This is really good article, which does go into some of the old anti-American history, but perhaps I can add a bit to it, which might help those who don't know any of what I'm about to write.
Before WW I, America was viewed as a pretty backward nation. Forget about what you know that de Tocqueville wrote; he was an exception. The English and Europeans saw Americans are second tier, whose people were uncultured and ill mannered.
And truth to tell, America was NOT a world power and the "elite", from colonial times, through our Revolution, and afterwards, looked to Europe for "CULTURE".
After WW I, there actually WAS a society formed in America, to convince Europe that America WAS cultured and that our society was as good as theirs. A group of artists and writers and such went off to Europe, but it didn't work out all that well.
France embraced American music, many of the entertainers, but they still held their noses up in the air.
After WW II, most of Europe was devastated, England wasn't in great shape; but, America, relatively untouched by both world wars was in a position to help them. Talk about no good deed going unpunished? Yes, that's when the jealousy, talked about in the article, came into play. And since then, especially now, since we are the ONLY "superpower", that jealousy has been heightened.
Thanks for the history.
Look how far we have come in such a short time.
"After WW II, most of Europe was devastated, England wasn't in great shape; but, America, relatively untouched by both world wars was in a position to help them. Talk about no good deed going unpunished? Yes, that's when the jealousy, talked about in the article, came into play. And since then, especially now, since we are the ONLY "superpower", that jealousy has been heightened."
Help them? Consider this. after WWII, the US was left with one half of the world's standing industrial production capacity. We setup the marshall plan & helped rebuild Japan and Germany also because they'd serve as markets in the future and would forsake the path of totalatarianism and a future world war. We almost succeeded in our aims. Japan didn't quite open its markets to us as much as we would like and Mainland europe slid into socialistic semi-totalatarianism. But hey, on the whole it went off well for us. It could've been MUCH worse, ya know.
Not all of Tocqueville's words were positive though were they? I believe Jules Vernes was another great admirer of the US.