Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
169
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
Joseph Eaton∗
Anti-Americanism is old, even older than the United States of America.
Many Enlightenment intellectuals held a very negative view about the
New World in regards to physical nature in the Americas.
It was
believed that plants, animals, and even humans degenerated in the New
World. The assumption of American physical degeneracy persisted well
into the nineteenth century, far longer than historians of the controversy
have acknowledged.
The degeneracy issue blended well with newly
developing political and cultural critiques of the young United States.
Key words: anti-Americanism, Buffon, DePauw, Jefferson,
Enlightenment, degeneration
Foreign animosity towards the United States is most often associated
with causes relating to what is perceived as Americans’ attempts at
hegemony – an aggressive foreign policy, the competitive nature of what
is presumed to be the American model of capitalism, and the magnetism
of American popular culture amongst the masses worldwide, etc.
In fact
a particularly virulent strain of anti-Americanism predated the creation of
∗
Joseph Eaton is currently Visiting Fulbright Professor in the Graduate Institute of
American Studies at Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taiwan. Eaton, a historian, is a
graduate of Columbia University (Ph.D. 2004). His research interests include American
rejoinders to foreign criticism in the early nineteenth century and Western perceptions of
China. Dr. Eaton can be reached at [email protected].
Tamkang Journal of International Affairs
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the United States by some decades and the development of a
Marxist/leftist critique by over a hundred years. The accusations against
America also depended upon an assumption of American weakness.
Long before the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford,
Coca-Cola, Hollywood, Iraq War, or Starbucks, European commentators
offered up a less than charitable opinion on the prospects of the New
World.
Many prominent figures in the European Enlightenment damned
the birthplace of Franklin and Jefferson for being physically unfit to
receive
European
civilization.
Long
before
a
prominent
twentieth-century critic described American culture as having the qualities
of a desert, American physical nature was depicted by European elites as
being void of the attributes that would be able to nourish a successful
New World civilization.1
Criticisms of American natural degeneracy
persisted well into the nineteenth century, longer than scholars have
generally understood, combining agreeably with increasingly political and
cultural disparagement.
The Enlightenment’s Condemnation of America
Sometimes described as a “child” of the Enlightenment, the territory
that became the United States was not given the collective blessing of the
intellectual movement and may indeed be considered its victim. During
the eighteenth century, it was presumed by many that life in the New
World (plant, animal and sometimes human) was inferior to that of the
Old.
1
The entire hemisphere suffered from a resulting decay and
Jean Baudrillard, America, Chris Turner trans. (reprint, Verso, 1989).
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
corruption.2
171
Many of Europe’s most renowned thinkers contributed to
shaping this image of American physical degeneracy.
Georges-Louis
Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) was preeminent in the effort to
impugn America.
Buffon was one of the leading scientists in Europe,
renowned for his bold theories and style.
In the Histoire naturelle (15
volumes, 1749-1767), Buffon condemned American nature outright: “[In
America] Nature is weaker, less active, and more circumscribed in the
variety of her productions [than in the Old World].” On what basis did
Buffon make such a statement?
By comparison with Old World varieties,
American animals suffered: “No American animal can be compared with
the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the dromedary, the
camelopard, the buffalo, the lion, the tiger, etc.”
Even species that
America shared in common with the Old World - including bears, stag,
roebuck, reindeer, hares, squirrels, hedgehogs, otters, rats, moles, beavers,
wolves, and foxes - were shown to be inferior in comparison.
American
varieties whether “native or transported,” were in all cases smaller than
their Old World “original.” Buffon claimed this result to be true of
domesticated animals: “All the animals which have been transported from
Europe to America, as the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, the
hog, the dog, etc., have become smaller.”3
2
Antonello Gerbi's The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900
(La disputa del Nuovo Mondo: Storia di una polemica, 1750-1900, 1955) trans. Jeremy
Moyle, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973, is a superb and wide-ranging
work that looks at this question as it was comprehended by a galaxy of Europeans of
various intellectual backgrounds, an intellectual history of Europe focused through this
single question. As is explained below, Gerbi might have given even more attention to
the question of physical nature in the nineteenth century.
3
Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake, An
Eighteenth-Century Controversy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1967),
53, 58-59, 60.
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Humankind was not exempt from degeneracy, as Buffon claimed of
the indigenous peoples of the New World: “In the savage, the organs of
generation are small and feeble.
the female.
...
He has no hair, no beard, no ardor for
His sensations are less acute [than Europeans]; and
yet he is more timid and cowardly.
He has no vivacity, no activity of
mind. . . . They have no ardour for women, and, of course, no love to
mankind.”4
Other writers contributed to the litany of negatives facing the New
World. The Abbé Corneille de Pauw, a Dutchman, was particularly
condemning.
As de Pauw explained, the Americas excelled in producing
just poisonous animals as the hemisphere had been flooded with “lizards,
snakes, serpents, reptiles, and insects
...
monstrous in their size and
the power of their poison extracted from the juice of this earth, so barren,
so vitiated, so abandoned, where the nutritive sap became sour like milk
in the breasts of animals that do not propagate.”
De Pauw added that “it
is well known that dogs brought to the New World from the Old lose their
faculty of barking”!5
Causes for Degeneracy
Buffon and his successors gave climate as the cause of American
degeneracy.
America was humid, cursed with high mountains, thick
forests, and excessive standing water, all of which made America a cold
4
5
Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?, 60-61.
Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?, 83-86.
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
173
place relative to the Old World.6
Why all of the humidity?
As was generally explained, there were
Biblical causes to America’s inferior climate. Due to the severity of the
Flood in the Americas, the animals and peoples there were never able to
recover; America would be deprived of society and civilization so long as
remains of the Deluge continued to produce cold and humidity.
With
few human inhabitants to tame nature in the New World, it would be
impossible for America to progress through all but the most basic
evolutionary stages.
The Americas had been cursed by a terrible
equation: a more difficult climate = less human development; less human
involvement in the environment = the impossibility of mitigating the
harshness of American nature.
Although modern readers might cringe at eighteenth-century
understandings of climatic influences on civilization in the New World
(and particularly Enlightenment optimism concerning man-made climate
change), such commentary about American nature provides insights into
Enlightenment-era fears regarding changes brought about by the
discovery of the New World.
The debate over the New World might tell
a modern reader of the anxieties facing Enlightenment Europe.
As the
historians Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti explained, the
6
"Climate,” as understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, includes not only
what we would describe as temperature but broader environmental factors including
terrain, shelter, as well as plant and animal life. The importance of climate to
contemporary debates about Asia and America was enormous. As related to the debate
over America, it is important to note the high estimation of the effects of humidity and
temperature on civilization: "The hygrometer and thermometer almost became a standard
part of a scholar's equipment." P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of
Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982), 275.
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eighteenth century “problem of America” was very much one of European
politics and philosophy.7
The Enlightenment vision of America suited
European needs and reflected anxieties.
America became a symbol by
which to debate the merits and shortcomings of trends and events that
might shape debates within European intellectual and political life about
political economy, primitivism, republicanism, emigration, etc.
Lots of
things had gone wrong since the discovery of the New World, from a
European perspective. Syphilis, a gift of the Americas, had infected and
killed millions.
Colonization of the Americas brought warfare and little
beneficial impact, while Europe faced the prospect of depopulation.
The
search for precious metals in the New World brought frustrations and
inflation. Agriculture suffered because of the inordinate emphasis on
global trade.
In sum, the Old World had suffered from the New World.
The Debate Continued
The eighteenth-century debate over American nature, initially
conducted with an eye to the important Spanish and Portugese Latin
American colonies, shaped the European view of the United States of
America well into the nineteenth century.
As the relative power of los
Norteamericanos increased, both economically/politically and in the
European imagination, the New Republic became the central focus of old
calumnies.
7
Arguments suggesting a primitiveness of American nature
"With each passing year it became increasingly clear that those who took sides on the
Problem of America were really using America as a kind of stalking horse for their own
battles, campaigns, and crusades.
. . .
it was clear that those who asked "Was
America a Mistake?" were not really talking about the New World, but about Nature and
Civilization, Mercantilism and Physiocracy, about the corruption and misfortunes that
afflicted their own societies." Was America a Mistake?, 23, 27.
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
175
combined with notions of inferiority of intellect and culture in the United
States.
Historians of the debate over North American physical nature have
usually emphasized the changing terms of the debate, after American
Independence, as the politics and egalitarian societal structure of the
United States became a threat to European elites. In his magnificent
work, La disputa del Nuovo Mondo (1955, English translation 1973),
Antonello Gerbi attempted, prematurely, I believe, to put to rest the
Buffon-DePauw controversy.
Gerbi saw the question of New World
inferiority as having been focused, post-1776, around issues such as the
problem of American slavery in light of professed ideals of liberty and
equality, the perceived low level of manners, the American’s failure to
respect copyright, and the tendency to violence in the United States.8
the contrary, I see a strong continuation of the controversy.
To
European
disparagement of American physical nature continued to exist alongside
more novel criticisms of republicanism and democracy.
8
“The specific themes of the polemic provoked by Buffon disappear, and the name de
Pauw falls into the most complete oblivion. . . . thus the European criticism shifts
rapidly from the physical nature of the continent to the society formed therein. . . .
The crudeness of American manners was described and caricatured by such writers as
Mrs. Trollope and Charles Dickens, and in fact by almost all the travelers emunctae naris.
But their disdain for the social life of the United States no longer leans on inflexible laws
of nature, nor is it enriched by fatuous references to degeneration.
. . . The
naturalistic and biological themes recede ever further into the background, to be replaced
by increasingly substantial and insistent social and political notions, criticisms of the
young nation's way of life, its prejudices, its own special arrogance, and constitutional
defects.” The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, (La
disputa del Nuovo Mondo: Storia di una polemica, 1750-1900 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 443, 460, 468.
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Commager and Giordanetti, like Gerbi, explain that the terms of
debate changed after American independence: "Now they [European
critics] were writing about the new United States rather than the New
World; now they were writing economics and history rather than
philosophy."9
Another expert on American influence on Europe notes,
"The real response to Buffon and de Pauw was already seen in events.
The rise of the United States and its spectacular growth demonstrated the
bankruptcy of their philosophy from the first day."10
Similarly, general
works dealing with travel literature deny any remaining debate of a
Buffonian-dePauwian nature.11
My understanding of nineteenth-century European commentary on
America is not so sanguine when it comes to the question of physical
nature. It is illustrative to examine just two of Gerbi's examples pertaining
to his claim regarding the absence of a Buffon/de Pauw controversy in the
nineteenth century. In regards to Francis Wright, a very pro-American
radical, Gerbi remarks, "Of the more ancient slanderers who had
denigrated the physical nature of the continent she never speaks, and
seems to have no direct knowledge of them." Concerning the outspoken
convert to anti-Americanism, Frances Trollope, Gerbi explains, "All in all
the country is beautiful, the air fresh, and the climate good, the stars
brilliant and the animal and vegetable life exuberantly rich; but the
9
Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?, 34.
Germán Arciniengas, America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 154.
11
Jane Mesick, in The English Traveller in America, 1785-1835 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1922), did not include the debate in her chapter on "Famous
Controversies." Max Berger ignored the debate in his The British Traveller in America,
1836-1860 (New York: Columbia, 1943).
10
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
people
. . . are really unbearable.
magnificent."
177
. . . The natural phenomena are
12
In fact, Wright's comments are often times focused around the
question of degeneration and are meant to deflect criticisms of the United
States. Physical nature needed to be defended for American democracy to
be right. Relying on a friend’s second-hand account, Wright portrayed
Morris Birkbeck’s southeastern Illinois “English Prairie” in extremely
fertile terms: “The prairie in which it stands is described as exquisitely
beautiful: lawns of unchanging verdure, spreading over hills and dales,
scattered with islands of luxuriant trees, dropped by the hand of nature
with a taste that art could not rival – all this spread beneath a sky of
glowing and unspotted sapphires.”13
That Wright would give a physical
description of a place that she had not yet seen is some proof of the
importance of the degeneracy debate for those who wanted to defend the
United States.
Wright’s comments regarding the air in New York’s harbor might also
be read within the lens of her very pro-American politics: "We
approached these shores under a fervid sun, but the air, though of a higher
temperature than I had ever before experienced, was so entirely free of
vapor, that I thought it was for the first time in my life that I had drawn a
clear breath.”
America’s notorious humidity was absent from Wright’s
first breaths, an inhalation of the air of liberty. In her travels, when Wright
noticed some streams that were poisoned with putrid water, she attributed
12
Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 471, 473, 475.
Frances Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America, ed. Paul R. Baker
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 136.
13
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the causes to local malfeasance by humans. The general climate, Wright
remarked, “seems to be peculiarly healthy and highly favorable to the
growth of the human figure.”
America had been blessed by nature.14
Conversely, Trollope began her Domestic Manners of the Americans
with a denunciation of American nature.
Her first vision of America, at
the mouth of the Mississippi River, was a "dreary scene”: “It was not
without a feeling of regret that we passed from the bright blue waves . . .
into the murky stream. . . . I never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as
this entrance of the Mississippi.
Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn
images of another Bolgia from its horrors.” 15
Trollope’s literary
reference aside, she was elaborating on the long-standing imagery
depicting America as a land of horrors. Trollope’s vision of America
was one suffering from physical decay and not just democratic
ineptitude.16
The debate over America was slow to subside. My extended reading
of nineteenth–century European writings on America shows that
references to American physical nature, both critical of American physical
14
Wright, Views of Society and Manners, 8, 121, 234.
Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) (New York: Penguin,
1997), 9, 10, 11.
16
Pratt explains that Gerbi underestimates the importance of the lingering controversy
in the work of the German Alexander von Humboldt and his attempt as vindicating
"Wild and Gigantic Nature" in South America: "Gerbi sees his [Humboldt's] position in
the dispute as "anomalous" and "somewhat marginal," exercising only a "belated and
lateral influence." . . . I have found it most useful to treat Humboldt's writings and
the querelle d'Amerique as intersecting phenomena shaped by shared European
preoccupations and anxieties with respect to the Americas." Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992), 120. In her Imperial Eyes:
Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt similarly explains that
15
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
179
nature and in its defense, were very prominent in European commentary
on the New Republic.
Questioning of American physical conditions
persisted into the nineteenth century, giving doubt to the prospects for
future material and intellectual growth of the republic.17
The generation of European intellectuals before the French Revolution
had attacked American nature, their real targets being overseas trade,
colonization, and the notion of a Noble Savage.
Nineteenth-century
writers used the question of nature as a means to attack republicanism and
the democratic aspects of the American experiment.
Eighteenth century
comparisons between American pumas and African lions (what did
Europe have to offer to the debate?) were replaced by recurring doubts
about the political and cultural tendencies of the New Republic. Other
practically oriented doubts about the unhealthiness of temperature,
inadequate scenery, and crop output also persisted. The importance of
the degeneracy thesis was shown not just in the sheer quantity of
nineteenth-century references to American physical nature but in their
outwardly political emphasis.
As had been the case in the eighteenth century, many of the ongoing
critiques were of an avian nature.
The arch-Tory traveler Thomas
Hamilton brought out the long-standing charge against American birds,
Gerbi understates his case in discussion of Alexander von Humboldt and South America.
Durand Echeverria, in his work, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of
American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), correctly notes
that, "The theory of American degeneration by no means disappeared with the American
Revolution. Buffon's words were still being read
. . . Morever, De Pauw's and
Raynal's ideas were absorbed and diffused by other writers" (64). I believe this also to
be apparent in the case of the British Isles.
17
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that they were aphonic: “It was June, yet there were no birds pouring
melody through these dismal woodlands.
How different are the
Canadian forests from the woods of Old England!”18 Such criticism
suited Hamilton’s purpose of combating emigration.
Poets and travelers had long described the absence of the nightingale
as a sign of nature’s parsimony in the New World.
Perhaps no one took
the metaphor further than the German speaking poet, Hungarian Nikolas
Lenau.
Expecting to find solutions to Europe’s political problems in
America, instead, Lenau found degeneration and death: "How do I like it
in America? . . . . As you know, there is no nightingale here, altogether no
real songbirds.
This seems to me to be a poetic curse on the land, and of
deep significance.
Nature here is never so joyful or sad that it must sing.
It has no soul and no imagination and therefore can give nothing of the
kind to its creatures.”
Immigrants would suffer the curse of America: “It
is quite sad, the sight of these burnt-out men in their burnt-out woods.
The German immigrants make an especially deadly impression on me.
After they have been here for several years all the fire that they brought
from home has disappeared to the last spark."19
The French philosopher
Constantin-Francois Volney claimed to have traveled from Louisville,
Kentucky to Vincennes, Indiana "without hearing the song of a single
bird."20
In contrast, the German Gottfried Duden, who advocated emigration
18
Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2 volumes (Augustus Kelley: New
York, 1968), 2:356.
19
Quoted in Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and the
North American Indians (Cambridge: University Press, 1998), 121-22.
20
Quoted in M. H. Dunlop, Sixty Miles from Contentment: Traveling the
Nineteenth-Century American Interior (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 31.
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
181
to certain parts of the United States, defended America’s birds: "You can
scarcely imagine how much pleasure I derive from the wild birds of this
country. That there are no good songbirds in North America is a ridiculous
exaggeration, which the contrast of the voice to the beautiful colors of
their feathers seems to have given rise to.” Duden necessarily referred to
that one species whose absence America never could be forgiven for:
“Actually one misses only the nightingale. The rest of America's
songbirds can compete very well with those of Europe.
. . . Instead of
the cuckoo of the old world, one hears everywhere here the soft, plaintive
notes of the turtledove, to which the cooing of the European species
cannot be compared."21
Joseph John Gurney, who came to America to visit Quaker brethren,
gave a sympathetic picture of American wild flowers correspondent to his
generally favorable overall portrait of the United States: "There were also
to be seen, as we passed along, a variety of wild plants which would, in
England, be considered fit ornaments for the garden; the blue and
crimson.”22
Positive references to American nature were framed in terms that
would flatter political/societal possibilities. The radical pro-American
Harriet Martineau described the United States as a caterpillar that should
21
Gottfried Duden, Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America and a
Stay of Several Years Along the Missouri (During the Years 1824, '25, '26, and 1827) ed.
James M. Goodrich (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1980), 118-19.
22
Joseph John Gurney, A Journey in North America, Described in Familiar Letters to
Amelia Opie (Norwich, Josiah Fletcher, 1841), 12.
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“anticipate the bright day when it will be a butterfly."23
Progressives of
Martineau’s generation saw great opportunities for the rejuvenation of
mankind in America: "Never was a country more gifted by nature."24
Though her picture of American democracy was not unproblematic,
particularly regarding slavery, Martineau employed an analogy from
nature to explain the future of the United States. Sometimes Americans
did not live up to their ideals, but the American system, and America itself,
was a beautiful land. Morris Birkbeck, an advocate of the United States
and founder of an “English Prairie” settlement in Illinois explained that
American snakes and mosquitoes were not as bad as Europeans feared.
Pests
and
plagues
would
disappear
completely
with
further
development.25
Another traveler referenced Buffon directly when describing the
height of Kentucky men:
The King of Prussia would easily have filled up his
regiment of tall Grenadiers if he could have
recruited among the Kentuckians, as almost every
man in the State would have been considered a
good recruit.
23
I am certain if Monsieur de Buffon
Harriet Martineau, Society in America (1837) ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1981), 271. J. Hector St John de
Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer contains perhaps the most famous
defense of American nature and its rejuvenating effect on European civilization. In the
Old World he explained, the masses "were as so many useless plants, wasting, vegetative
mould and refreshing showers. They withered; and were moved down by want, hunger,
and war; but now, but the power of transplantation, like all other plants, they have taken
root and flourished!" Letters from an American Farmer (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 43.
24
Martineau, Society in America, 131.
25
Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America, From the Coast of Virginia to the
Territory of Illinois, 4th edition (London: James Ridgway, 1818). 139-40.
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
183
could have seen them, he would have completely
altered his opinion, that men degenerate in the New
World.26
These remarks show very clearly that the Buffon-de Pauw
controversy was alive and well into the nineteenth century.
Some very pro-American travelers attempted to turn the variable
nature of the American climate into a positive.
Patrick Shirreff, who
went to North America to scout the possibilities for Scottish farmers,
explained that daily variations in temperature helped to produce moisture
from evaporation, producing luxuriant and beautiful vegetation.27 Miguel
Cabrera de Nevares, a Spanish liberal with a favorable opinion of
America, argued that harsh changes in weather made Americans stronger.
Nevares turned the degeneracy thesis on its head: “Rapid temperature
change naturally produces a corresponding favorable flexibility in the
constitution.
Americans . . . are more energetic and quick in their
muscular movements than are the Europeans, from whom they are
descended."28
26
Captain William Newnham Blane(y), An Excursion through the United States and
Canada during the Years 1822-23, By an English Gentleman, New York: Negro
Universities Press, 1969., 290-91.
27
Patrick Shirreff, A Tour Through North America; Together With A Comprehensive
View of the Canadas and United States As Adapeted for Agricultural Emigration
(Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Company, 1835), 150.
28
D. Miguel Cabrera de Nevares, Observaciones Acerca de Los Estados Unidos de La
America Del Norte en 1834 (Cabrera de Nevares' Obervations of the United States of
North America in 1834), trans. Jose de Onis (Boulder: University of Colorado, 1968),
51-52.
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Perhaps the most damning criticisms of American nature focused on
climatic dangers to White Europeans in America.29
The ill effects of
American climate were often seen in White Americans’ countenance and
complexion.
Henry Bradshaw Fearon, a convert to the anti-American
cause while traveling in the United States, doubted that he was in the best
“poor man’s country,” judging from the “sallow and unhealthy-looking
complexions” that he witnessed.
Fearon’s comment regarding American
facial coloration - “I would say, there is a want of sound regular health, at
least if our English ideas of ruddy cheeks are to be taken as a criterion” was a common observation by travelers.30
The anti-American traveler Thomas Ashe addressed the degeneracy
controversy head-on, and in the affirmative: “M. Buffon was perfectly
right in his assertation . . . that man and beast degenerated in America and
became in time inferior to those of Europe."31 William Faux, who had
gone to American to scout the prospects for English farmers, warned of
dangers in almost medieval vocabulary: "Immense snakes, alligators, and
hydras, appear in burnt serpentine arms of trees, waiting to fall on and
29
In the words of a contemporary expert on travel literature, "white travelers never
spoke of other white bodies but paid close attention not only to the clothes but also to the
bodies of Indians." M.H. Dunlop, Sixty Miles from Contentment: Traveling the
Nineteenth Century American Interior (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 103. As
become apparent to readers in tune with the degeneracy debate, travelers were observant
of the Caucasian body, as well.
30
Allan Nevins, ed. America Through British Eyes (American Social History as
Recorded by British Travellers) New York: Oxford Press, 1948), 14, 219.
31
Quoted in Dwight Boehm and Edward Schwartz, "Jefferson and the Theory of
Degeneracy" American Quarterly 9 (Winter 1957), 453.
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
185
destroy the poor traveller."32
John Bernard, an Englishman who resided in the United States for
over a decade, claimed that reptiles luckily suffered as in comparison with
their Old World cousins: “[Alligators] were not so obtrusive or so terrible,
supporting the Buffon hypothesis that they are a degenerated edition, both
in size and temper, of the Egyptian crocodile.”33
What an odd advantage
from New World degeneracy!
Even severely anti-American travelers might refer to the Buffon
question with a bit irony. Captain Frederick Marryat noted the relative
size of the American Grizzly Bear: "The largest lion, or Bengal tiger,
would stand but a poor chance, if opposed to one of these animals full
grown."34
On a serious note, emigrants in America faced fears of crop failure
due to a poisoned climate.
William Cobbett, the English radical, who
spent a few years on Long Island wrote with great apprehension of his
attempt to grow rutabaga: "Whether it would degenerate is a matter that I
have not yet ascertained; but which I am about to ascertain this year."35
32
William Faux, Memorable Days in America: Being a Journal of a Tour to the United
States, Principally Undertaken to Ascertain, by Positive Evidence, The Condition and
Probable Prospects of British Emigrants; Including Accounts of Mr. Birkbeck's
Settlement in the Illinois; And Intended to shew Men and Things as they are in America,
(London, 1823), 53.
33
John Bernard, Retrospections of America 1797-1811 (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1887), 224.
34
Captain Frederick Marryat, Diary in America, ed. Jules Zanger (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1960), 256.
35
William Cobbett, A Years Residence in the United States of America, in Three Parts
(New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 104.
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186
Cobbett’s careful diary of climatic conditions was testimony to the need
to explain the situation in the New World in the most empirical manner.
Sometimes commentators would find a combination of causes to
explain American mortality.
One traveler explained that New York City
was a city with an astounding percentage of widows and widowers.
Climate played a substantial role, as did the common practice of
dram-drinking.
It was supposed that half of the population of New York
went to bed every night drunk.36
The degeneration thesis persisted, with force. In 1850, Robert Knox
M.D. explained the American physical type to be degraded and forecast
the failure of any attempts at exporting European life to North America.
Dr. Knox argued that Americans lacked the body fat required for
longevity! 37
Barry and Judith Colp Rubin have found that the
degeneration debate had some echoes into the first half of the twentieth
century amongst scholars, poets, diplomats, and even scientists.38
American Responses
36
Richard Gooch, America and the Americans - In 1833-4, ed. Richard Toby
(Widdicombe, Fordham University Press, 1994), 91.
37
"I can perceive in the early loss of the subcutaneous adipose [body fat] cushion which
marks the Saxon and Celtic American - proofs of a climate telling against the very
people of life - against the very emblem of youth, and marking with a premature
appearance of age . . . Symptoms of a premature decay, as the early loss of teeth,
have a similar signification; the notion that the races become taller in America I have
shown to be false . . . The colonization, then, of Northern America by Celt and Saxon,
and South or Middle German, is a problem, whose success cannot be foretold, cannot
reasonably be believed." Robert Knox, The Races of Men (1850) (reprint, Miami:
Mnemosyne, 1969), 99.
38
Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America: A History (New York: Oxford,
2004), 18.
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
187
The charge of degeneration threatened to doom the idea of the United
States as a common man's utopia: "If this [the degeneration thesis] were
true, then obviously no argument for the perfectibility of mankind could
be drawn from any American example." 39
The American threat to
European monarchy and aristocracy, taste and manners, is easily
perceived; charges of degeneracy went even further, threatening the
existence of a society of farms and log cabins. One might speculate on
the debate’s detrimental effects on the growth of population in America
through European emigration.
Prominent defenses of nature made by American authors make it clear
that Americans took the debate seriously.40
As Gerbi explains, "Almost
all the Founding Fathers of the United States loosened a few shafts in the
direction of Buffon and de Pauw."41 Americans tried to influence the
debate over nature.
While Americans may have argued amongst
themselves as to the qualities of American literature or even the merits of
the increasingly democratic nature of the American political experiment,
39
Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American
Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 4.
40
The most famous reply to detractors of Nature in the New World is found within
Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Query VI, "A notice of the mines
and other subterraneous riches; its trees, plants, fruits, & c." gives Jefferson's defense of
animals and American Indians. Henry Steele Commager, in his Empire of Reason:
How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment, gives excellent
treatment to the issue of degeneracy in America in chapter IV "America under Attack"
and the American response in chapter V "The Enlightenment Vindicates America".
Despite the noble work of Jefferson, the American Philosophical Society, and many
others that are described, Commager is mistaken to imply that America was fully
vindicated in the late eighteenth century. These doubts lived on, and travellers list a
whole catalogue of concerns about nature in the New World despite American efforts to
"vindicate their environment, their society, their history, and their civilization"(94).
41
Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 248.
Tamkang Journal of International Affairs
188
no American with even an ounce of pride could afford to argue on the side
of Buffon and DePauw.
Alexander Hamilton even summarized the
degeneration argument with concern for his country’s reputation in
Federalist 11: “Men admired as profound philosophers gravely asserted
that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America
-- that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our
atmosphere.”42
Thomas Jefferson’s only book-length work, Notes on the State of
Virginia (1786), dealt substantially with the degeneration controversy.
Yet, for Jefferson, words alone could not win the debate about nature.
Jefferson arranged for Buffon to receive an actual panther skin and
remains of a moose.43
Some years later, he sent mastodon bones, an
indication of America’s mammoth potential, to doubters in France.
Americans in Europe sometimes challenged the Buffon thesis with
humor. As Joel Barlow noted in his travel journal, "The European flea is
at least heavier by one third of a grain than that of America."44 The most
amusing reply to French critics of American nature probably came from
Benjamin Franklin. Franklin happened to be in Paris entertaining several
French and American guests, including the Abbé Raynal, an advocate of
the degeneration thesis. The Abbé spoke about how men and animals
degenerated in America. Franklin suggested a test on the matter: "Let us
try this question by the fact before us." He then asked all present to stand.
42
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed11.htm (Accessed April 22, 2007).
Brother C. Edward, “Jefferson, Sullivan, and the Moose,” American History
Illustrated (9 November 1974), 18-19.
44
James Woodress, A Yankee's Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (New York:
Greenwood, 1958), 95.
43
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
189
The Americans were tall and muscular, the Frenchmen tiny, the Abbott
being a "mere shrimp." One American who was there later told Jefferson,
"In fact there was not one American present who could not have tost out
the Windows any one or perhaps two of the rest of the Company
[Frenchmen]."45
Well into the nineteenth century, American nationalists continued to
address the degeneration controversy head-on in their vindicatory
accounts of the United States, including William Wirt’s Letters of a
British Spy (1803), Charles Jared Ingersoll’s Inchiquin, the Jesuit’s Letters
(1810), James Kirke Paulding’s United States and Great Britain (1815),
and James Fenimore Cooper’s Notions of the Americans (1828).
Americans of all political persuasions responded to the degeneracy thesis.
Timothy Dwight, New Haven pastor, Yale president, and arch-Federalist,
responded just as vehemently as Jefferson, though most often with
examples peculiar to New England: "The white pine is the noblest forest
tree in New England, and probably in the world. It grows to six feet in
diameter and frequently 250 in height." The mammoth was as valuable to
the anti-Jeffersonian Dwight as to the Republicans: "What if we should
turn the tables on you and insist that your continent is grown too old to
yield the productions of nature in their full size, while ours, young, if you
please, certainly vigorous, nourishes them to a state of comparative
perfection. Besides, were you once to behold the skeleton of our
mammoth, you would be struck with astonishment and regard the animals
of Europe as a collection of pygmies." Dwight also cited the American
bald eagle, with its nine-foot wingspan as proof against the degeneracy
45
Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 242.
Tamkang Journal of International Affairs
190
thesis.
Even the mosquitoes were not so bad in America, at least the
ones that Dwight knew in New England.
46
Jefferson was not the only American politician to respond to European
calumnies.
In an 1814 speech, New York City Mayor DeWitt Clinton
warned the citizens of New York that scientists in the state, and the nation,
were viewed with suspicion by Europeans: "Clinton continued somewhat
effusively that foreign scientists claimed 'our national character is marked
with all the traits of premature corruption and precocious turpitude'."47
Clinton's patriotic defense of American nature was not gratuitous.
Clinton felt the need, like Thomas Jefferson in his Notes some three
decades before, to defend nature within his state, and his country.
The
charge of degeneration remained a real threat to a positive notion of
American nationality.
In light of the nearly century-old European habit of condemning
America for its lack of proper physical qualities, it is no wonder that
Americans read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (2 vols.
1835, 1840) with serious interest.
Though Tocqueville began his
account of American democracy with a positive physical depiction of
46
Graham Clarke, The American Landscape: Literary Sources & Documents, vol. 1
(Mountfield: Helm, 1993), 299, 308-9, 311-12.
47
DeWitt Clinton, An Introductory Discourse Delivered before the Literary and
Philosophical Society of New-York on the Fourth of May, 1814 (New York: David
Longworth, 1815). In The Eagle's Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812-1842
(1986), Charlotte M. Potter probably underestimates the importance of American
responses to the charges of degeneration, specifically Clinton’s speech. As Porter
explains, "These comments must have sounded anachronistic to a younger generation of
naturalists." Charlotte M. Porter, The Eagle's Nest: Natural History and American Ideas,
1812-1842 (University of Alabama Press, 1986), 24.
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
191
America’s potential, speaking of the Mississippi Valley as "the most
magnificent dwelling-place proposed by God for man's abode; and yet it
may be said that at present it is but a mighty desert," he then quickly
shifted his focus from climate/nature to human causes, abandoning a
Montesquieuian geographic framework.48
For Tocqueville, democratic
moeurs and religion, not climate, would determine America’s future.
Lessons from the Degeneracy Debate
The specific terms of the Buffon-DePauw debate might strike the
modern reader as being odd.
impressions
of
As noted at the head of this paper, negative
America
are
usually
associated
with
Marxist/leftist-influenced perspectives on foreign policy, economic
competition, or culture. American nature is no longer a noticeable focus
of commentary on America; the Americans are themselves a degenerate
people living in a beautiful country.49
The degeneration debate may, however, provide twenty-first-century
readers a lesson in comparison, and its limitations.
We might learn to be
better travelers and citizens of the world by avoiding the use of parochial
48
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve trans. (New York: D.
Appleton and Company, 1904), ii, 4, 5, 6, 10. Tocqueville explained that, in regard to
South America, underneath its "brilliant exterior death was concealed." The shift to
the "grave, serious, and solemn" United States in the nineteenth century gives, I believe,
the debate a new gravity and relevance for Europe.
49
It is not impossible that some memory of a poisonous America still does persist. I
recall a small episode while arriving in Europe a few years ago with a group of American
students and colleagues. After initial greetings, our Italian tour guide promised us, “No
worries, there is nothing poisonous in Europe.” I took that to mean that we had come
from a place were there were things with deadly qualities but had arrived on a safe,
civilized continent. An echo of the centuries old debate over American nature?
Tamkang Journal of International Affairs
192
nomenclatures for foreign things and peoples.
Comparisons between
African lions and American pumas aside, less egregious examples
certainly abound. If Western observers have been guilty of Orientalism
when speaking of South Asia and the Middle East, then one might also
speak of New Worldism or Americanism in regards to failure to grasp
Americans on their own terms.
It is possible to understand the United States as an almost unique
victim of European misunderstanding.
Washington Irving wrote in his
Sketch-book (1819-1820) essay, “English Writers on America,” of British
travelers’ propensity to convincingly describe far-off places but fail at
describing their neighbors (presumably France) and relations (the United
States):
I would place implicit confidence in an Englishman's
descriptions of the regions beyond the cataracts of the Nile;
of unknown islands in the Yellow Sea; of the interior of
India; or of any other tract which other travellers might be
apt to picture out with the illusions of their fancies; but I
would cautiously receive his account of his immediate
neighbors, and of those nations with which he is in habits
of most frequent intercourse. However I might be disposed
to trust his probity, I dare not trust his prejudices.50
A certain narrow-mindedness regarding America had, in fact, been the
habit in Europe for over a half century.
Supposed Enlightenment traits
of cosmopolitanism and optimism disappeared within depictions of
50
http://www.4literature.net/Washington_Irving/English_Writers_on_America/
(Accessed April 18, 2007).
Enlightenment Theories of Nature’s Degeneracy and
the Origins of Anti-Americanism
193
American nature. Instead, many prominent members of that intellectual
movement were shown to have been exceptionally prejudiced about a
place that they had not visited.
By the early nineteenth century, the phenomenon that we know as
anti-Americanism became associated exclusively with the United States,
and not Canada, or Peru, or any another American nation.
nation could provide the symbolic importance.
No other
Most remarkably,
accusations of natural inferiority persisted well into the nineteenth century,
even as the United States grew in economic strength and population.
Commentary on the United States has proved useful in European political
debate, from the Founding to today. As was apparent in the debate over
American degeneracy, both in its early stages and post-1776,
interpretations of America have often been more self-referential than truly
descriptive, indicative of preconceptions that served broader domestic
purposes.