The American Dream Abroad

Introduction

Since the Pilgrims emigrated from England in 1620, America has represented a place of freedom and financial gain. While the Separatists fled to the New World for religious acceptance, cultural identity, and civil autonomy, merchant investors in the Virginia Company of London looked to make a profit on exploration and newly found territory. Both groups saw the potential for expansion and wealth; the untouched land offered fulfillment financially and spiritually. As the pilgrims sought to spread their church doctrine and populate their faith, the merchants sought new ways to fill their monetary coffers. The New World symbolized a new life, nearly free from tyranny.

But the dream built on American democracy has inspired mixed emotions, from admiration to distrust. In 1833, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, a study of why the republican representative democracy in America is successful. In the book, he discusses why this particular form of government fails elsewhere, including in his home country, and hypothesizes about the future of American democracy. Though Tocqueville mused on what worked about the system, he also pointed out possible dangers, including the tyranny of majority. But ultimately, Tocqueville recognized the potential for America to one day become a global force of power.

As a nation so powerful, America continued to prompt curiosity and interest abroad, especially with men of letters. In 1842, Englishman Charles Dickens, though primarily known for his fiction, wrote American Notes for General Circulation, a travelogue that not only described geography and landscape for his British readership, but also provided an outsider's look at American society. He chronicled his experiences visiting mental institutions, prisons, and even tobacco spitting contests. He criticized copyright laws as well as slavery, and tried to be fair in his assessment of the country, or even favorable, as noted in his preface: "Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour of the United States…. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing."

At the turn of the twentieth century, the American dream called to people worldwide. Between 1900 and 1910, over nine million immigrants entered the United States. Though centuries had passed since the arrival of the pilgrims, people still came to America because of religious persecution, as well as social and economic opportunities. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson reminded people about their patriotic duty and global responsibility as Americans. During his second inaugural address, he prepared the country for its participation in World War I, clearly stating what the United States would "stand for, whether in war or in peace":

That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and in the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for their maintenance; that the essential principle of peace is the actual equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege;… that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common thought, purpose or power of the family of nations;… that national armaments shall be limited to the necessities of national order and domestic safety; that the community of interest and of power upon which peace must henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding from its own citizens meant to encourage or assist revolution in other states should be sternly and effectually suppressed and prevented.

Wilson's rhetoric of international unity is exemplified by the American Field Service's involvement with the French Army between 1915 and 1917. The AFS, a group of approximately twenty-five American men, served in the ambulance and automobile services, helping transport troops both on and off the battlefields. In his history of the AFS, A. Piatt Andrew quotes a French officer who praised the American volunteers in 1916:

The American Field Service is the finest flower of the magnificent wreath offered by the great America to her little Latin sister. Those, who like you and your friends have consecrated themselves entirely to our cause, up to and including the supreme sacrifice, deserve more than our gratitude. We cannot think of them in the future as other than our own.

Andrew notes that the admiration was mutual, quoting President Sills of Bowdoin College the same year: "The drivers in the American Ambulance Field Service showed France that chivalry was not dead in America, and carried to the gallant and hard-pressed French people the sympathy of the United States that was never neutral."

The strength, sympathy, and support of America were summoned once again during World War II when Hitler and his Nazi Party systematically invaded and conquered Europe. Though America did not officially enter the war until 1941 after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the nation was already supplying Europe and Asia with war resources to sustain the efforts. America's victory in World War II cemented its reputation as a superpower. A leader in spearheading the United Nations, the United States was instrumental in implementing peace treaties, re-parceling territories, and drawing new boundaries. From 1948 to 1952, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall's "European Recovery Program," commonlny known as the Marshall Plan, spent $13 billion in aid to rebuild Western Europe. With this plan's American values, ideals, and trade relations, war-torn Europe prospered.

In the coming decades, the diplomatic and economic authority of the United States made the nation even more of a haven for immigrants than it had been for the pilgrims. The country's participation in the Korean War and the Vietnam Conflict demonstrated American strong-arm, and although many people protested America's involvement, the undeniable might showed people around the world that the nation would not easily back down. Seeking refuge in a country that faced its battles and fought for citizens beyond its borders seemed a logical choice. Despite the controversy of the Iraq War and Middle Eastern politics, the twenty-first century still finds the American dream alive overseas. But in some ways, American prosperity and success has tempered the golden image; what represents a hopeful dream for many is seen as excessive and materialistic by others.

America the Beautiful

Though the chance for personal freedom and democracy beckoned most immigrants to the New World, the idea of wide open spaces and unique landscape was another incentive. Just as Charles Dickens visited in the nineteenth century, Simone de Beauvoir, French intellectual, theorist, and writer, headed for the United States in 1947 on a four-month tour of American culture. After traveling from college to college on a lecture circuit, she wrote America Day by Day, a journal comprised of souvenirs, memories, letters, and notes from her trip on buses, cars, and trains. Though she was intrigued and impressed by America's landscape, she explored the nation's true colors and textures through a variety of cultural experiences, socializing with people everywhere from drugstores and Ivy League schools to slaughterhouses and burlesques. In the book, she provides a keen look at America not only from a foreign woman's perspective, but also from the perspective of those interesting characters she meets. De Beauvoir is both fascinated and repelled by the American scene. "America is so vast," de Beauvoir writes, "that nothing anyone can say about it is true." When dining with some friends who emigrated from Spain, she also recognizes that beauty may be in the eye of the beholder: "I know that for many refugees, America has been a land of exile, not a place they've come to love…. They say life is cruel in New York for immigrants and for the poor."

Nearly fifty years later, America possesses that same contradicting allure for Beppe Severgnini, an Italian writer who moved to the United States with his wife. Severgnini, unlike de Beauvoir, appreciates the United States with a humorous outlook in his book, Ciao, America!. Renting a house in Washington, D.C., Severgnini and his wife develop a fascination with ice cubes, recliner chairs, and yard sales, and along the way, observe American mannerisms, morals, and social customs. The Severgninis, like Dickens and de Beauvoir, sought the "real" America and left no stone unturned in their quest, making even a simple shopping trip a lesson in what it means to be American. But the best thing about America, Severgnini muses, is the facility of American bureaucracy:

For Italians coming to live in the United States, the greatest satisfaction derives not from seeing films six months before they are released in Italy, or choosing from fifty different kinds of breakfast cereal, or reading two kilos of newspaper on a Sunday morning. What really tickles our epiglottis is grappling with American bureaucracy. Why is that? It's because, having trained on the Italian version, we feel like a matador faced with a milk cow. It's a pushover.

America Goes Abroad

In Henry James's The American, written in 1877, France plays host to retired young American Christopher Newman as he takes his first tour of Europe. He falls in love with Claire, but her family cannot tolerate his materialistic and gauche ways. Essentially, this novel deals with the clash between old world European traditions and the corruption of new world American manners. Newman's experiences are loosely based on those of the author, who had spent his youth traveling between the United States and Europe and was educated in cities such as Paris, Bonn, and Geneva.

Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949), though published more than seventy years after The American, also tells the story of three wealthy Americans and their experiences in a foreign land, this time North Africa. In contrast to James's witty, social tale, Bowles tells the edgy, sensual, existentialist story of married couple Port and Kit Moresby and their friend George Tunner. The theme familiar in James's novel—corruption of American values—also takes hold in this novel as Port, Kit, and Tunner desire intimacy with one another but can never connect emotionally. By the end of the book, the characters' lack of appreciation for time, life, love, or even death leads them to tragedy. Their lives are boundless, a very American notion, as shown in this musing from Port:

Because we don't know [when we will die], we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Several years later, in 1955, Graham Greene uses his personal experiences in Vietnam to write The Quiet American, a novel set in 1950s Saigon. In this story about the conflict mounting in Vietnam, British journalist Thomas Fowler, young American Alden Pyle, and Fowler's Vietnamese mistress Phuong make up the triangle of main characters. Their complex relationship provides a framework for the novel as Fowler and Pyle's battle for Phuong's attentions mirrors the idea of the United States' potential colonization of Vietnam. Idealistic and driven, Pyle wants to "save the east for democracy" and does not mind killing innocent people for the greater good of social and national development. American patriotism motivates his sense of social justice: "He was absorbed already in the dilemmas of democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined … to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve." Greene criticized American involvement in Vietnam and offers Pyle as a critique of foreign policy.

In contrast to The American, The Sheltering Sky, and The Quiet American, Betty Mahmoody's book Not Without My Daughter is not about an American touring a foreign country for pure pleasure and cultural awakening. However, like the novels by Bowles and Greene, Mahmoody's novel is based on personal experiences and deals with the challenges and harsh realities of crossing cultures. Written in 1987, the true story recounts Mahmoody's difficult journey, from the moment her Iranian husband convinces her to bring their daughter Mahtob to visit his family in Iran to the moment she must flee the country with Mahtob, eighteen months later. Mahmoody's emotional struggle begins when her husband says she can return home, but Mahtob must remain. Mahmoody and her daughter stay in Iran for eighteen months, imprisoned by Islamic fundamentalism and misogyny. In Iran, Mahmoody becomes the property of her husband; she cannot do anything without his permission. Again, the idea of America and being American disintegrates on foreign soil; its power and patriotism dissolve into the old world strength of another homeland, another culture, and other traditions.

U.S. Foreign Policies, a Foreign Perspective

Like Graham Greene, Canadian writer and feminist Margaret Atwood uses her poetic and fictional work to criticize and comment on political issues. But just after the turn of the twenty-first century, on March 27, 2003, she wrote "A Letter to America," a personal letter to the newspaper the Nation, wagging her finger at the deterioration of American strength, morality, and leadership and attacking American action in Iraq. In directly addressing America, she points out how the nation used to set the intellectual and entertainment trends with Mickey Mouse, Marlon Brando, Walt Whitman, and Ernest Hemingway. She notes how she used to admire, even revere America. But America, by "gutting its Constitution," "torching the American economy," and "running up a record level of debt," is slowing losing its power and prestige. Adressing America directly, Atwood writes,

If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They'll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They'll think you've abandoned the rule of law. They'll think you've fouled your own nest.

Margaret Atwood uses humor, satire, nostalgia, and personal sentiment to present her case and express her feelings about the direction of American policies, foreign and domestic. In 2006, Gary Shteyngart combined similar rhetorical styles in Absurdistan, a clever satire about what America means to Russian Misha Vainberg, who attended college in America and fondly remembers those optimistic days of excess and pleasure. He now leads a luxurious life in Russia on an inheritance from his murdered mobster father, but he longs to return to the States where his girlfriend lives in the Bronx. Because of his father's shady actions, Vainberg cannot obtain a visa. He heads for the minor republic Absurdistan in hopes of rectifying the situation, but political conflict in the territory, ironically backed by American dollars and democracy, stops his dream cold. Rather than providing a direct hit like Atwood, Shteyngart employs farce to show, from a global perspective, how absurd people are in their biases, prejudices, and opinions of each other. Echoing the same themes as James's The American, yet told in a more contemporary, more preposterous fashion, Absurdistan reveals the ways in which foreign and American attitudes clash and affect each other socially and politically.

The inverse of outside opinions about the pursuit of the American dream at home is inside opinions about the fostering of the American dream abroad—American influence in foreign affairs, that is. Never has one opinion been so contrary to the American notion of its righteousness in the world than when Fidel Castro denounced imperialism and colonialism at the United Nations in a speech delivered before the U.N. General Assembly in September 1960, blaming the United States for the plight of impoverished Cubans:

Of course, as far as the President of the United States is concerned, we have betrayed our people, but it would certainly not have been considered so, if, instead of the Revolutionary Government being true to its people, it had been loyal to the big American monopolies that exploited the economy of our country. At least, let note be taken here of the wonders the Revolution found when it came to power. They were no more and no less than the usual wonder of imperialism, which are in themselves the wonders of the free world as far as we, the colonies, are concerned!

Carlos Fuentes's novel The Eagle's Throne (2006) uses a satirical strategy to comment on America's fictional political positioning in 2020. Though the world has not changed much, Condoleeza Rice is the U.S. president, the United States has conquered Colombia, and Mexico is demanding its withdrawal. In reply to Mexico's demands, the United States shuts down Mexico's communication systems. Written in epistolary style, as the characters communicate by letters, this futuristic tale veils Fuentes's commentary on the authoritarian morphing of "American" democracy in Mexico. As Fuentes said wryly at a February 2006 talk in London, "We always know who will be president [of Mexico], because we know it a year ahead of elections."

Conclusion: The American Dream, A Global Tangle

The American dream is still famous around the world. The land of opportunity and instant success continues to gleam with certain promise, encouraging immigration and subsequently stirring that nation nicknamed "the melting pot." America, as in the lyrics to the national anthem, remains "the land of the free and the home of the brave," and in the Statue of Liberty's signature poem, those "yearning to breathe free" continue to land on American shores. But globally, the idea of America, or Americans, will forever evoke a complicated tangle of social, political, and geographical assumptions and expectations.

SOURCES

Andrew, A. Piatt, "History of the American Field Service, Part 1," net.lib.byu.edu/∼rdh7/wwi/memoir/AFShist/AFS1a.htm (December 15, 2006).

Atwood, Margaret, "A Letter to America," in the Nation, March 27, 2003, www.thenation.com/doc/20030414/atwood (January 9, 2007).

Bowles, Paul, The Sheltering Sky, Harper Perennial, 1998, p.238; originally published in 1949.

Castro, Fidel, "Address to the United Nations General Assembly, 1969," Castro Speech Data Base: Speeches, Interviews, Articles: 1959–1996, lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro/1960/19600926 (December 15, 2006).

de Beauvoir, Simone, America Day by Day, University of California Press, 1999; originally published as L'Amerique on Jour le Jour, Editions Gallimard, 1954.

Dickens, Charles, "Preface to the Charles Dickens Edition," in American Notes for General Circulation, Kessinger Publishing, 2004, p. 3; originally published in 1850.

Greene, Graham, The Quiet American, Penguin, 1991, p. 13, originally published in 1955.

Mahmoody, Betty, Not Without My Daughter, St. Martin's Press, 1991, p. 16.

Severgnini, Beppe, Ciao, America!, Broadway Press, 2003, p. 13.

Wilson, Woodrow, "Second Inaugural Address," March 5, 1917, The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/wilson2.htm (December 15, 2006).