Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. In this essay, he discusses the novel in the context of the cold war, the Vietnam war, and the nature of the U.S. national identity and character.
Central to The Ugly American is the historical reality of the cold war. Behind all the individual stories lies the larger picture of a global struggle between two superpowers who embrace competing ideologies and compete ruthlessly for influence and control over smaller countries not only in Southeast Asia but all over the world. Given the fact that both superpowers have the capacity to destroy each other several times over through the use of nuclear weapons, the future of human civilization may depend on the outcome of the struggle.
Since the novel is so rooted in a particular period of history, it is impossible for readers in the early 2000s to respond to it in the same way that the original readers did, in the 1950s. In the early twenty-first century, the outcome of the cold war, far from being in doubt, is known, and that long struggle has receded into the pages of history. In fact, young people of college age in the early 2000s can have little or no direct memory of the cold war, since it wound down during the late- 1980s and finally ended with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since the United States and its allies won the cold war, and communism has completely lost the worldwide appeal it held for so many people from the 1950s to the 1980s, it is apparent from the perspective of the early 2000s that many of the fears expressed by Burdick and Lederer did not come to pass. The Soviets did not outwit or outlast the Americans. American ideas, the clarion call of freedom and democracy, proved to be more durable than the collectivist ideas of Marx and Lenin.
Tragically, however, that is only part of the story. Some of the fears expressed by the authors in The Ugly American did indeed come true. The United States did not learn its lessons quickly enough to avoid the catastrophe of the Vietnam War, in which over 58,000 Americans were killed from 1964 to 1973, and the nation lost a war for the first time in its history.
In connection with Vietnam, The Ugly American seems prescient indeed, as the two chapters, "The Iron of War" and "The Lessons of War" demonstrate. The French, as they battle the communist insurgency, believe that their well-trained army, equipped with all the most modern weapons of war, will surely triumph over a ragged band of poorly equipped communists. They continue to believe this, according to The Ugly American, even when the evidence proves them wrong, again and again. When the French finally capitulate and withdraw from Hanoi, Major Monet, who has been enlightened by his discussions with Major "Tex" Wolchek and Gilbert MacWhite, expresses the truth as he watches the final French military parade: "No one bothered to tell the tankers that their tanks couldn't operate in endless mud. And those recoilless rifles never found an enemy disposition big enough to warrant shooting at it with them."
Less than a decade later, the United States made the same mistake as the French, thinking that a huge army—U.S. troop numbers in Vietnam reached 543,000 in 1969—with the most sophisticated military equipment in the world would defeat an enemy that possessed almost nothing in comparison. The shock of that defeat in Vietnam continued to reverberate in the national psyche...
(This entire section contains 1868 words.)
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for over thirty years.
But The Ugly American is about more than history and the cold war and the forewarnings about Vietnam. Behind the swirl of political events in Southeast Asia, the authors ground their work in a larger issue, the nature of the U.S. national identity and character. They are very careful to draw a distinction between the real American character and the distortions of it that occur when Americans get caught abroad in the twin traps of bureaucracy and shallow conventional wisdom. When Ambassador MacWhite visits the Philippines, for example, he meets the head of the government, Ramon Magsaysay, who makes the following observation:
[A]verage Americans, in their natural state … are the best ambassadors a country can have…. They are not suspicious, they are eager to share their skills, they are generous. But something happens to Americans when they go abroad.
Magsaysay, who, incidentally, was a real historical figure, believes that many Americans abroad are "second-raters" who get carried away by their luxurious style of living and all the cocktail parties they attend. They lose the natural good qualities that are otherwise such a prominent feature of the national character.
The Burmese journalist U Maung Swe expresses the same idea. At a dinner party in Rangoon, he remarks that the Americans he knew in the United States "were wonderfully friendly, unassuming, and interested in the world." He trusted and respected them. But he continues:
The Americans I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they're frightened and defensive; or maybe they're not properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance.
The characters in the book who accomplish something of value are presented as examples of the true American character, as opposed to the distortion of that character that seems to occur in the foreign service. These "real Americans" are all practical men, not intellectuals. They are adventurous, creative, and ingenious. They are brave, they relish a challenge, and they are hardworking. They are also open and friendly, and not prejudiced. They speak their minds, and a rough exterior often hides a gentle heart. They are always willing to use their talents and knowledge in service of others not because they are especially religious or saintly, but because they are naturally warm and good-hearted, and they like to share what they know.
An example is John Colvin, the man who tries to help the Sarkhanese with his milk and cattle scheme and is betrayed by his former friend turned communist, Deong. Colvin is a tough, confident, battle-hardened World War II veteran. Back home in Wisconsin, he is a successful small-businessman who runs the family milk business. When he hears that Sarkhan is in danger of going communist, he feels a sense of personal responsibility to the Sarkhanese people, whom he had learned to love during his adventures there in World War II. So he returns to start up a business in Sarkhan and puts up the small amount of capital required himself. It should be noted that this is private enterprise in action, not a big government-funded project, and it will rely on local free market forces to prosper.
Colvin again shows what he is made of after Deong gets the better of him, and the mob of women beat him. Ambassador Sears only manages to send Colvin home over his vigorous objections (Colvin says, with great intensity, "I won't go"). But Gilbert MacWhite sends for him again, and this time Colvin's persistence pays off. Within a year or so, his project is a success, and the local economy benefits from his innovation. Thus Colvin demonstrates qualities that the authors believe represent core American values: initiative, self-reliance, business acumen, determination, perseverance, and personal and civic responsibility.
The preeminent example of the ideal American character in action is Homer Atkins. Although he is the "ugly American" of the title, his rough outward appearance does not reflect the inner core of the man. As a blunt-spoken inventor and engineer, Atkins has no patience with intellectual theories or with men who dress in nice suits, wear after-shave lotion, and sit around conference tables. Atkins travels to Vietnam and then, at MacWhite's request, to Sarkhan, as a private individual. He certainly does not need the money, since he has been highly successful in his career and is worth $3 million (a huge fortune in 1958 dollars). He enjoys the challenge of new projects, but he is only interested in things that will be immediately useful for the local people. He is a realist and has no time for grandiose dreams. When it comes to setting up his business in Sarkhan, he presents a textbook example of how foreign aid programs should be conducted. He provides the expertise and the creative mind (in consultation with the local man, Jeepo), but all the materials he uses for the water pump he invents are local: pipes made from bamboo, pistons adapted from the pistons of old jeeps, and power from the drive mechanism of bicycles. Everything is cheap and easily available, and nothing has to be imported. Atkins then employs local labor, and they all work eighteen to twenty-hour days to get the business off the ground. Then those who make the product get the chance to sell it and make money. It is an ideal set-up all round, and its success is due to the sturdy good sense, ingenuity, hard work, and benevolence of Atkins.
Homer's wife Emma is another example of this sturdy American character. She is happy to live in a simple cottage in Sarkhan with relatively primitive facilities: "pressed earth floors, one spigot of cold water, a charcoal fire, two very comfortable hammocks, a horde of small, harmless insects." She does not for a moment miss the amenities of a modern American kitchen or the luxuries that are available in an advanced civilization. Indeed, in their simple, self-reliant way of living, Homer and Emma Atkins resemble not so much a modern American couple but a throwback to earlier times, the nineteenth century or even the colonial period. As John Hellmann points out in his book American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, the Americans who have the right approach in The Ugly American represent ideas about the American character and about the nation's role in the world that go back to colonial times. One of these myths is of the frontier hero, with the frontier displaced in the novel from the American West onto the landscape of Southeast Asia.
Seen in this light, The Ugly American is not only an indictment of the ineffectiveness of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, it is also a wake-up call to Americans to rediscover their own best qualities and values. The authors return to this theme in their "Factual Epilogue," in which they write:
We have so lost sight of our own past that we are trying to sell guns and money alone, instead of remembering that is was the quest for the dignity of freedom that was responsible for our way of life.
The authors' conclusion, in which they write, "All over Asia we have found that the basic American ethic is revered and honored and imitated when possible," sends a very clear message. As long as Americans remain true to themselves and their values, they have nothing to fear from communist aggression; they will surely prevail.
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on The Ugly American, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
John Hellmann
In the following essay excerpt, Hellmann examines the socio-political environment in which The Ugly American was published, and posits that the novel is a form of the American Jeremiad, a form of "political-sermon" dating back to the Puritans.
The Ugly American appeared in the wake of such influential analyses of postwar American society as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), William H. Whyte, Jr.'s The Organization Man (1956), and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958). These books were widely discussed and alluded to in reviews, columns, and articles. They had such impact because they articulated in persuasive detail suspicions voiced through the decade with steadily increasing anxiety. These suspicions had in common a fear that trends in contemporary American society were fundamentally altering the American character. Conservatives usually focused upon "socialistic" tendencies toward conformity and mediocrity within a network of dependence on the large organizations of government, business, and unions now dominating American life. Liberals more typically emphasized the corrupting effects of a cynical, materialistic consumer society. Underlying these critiques was a shared suspicion that Americans were becoming too "soft," immoral, and greedy to survive the Soviets' dedicated pursuit of world communism.
In 1952, for instance, Louis B. Seltzer, the editor of the Cleveland Press, asked in an editorial "What is wrong with us?" and provided an answer that would be received with a torrent of approving telephone calls, letters, and personal congratulations on the street:
We have everything. We abound with all of the things that make us comfortable. We are, on the average, rich beyond the dreams of the kings of old…. Yet … something is not there that should be—something we once had….
Are we our own worst enemies? Should we fear what is happening among us more than what is happening elsewhere?…
No one seems to know what to do to meet it. But everybody worries.
Forty-one publications all over the country would reprint the editorial. At the end of the decade novelist John Steinbeck received a similar response to the publication of his letter to Adlai Stevenson in which he declared that if he wanted to ruin a nation "I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick…. [In rich America] a creeping, all pervading, nerve-gas of immorality starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices, both corporate and governmental." Steinbeck's letter was also reprinted many times and discussed throughout the country. Luxuriating in a landscape of tailfins, lawn sprinklers, and gray flannel suits, thoughtful Americans were uneasily considering what they had lost in their character and what they might be on their way to losing in the world at large.
Lederer and Burdick's novel presented Americans with confirmation of these fears in melodramatic terms charged with American mythic conceptions. Unlike The Quiet American, it attacked not the American character but the failure of many contemporary Americans to retain that character. Presenting confirmation of suspected corruption, The Ugly American echoed a traditional American message extending back to the New England Puritans. In The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch has shown that the political-sermon form of the Puritans known as the jeremiad survived in the political rhetoric of the formative years of the republic, and has continued to be a central ritual of American culture. Combining a criticism of contemporary errors and vision of future disaster with an affirmation of the correctness of the traditional character and purpose of the American "errand," the American jeremiad has enabled speakers and writers to exert a power at once conservative and progressive, demanding of each generation that they return to the way of the fathers and rededicate themselves to the special mission of the culture.
In The Ugly American the authors explicitly make this ritualistic call in the epilogue. After finishing their claims for the book's factual basis, the authors begin the ritual with the traditional cry of doom:
The picture as we saw it, then, is of an Asia where we stand relatively mute, locked in the cities, misunderstanding the temper and the needs of the Asians. We saw America spending vast sums where Russia spends far less and achieves far more. The result has been called "an uneasy balance," but actually it is nothing of the sort. We have been losing—not only in Asia, but everywhere.
If the only price we are willing to pay is the dollar price, then we might as well pull out before we're thrown out. If we are not prepared to pay the human price, we had better retreat to our shores, build Fortress America, learn to live without international trade and communications, and accept the mediocrity, the low standard of living, and the loom of world Communism which would accompany such a move.
The authors follow this grim assessment with assurance that the future nevertheless remains conditional, since the responsibility for this imminent catastrophe lies in the present attitude of American society:
Actually, the state in which we find ourselves is far from hopeless. We have the material, and above all the human resources, to change our methods and to win. It is not the fault of the government or its leaders or any political party that we have acted as we have. It is the temper of the whole nation.
They follow this denunciation of the present "temper of the whole nation" with an explanation that the problem lies in a deviation from the past mythos of the nation: "We have so lost sight of our own past that we are trying to sell guns and money alone, instead of remembering that it was the quest for the dignity of freedom that was responsible for our own way of life." Finally, they reassure readers that success is preordained if they will simply return to American principles:
All over Asia we have found that the basic American ethic is revered and honored and imitated when possible. We must, while helping Asia toward self-sufficiency, show by example that America is still the America of freedom and hope and knowledge and law. If we succeed, we cannot lose the struggle.
The fictional text of The Ugly American is a narrative version of this jeremiad: its structure of parabolic tales induces anxiety by showing imminent communist victory in Asia, places the blame upon the lapse of the majority of Americans serving there, and offers visions of the completed errand through small but exemplary successes won by a few virtuous Americans. The story then ends with an apocalyptic challenge to the reader in the form of the Secretary of State's rejection of the heroic few on the grounds that not enough Americans would be willing to make the sacrifices necessary for such policies. The characters of this drama symbolize the concepts intrinsic to the jeremiad from Puritan times to the nineteenth century: the Asian villagers are the American Indians or the Chinese, living in a terra profana, to be converted to the Forces of Light; the Soviet agents the clever and ruthless Forces of Darkness; the Viet Minh guerrillas the "savage" Indians manipulated by the Dark Forces; the British and French colonial officials the "dead hand of the European past"; the "ugly" Americans the Chosen who have fallen away from the errand; and the few "non-ugly" Americans, as Lederer and Burdick referred to them in a subsequent Life article, the traditional heroes of American mythic history.
The resulting allegory is played out upon an Indochina as much imagined as observed, an Indochina overlayed with the mythic landscapes represented in the American mind by the frontiers of the American West and nineteenth-century China. Set in the invented nation of Sarkhan and such actual nations as Vietnam, Burma, and Cambodia, The Ugly American imposes upon an exotic but generalized Southeast Asian topography and demography the "moral geography" characterizing American thought since the colonial period. The dominating features of the resulting symbolic landscape are the classic images of city and country, embodying the stark opposition between civilization and wilderness, Europe and America, technology and nature, the conscious and unconscious, that such critics of classic American literature as D. H. Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler have identified as obsessions of the American psyche. The power of the book lies in its presentation of the struggle in Indochina, and by extension the global cold war, in images holding mythic resonance.
In their prefatory note Lederer and Burdick protest that "what we have written is not just an angry dream, but rather the rendering of fact into fiction." But, however strong the basis of The Ugly American in actuality, its fictional power is precisely that of dream, the collective dream of authors and readers in a text based in shared myth. The vivid but formulaic prose, the alternately sentimental and horrific plot, and the sharply drawn but stereotypical characters call easily upon cultural memory. We can compare The Ugly American in this aspect to such myth-laden children's tales as Parson Weems' fable of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, which presented generations of American schoolchildren with a symbolic resolution of the psychological conflict of a culture both revolutionary and conservative in its origins. Though it functions as a jeremiad as opposed to the celebration of Weems' fable, The Ugly American possesses a similar power and method in its symbolic, ultimately uncritical, presentation of American cultural conflict.
In the symbolic landscape of The Ugly American, the success of the external struggle with Soviet agents and their "savage" Asian army of Viet Minh depends upon the outcome of an internal struggle taking place within the American psyche and the American society. The crucial conflict in The Ugly American is thus between two types of Americans. The "ugly" Americans, far from being simply incompetent diplomats, represent the"temper of the whole nation" that is in error. They present grotesque reflections of those contemporary Americans who have fallen away from American virtue and mission. In the moral geography of American myth found in the novel, the journey of the ugly Americans west to Asia is ironically a spiritual flight east back to Europe. The targets of the exposé in The Ugly American—narrow careerists in the diplomatic service, pleasure-seeking staff members, and "big" foreign-aid projects conferring wealth and status on the native elite without actually helping the people—are the means by which the book indirectly points its accusing finger at the loss of the frontier virtues in postwar society.
In its attacks on American policies and personnel in Asia, The Ugly American shows its American readers a mirror of their own "ugliness." Lederer and Burdick depict Americans in Washington being recruited to service overseas with assurances that they will "be living with a gang of clean-cut Americans" on "the high American standard," for even "in Saigon they stock American ice cream, bread, cake, and, well, anything you want." A friendly Asian leader observes that "something happens to most Americans when they go abroad…. Many of them, against their own judgment, feel that they must live up to their commissaries and big cars and cocktail parties." Readers in 1958 and later could recognize in these images the pervasive conformity, affluence, and status-seeking characterizing their postwar society.
Source: John Hellmann, "Entering a Symbolic Landscape," in American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 19-24.
