Just Like Us, by Thomas Borstelmann (chapter 1)

CHA P T E R I

The Challenge of Contact with Foreigners

“F

oreign”: it’s a very familiar term. So, too, is “foreigner,” a person who lives elsewhere or has come from elsewhere.

But what do they mean? The English word “foreign” derives from the Latin for “door” and “outside”: what is outside the door and, thus, not part of us and our household, whoever we are, here on the inside of the door. It is close to the Italian adverb “ fuori”—­outside—­and opposite of the Spanish adjective “ familiar,” meaning “family.” Foreigners do not belong to the family.

Or do they—­or could they? A door, after all, is not a wall. It is designed to swing open. People pass through from inside to outside and from outside to inside. The foreign can and does become familiar. It can lose its foreignness. Much of human history is the story of people moving, bringing them into contact with unfamiliar others, and perhaps nowhere in the modern world has there been more movement and more contact than in the lands of the United States and in this most powerful state’s ventures abroad. So how Americans have understood the nature of other peoples underpins a great deal of U.S. and recent world history. Are they essentially similar to Americans, or are they, in their cultural or even biological essence, different? On the answer to this question has hung great significance for how the United States has interacted with the rest of the world.

Perhaps the most compelling answer to the question of how Americans imagine foreigners may have been crystallized in a scene from Full Metal [1]

Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film about a group of American GIs serving in Vietnam. A U.S. colonel is instructing a skeptical young army journalist in his unit about the purpose of the American war in Southeast Asia.

“We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every” foreigner “there is an American trying to get out.” Sometimes close to the surface, sometimes buried under layers of miseducation by other cultures, a core of every human being was assumed to be fundamentally American—­that is, yearning for American-­style individual freedom and opportunity. Human nature, in this view, was best and most fully expressed in American culture and society. This universalist assumption arises not merely in fiction or art. John Prior, a U.S. Army sergeant serving in Iraq two decades later, explained the same view to the journalist George Packer: “In my heart,” declared Sergeant Prior, “I believe everybody’s American.” This way of thinking was, simultaneously, both blindly ethnocentric and warmly inclusive of all peoples. Such a combination helped produce both the most devastating and the most impressive developments of the American story, from genocide and war crimes, on the one hand, to the most multicultural, diverse, affluent great power in world history, on the other.1 From early English settlers establishing commonwealths in Virginia and Massachusetts to the authors of the Constitution gathered in the Philadelphia convention hall in 1787, from Woodrow Wilson in the White House deciding to go to war in Europe in 1917 to the American soldiers pouring across the Kuwaiti border into southern Iraq in 2003, there has been an abiding assumption that American culture—­A merican principles and practices—­a re not only the best ever created by human beings but also closely aligned with the very essence of human nature. The ultimate logic of American exceptionalism, on most prominent display during the Cold War, held that U.S. history and American institutions had facilitated the full liberation of the human spirit and the fulfillment of the highest human aspirations. This was, it seemed to many of its people, the nation that had finally embodied liberty and happiness for its residents. American democratic culture was thus seen as truly “natural,” in common American thinking, giving citizens self-­r ule, individual freedom, and a market economy that sold them what they wanted and needed.2 Such assumptions about the essential character of American society and the inner yearnings of non-­A mericans reached unprecedented influence in the mid-­t wentieth century. But they were not entirely new in the Cold War. The revolutionaries of 1776 had expected other peoples in the [ 2 ] T he C hallenge of C ontact with F oreigners

hemisphere to emulate their actions and, in fact, had watched as most of Latin America in the following generation also threw off the European imperial yoke. The subsequent story of U.S. expansion awkwardly balanced conquest with attempts at conversion, from Powhatan and Pequot Indians along the Atlantic shore in the 1600s to Afghanis and Iraqis in the greater Middle East in the early 2000s. A letter sent by the Continental Congress to the inhabitants of Québec in 1774 perfectly squared the circle of an expanding empire imagining itself as a center of freedom. The letter invited the Québécois to join the anti-­British union of colonial troops marching north with these words: “You [will] have been conquered into liberty, if you act as you ought.” While Québec and the rest of Canada managed to avoid being “conquered into liberty,” many others did not.

They were more likely to experience conquest as taking away their freedom. Through the nineteenth century, widening U.S. dominion ranged from Liberia in the east to Hawai‘i and the Philippines in the west and from Alaska in the north to Nicaragua in the south.3 But certain constraints had to be shed to enable the full flowering of American universalism. One such constraint was hierarchical racial thinking. Persistent racial and ethnic prejudice cramped the ability of white Americans to fully imagine non-­Europeans—­and even many Europeans from south and east of the Alps—­as being like themselves. Another constraint was a certain lingering cultural insecurity among American elites.

While intensely proud of U.S. economic success, they still looked to Europe for the highest standards in such arenas as art, literature, drama, fashion, and cuisine. And a third constraint was the tradition of hemispheric, if not isolationist, resistance to global engagement and militarism. The political and military position of the United States in international affairs before World War II remained modest in comparison to the nation’s economic might.4 These constraints began to fade rapidly in the 1940s as the distinctive circumstances of the mid-­t wentieth century ratcheted up the stakes for how Americans understood non-­A mericans. The outcome of World War II left millions of U.S. military personnel on duty on every continent and on every ocean, the startling resurgence of the U.S. economy expanded American trade interests everywhere, the retreat of European colonial rule reshaped global politics, and the Cold War drew the American presence outward around the world. “There is no longer any real distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ affairs,” the State Department announced in the opening sentence of its 1950 summary of “Our Foreign Policy.” Given their T he C hallenge of C ontact with F oreigners [ 3 ]

newly extensive and intensive contact with foreigners everywhere, Americans had to figure them out.5 What a majority of Americans did in the decades following World War II was to shed some older hierarchical notions of humankind, grounded particularly in ideas about race, ethnicity, and religion, and to confirm instead a growing sense of foreigners as potential Americans. Despite some ongoing dissent and despite persistent racial discrimination, the broad middle ground of “common sense” in mainstream American society came to agree eventually with the colonel in Full Metal Jacket and with Sergeant John Prior in Iraq that other peoples, despite often growing up and living under repressive political and religious regimes, still, in their hearts, if they were truly allowed to, would reveal themselves by preference to be American. They wanted, in other words, U.S.-­style freedom, opportunity, and affluence. This view of foreigners was both profoundly ethnocentric and inward-­looking, on the one hand, and also universalistic and inclusive, on the other, and it came to be shared across the U.S. political spectrum, from liberal proponents of immigration reform to conservative advocates of preemptive war in Iraq, and by most moderate Americans in between. Very few modern Americans believed in cultural relativism.6 If American culture was natural and allowed for the fullest expression of human freedom, and if other peoples aspired to live like Americans or even to be Americans, then what Americans most feared was the loss of their natural freedom to unnatural subversion. Captivity was the threat, and supposed communist brainwashing—­mental captivity—­emerged as the quintessential challenge of the Cold War era. While the shrinking sphere of what was foreign to Americans is the primary theme of the story pursued here, Americans’ concomitant anxieties about possibly losing their freedoms to subversion and captivity provide a second, closely related theme. And a third theme is the potent magnetism of relatively democratic American capitalist culture, whose individualistic pursuit of material comforts and personal freedoms may have operated as the greatest subversive force in late-­t wentieth-­century international history.

The Meaning of Foreignness A great deal of human history has been the story of people of one culture coming into contact with people of different cultures. How have they [ 4 ] T he C hallenge of C ontact with F oreigners

resolved the inherent tensions and conflicts in such engagements? Often war and slavery predominated. But at other times alliances, intermarriage, and shared meals—­the beginnings of “ethnic food”—­worked better. From early nomadic tribes to contemporary global migrants, the relationships resulting from human cultural encounters have been wildly complicated and diverse. They have provided the basis for a large fraction of the best and wittiest novels, plays, movies, and television shows, from romances to tragedies.

The American version of intercultural contact has been particularly intensive and continuous. The largest-­scale human-­contact story unfolded in the Americas after the voyages of Christopher Columbus, where the depopulation of indigenous peoples by disease and warfare gave way to a swift repopulation by new peoples from the other hemisphere. “Colonial conditions produced an unprecedented mixing of African, European, and Indian cultures,” notes Alan Taylor, a leading colonial historian. “The world had never known such a rapid and intense intermingling of peoples—­ and of microbes, plants, and animals from different continents.” This process continued with large numbers of migrants from the nineteenth century from Asia and from the late twentieth century from the Middle East.7 The unprecedented cultural mixing of the so-­called New World reached its apex in the United States. The demographic churn of the colonial era only accelerated during the nineteenth century, when tens of millions of newcomers from the “Old World” of the Europe-­A sia-­A frica supercontinent flowed into the new nation. For all the press of migrants into places such as Argentina, Canada, and Australia, no country received close to the numbers pouring into the United States as it expanded westward to the Pacific Ocean. Divinely guided destiny offered a persuasive explanation to many white Americans at the time, but available land, industrial employment, a temperate climate, and relative proximity to Europe’s large and multicultural emigrant pool underpinned the preference for U.S. shores.

Disease had devastated indigenous populations throughout the Americas since the original Columbian voyages. Relentless settler violence and U.S. military aggression further depleted Native American numbers, creating still more space for newcomers from the Old World.8 The still-­young nation of unusual human diversity did not just stick to its own recently acquired territory. Rather, the United States in the twentieth century surged outward in influence around the globe, in literally every direction. Through trade, investment, tourism, missionary work, and T he C hallenge of C ontact with F oreigners [ 5 ]

two world wars plus several other armed conflicts, Americans engaged with peoples in every land. With the world’s most powerful economy and military and its third-­largest population, the United States pressed its goods, culture, and values on other countries. American citizens encountered new peoples abroad even as they interacted with immigrants and visitors at home. The continued flow of newcomers into the United States and the rush of American influence outward beyond U.S. territory reached a peak together in the decades after 1945. By the end of the twentieth century, observers talked of “globalization” and the distinctly American flavor that it had.9 All cultures imagine themselves to be natural and normal. They offer the best response, their members assume, that has evolved over time to match the circumstances they face. Few cultures, however, received the powerful external validations of success that the United States did in the second half of the twentieth century: a booming economy with the largest middle class ever seen, a smorgasbord of affordable consumer goods, a military force and popular culture that dominated much of the world, steady demand from people elsewhere to move to the United States, and widespread admiration for American political ideals. Such success encouraged pride and parochialism among many Americans, who were tempted to equate national status with national virtue and superiority. The historian Thomas Bender notes that U.S. expansion and power encouraged “a passive, consistent failure of empathy” with others, who were expected to act more like Americans. Many citizens felt confirmed in their assumptions of American exceptionalism, a term that obscured more than it clarified. All nations, after all, are exceptional in the sense that each is distinctive. And there is no rule for other nations from which the United States stood out as an exception. What may actually be exceptional about the United States is its citizens’ widespread belief in American exceptionalism.10 Like European explorers who rode the wave of late-­n ineteenth-­century imperial expansion out into the far reaches of the globe and sought to understand the peoples and places they encountered there, Americans in the 1940s launched into an intense engagement with the myriad cultures with which World War II and the Cold War brought them into contact.

This reached far beyond the usual neighboring exotics of Canada and Mexico. Like pith-­helmeted imperialists finding Machu Picchu, Troy, Great Zimbabwe, and Angkor Wat, American Cold Warriors carried their

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promises of development and democracy to the newly independent nations of the so-­called Third World—­India, Egypt, Kenya, and the like—­and struggled to understand the cultures they encountered there. Were these peoples like Americans, or were they something completely different? The same question concerned Eastern Europe, newly controlled by communists and deemed “captive nations” by the U.S. Congress, and the Soviet Union, the original “captive nation.” American missionaries had long labored to reveal the Chinese to be much like Americans, but by 1949 the people of the Middle Kingdom had instead turned to communism—­were they still at heart like Americans, or no? Western Europeans were casting off their overseas empires, surely a positive sign of becoming more like Americans, yet they seemed tempted by democratic socialism, or at least social democracy. Most immediate were the challenges of West Germany and Japan, recently loathed and defeated enemies, now occupied by American GIs and potentially the closest U.S. allies of all.11 The unprecedented worldwide challenges facing the United States from the 1940s onward hinged on how the newly powerful Americans understood the peoples they encountered abroad. The United States had replaced Great Britain as the most influential nation and the leading Western model of constitutional government. Educated Americans believed, with one of their leading novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that “we will be the Romans in the next generations.” The ancient world’s conquerors had been known, like the modern United States, for assimilating newcomers and becoming the great multiethnic state of their time. At the height of their own trajectory in the early Cold War, Americans were already three times as numerous as the peoples of the Roman Empire at its peak, and American influence ranged far beyond Rome’s known world of the Mediterranean basin to the entire globe. How and whether Americans imagined their own version of assimilation would help determine much of the history to come.12 Figuring out to whom one belongs may be the deepest human concern.

From the earliest communities of Homo sapiens in east-­central Africa, people have striven to define clearly who was inside and who was outside any community. It was often a matter of life or death. Killing or fending off outsiders in order to protect insiders is an ancient story. In the lands of what became the United States, the first inhabitants typically referred to their communities as some version of “the human beings” or “the People.” In the Kawuneeche (“Coyote”) Valley at the headwaters of the Colorado

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River, high up in the snowy Rocky Mountains, for example, the original residents were called “Yutas” by the invading Spanish but knew themselves as the “Nuche,” which translates to “the People.”13 Psychologists make a similar point. “A key social factor that we human beings track is who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them,’ ” note the psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Lee Jussim. The distinction between “in-­g roups” and “out-­ groups” provides the most elemental social and emotional connections and community. Modern high-­schoolers know this in their bones, and so have all cultures throughout human history. As social creatures, people feel a powerful need to belong to a community that provides them comfort, purpose, and identity. Hermits are, by definition, peculiar. People are designed to fit in.14 What feels natural or familiar to people derives from their earliest experiences as infants and young children. Their tactile sense of the world is not yet mediated by self-­awareness and rational analysis. An infant’s world with its sights and smells is not yet compared with and weighed against other worlds—­it simply is what it is. Children then grow up to discern which of all the external stimuli they encounter—­a ll of which is initially foreign to them—­are actually comfortable and safe. They figure out where they fit through the communities they encounter, from their families outward through their neighborhoods, villages, cities, regions, and nations.

In the early twenty-­fi rst century Americans talk a lot about identity.

Who they imagine themselves to be hinges on several variables. Age distinguishes millennials from baby boomers. Politics separates Republicans and Democrats. Geography carves up urban and rural. Religion sorts unbelievers and believers, in their various stripes. Gender, once a given, now opens questions about identity. The kind of work people do defines much of who they are, particularly in a culture as obsessed with work as this one.15 Family responsibilities shape those who are parents and siblings. But no identifier in the modern public realm is as powerful as the nation. Americans, like others, derive enormous personal meaning from the country to which they belong. And it is the nation that most clearly defines who is a foreigner.

It was not always this way. National borders and identities seem commonsensical today, along with passports for travelers. But nations are a relatively recent product of modern history, mostly arising in the past two hundred years. Previously, for the vast majority of human history, political

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and social identities were both smaller and larger. In the much less mobile past before industrialization, most people lived and died within a few dozen miles of where they were born. This gave them a more local identity, in a village or region. At the same time, political life tended to be organized at a much higher level by kingdoms, empires, and religious authorities. An English peasant might be a resident of Kent and a subject of the Crown, just as a Chinese peasant might live outside Guangzhou and under the authority of the emperor.16 Nations, in other words, are not natural, though they may seem that way to modern Americans, citizens of a country whose very birth coincided with the rise of nation-­states. National borders are also not natural or given but have changed over time. Nations are not permanent in the long run. Cullen Murphy observes that “half the world’s national boundaries are less than a century old.” Nations are instead, as the distinguished political scientist Benedict Anderson first argued more than a generation ago, “imagined communities.” This hardly means they are not real. They are, however, constructed rather than natural. They were imagined as political projects and then brought into being in particular forms with enormous real-­world effects. They raised armies and fought wars, the most powerful way to separate their citizens from foreigners. The memory of sacrifices made on behalf of the nation then fertilized future generations of national loyalty. Nations became real in the modern era, and no nation became more powerful than the United States.17 That nation might have been much larger and more powerful still. In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress created three committees, one to draft a Declaration of Independence, another to write up the Articles of Confederation, and a third to create a Model Treaty as a template for the new nation’s future foreign relations. In drafting the Model Treaty, John Adams “demanded that Europe’s governments recognize the United States as the rightful successor to all of Britain’s North American empire,” in the words of the historian Eliga Gould, including Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the rest of Canada, East and West Florida, and Bermuda. This vision did not fully prevail. But it could have—­it was a serious twinkle in the eyes of the Founders. There was nothing preordained about the eventual borders of the United States. For the next century European Americans pressed this truth westward, seizing territory from indigenous peoples whom they viewed as nomadic and lacking in legitimate claims to the

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land. Adams’s son John Quincy Adams, another future president, later wrote in his diary that “the United States and North America are identical.” One can only imagine the might and impact of a modern single meganation unified from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Ocean.18 The definition of what is foreign tends to change. It is a moving target.

What may seem an absolute difference between groups at one point in time can disappear with remarkable swiftness. Probably no shift in mainstream American public sentiment about foreignness has been as dramatic as recent thinking about sexual orientation and, increasingly, gender identity. There is no historical precedent for the speed of change in the legal status and public views of homosexuality in the early twenty-­fi rst century. Indeed, it was the conservative Republican George W. Bush who first welcomed an openly transgender person to the White House. At a 2003 reunion of his Yale class of 1968, a woman in an evening gown made her way through the president’s receiving line and extended her hand. “Hello, George,” said Petra Leilani Akwai, “I guess the last time we spoke, I was still living as a man.” Bush smiled and responded graciously, “And now you’re you.”19 Not only imagined boundaries of difference but also physical borders and their meanings change over time. A quintessential American example is the Ohio River. In the earliest days of the republic, this mighty waterway divided the original Northwest Territory from the new state of Kentucky, established in 1792. It thus demarcated the slaveholding lands on its southern bank from the free states that developed on its northern shore: Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. To cross this water was to pass from slavery to freedom—­or the opposite. Thousands of American lives were shaped in the most elemental ways by the river, as Toni Morrison illuminated so brilliantly and painfully in her Pulitzer Prize–­w inning novel Beloved. Yet today commuters and others zip daily across the Interstate 64 and 65 bridges in Louisville with nary a thought of the human trauma and life-­and-­death drama that played out a hundred feet below them for so long. For many locals, the Ohio River seems mostly to separate fans of rival college basketball teams in Indiana and Kentucky.20 One other example can illustrate the lack of wisdom in imagining definitions of foreignness and borders as permanent or ultimately meaningful in the American past. In 1917 the United States enacted a new immigration law that banned people coming from within a so-­called Asiatic Barred Zone. U.S. law had already previously excluded most Chinese migrants,

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Photo by UNL Communications Office

“This is one of those books that sticks with you. Thomas Borstelmann asks a big question—about U.S. attitudes toward foreigners—and has an important argument to make.

What is more, Just Like Us sparkles with telling details and unexpected connections. It is, plainly put, masterful.”

A

MERICANS have long considered themselves a people set apart, but American exceptionalism is built on a set of tacit beliefs about other cultures. From the founding exclusion of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans to the uneasy welcome of waves of immigrants, from republican disavowals of colonialism to Cold War proclamations of freedom, Americans’ ideas of their differences from others have shaped the modern world—and how Americans have viewed foreigners is deeply revealing of their assumptions about themselves.

—DANIEL IMMERWAHR, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“This is a fantastic and timely book, written by one of the nation’s most distinguished scholars of American foreign relations, race, and world history. It is original, lively, beautifully written, accessible, and filled with profound insights that will contribute to the scholarly conversation on American foreign relations and world history.”

—ELAINE TYLER MAY, author of Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

—ANDREW PRESTON, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy

“In this moment of great peril for migrants and refugees in the United States, Borstelmann vividly recovers a necessary history of the place of the ‘foreigner’ in the American imagination. Tracing the ways in which Americans came to understand the world around them in their own exceptionalist image, Just Like Us brilliantly illustrates how growing sentiments of inclusion and equity emerged against persisting racism and xenophobic fears of subversion to shape the American past and present.”

The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners

“From one of our finest historians comes this smart, incisive overview of how Americans have viewed other peoples. With wit and insight, Borstelmann shows that Americans’ interaction with foreigners has irrevocably changed them both. The result is a completely fresh perspective on how the United States has engaged with the wider world, on everything from war and foreign policy to immigration and culture. A must-read.”

Just Like Us

T

HOMAS BORSTELMANN is the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His previous books include The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2012); The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (2001); and Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (1993).

Just Like Us

BO R ST EL M A NN

P RAISE FO R

—MARK PHILIP BRADLEY, author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

Jacket design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Jacket image: The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., and the American Flag of Faces, Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

COLU M B I A

Columbia University Press | New York | cup.columbia.edu

Just Like Us The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners THOMAS BORSTELMANN

Just Like Us is a pathbreaking exploration of what foreignness has meant across American history. Thomas Borstelmann traces American ambivalence about non-Americans, identifying a paradoxical perception of foreigners as suspiciously different yet fundamentally sharing American values beneath the layers of culture. Considering race and religion, notions of the American way of life, attitudes toward immigrants, competition with communism, Americans abroad, and the subversive power of American culture, he offers a surprisingly optimistic account of the acceptance of difference. Borstelmann contends that increasing contact with peoples around the globe during the Cold War encouraged mainstream society to grow steadily more inclusive. In a time of resurgent nativism and xenophobia, Just Like Us provides a reflective, urgent examination of how Americans have conceived of foreignness and their own exceptionalism throughout the nation’s history.