youthful and buoyant country and “older”—which meant less vigorous—industrial states such as Great Britain. In keeping with this perspective, German authors insisted that the United States were aging, thus becoming more Europeanized, with the consequence that the Americans would cease to present any real danger.Footnote 94
