Spring 2008

When a reporter for the German magazine Stern glimpses in Barack Obama “the ancient American tale of one single hero in the fight against the system,” or when an Arab poll respondent says he despises predatory U.S. leaders but admires ordinary Americans, both are drawing from a stock of archetypal images that dates back two centuries. The American Revolution might have cut ties with the British Empire, but it did not rid the U.S. of any number of opinionated foreigners. Even those few Old Worlders who came to compliment the civilization of the New, as Lafayette did on his triumphant return to American shores in 1825, felt themselves able to remark mainly on the relative, rather than absolute, qualities of the new nation: the republic had shown, George Washington’s old comrade noted, “progress” since he had last seen it—there had been “wonders of creation and improvement.”

More commminstrelon were the scolders and scandalized of Europe’s elite. Shocked at the determination of her fellow travelers to cram more baggage on her coach than it could decently carry, a visiting Frances Trollope protested, “No law, sir, can permit such conduct as this.” She elicited the loud reaction of backwoods laissez-faire: “We makes our own laws, and governs our own selves . . . this is a free country, we have no laws here, and we don’t want no foreign power to tyrannize over us.” Mrs. Trollope thought the association of law with tyranny revealing, even if it came from men who had “evidently been drinking more than an [sic] usual portion of whiskey.” It suggested a bias on behalf of convenience as against custom, lawlessness transformed into freedom. And it typified the ways in which Americans drew distinctions between themselves and Europe.

From such collisions, a uniquely American character began to emerge. Or, rather, an entire cast of American characters—images and archetypes that distinguished, and continue to distinguish, the new world from the old. Try as we may to control our image with public diplomacy campaigns, we still see ourselves as others see us, in portraits drawn from long-ago encounters.

Eric Rauchway is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America.

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