American Rifle - Alexander Rose [253]
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20. There were two major newspapers that stood up for France, the Boston Post and the New York World. The Post thought that Napoleon III had “kept France in the path of progress,” and warned that Prussia was not as liberal as its defenders believed; in fact, it was nothing other than a despotism. By way of contrast, the New York Times opined that Germany was a republic and France, an imperialist state. The World trod a middle line between the two, saying that France was indeed an imperialist power while cautioning that Prussia was run by a warmongering “North German Caesar,” and it told off the Times for “converting Count Bismarck and King William into apostles of progress and freedom.” See C. E. Scheiber, The Transformation of American Sentiment Toward Germany, 1870–1914 (Boston, Mass.: Cornhill, 1923), pp. 14–24. By 1870, in any case, the French lacked much of a cheerleading constituency in this country—at least in the North; the “aristocratic” South was more sympathetic. At this time there were 151,203 foreign-born, emigrant Germans living in New York (plus 50,746 in Philadelphia and 49,446 in Boston), compared to just 8,240 French in New York, 2,471 in Philadelphia, and 615 in Boston. Owing to their overwhelming preponderance, Germans naturally enjoyed greater sway in politics, diplomacy, and public opinion than did their French cousins. E. N. Curtis, “American Opinion of the French Nineteenth-Century Revolutions,” American Historical Review 29, no. 2 (1924), p. 264n56.
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21. Quoted in C. Brinton, The Americans and the French (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 68.
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22. The “makeup” story extended right back to the creation of the United States—and even then it probably enjoyed something of a pedigree. In 1780, when Dr. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, and his friend William Channing visited Newport, Rhode Island, to watch the French troops disembarking, they were surprised to discover that “neither officers nor men are the effeminate beings we were heretofore taught to believe them.” (Quoted in A. R. Rosenthal, “The Gender-Coded Stereotype: An American Perception of France and the French,” French Review 72, no. 5 (1999), p. 905). In this regard, I once heard a story that in the pre-1914 Austro-Hungarian army a regulation, sternly administered, stated that no officer under field rank was permitted to wear rouge or to powder his face. I have no idea how true this is. However, in his recent World War I: A Short History, Norman Stone observes that the Romanian army was so unaccustomed to war that junior officers were ordered not to wear eye shadow into battle. See P. Brendon, “Trench Warfare,” Guardian, July 7, 2007.
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23. On this subject see Rosenthal, “ Gender-Coded Stereotype,” pp. 897–908. French food enjoyed, or suffered, the sole honor of being cuttingly designated as “cuisine” to distinguish it from down-home Yankee fare. During the 1840 election Whig backers of William Henry Harrison would claim their man subsisted, like any good American frontiersman, on “raw beef without salt” while his dandified competitor Martin Van Buren gorged himself, like some modern-day Caligula, on such foreign fripperies as celery, cauliflower, and strawberries. D. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 323.
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24. For a detailed examination of the politics and Kultur of German emigrants, see T. Jaehn, Germans in the Southwest, 1850–1920 (Albuquerque: