The Ugly American

Last updated
The Ugly American
TheUglyAmericanCover.jpg
First edition cover
Author Eugene Burdick
William Lederer
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre Political fiction
Set inSarkhan
Published 1958 by Norton
Media typePrint
Pages285 pp
OCLC 287560
823.914
LC Class PS3562.E3

The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that depicts the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia.

Contents

The book caused a sensation in diplomatic circles and had major political implications. The Peace Corps was established during the Kennedy administration partly as a result of the book. The bestseller has remained continuously in print and is one of the most influential American political novels. [1] It has been called an "iconic Cold War text." [2]

Background

Authors

William Lederer was an American author and captain in the U.S. Navy who served as special assistant to the commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific and Asian theater.

Eugene Burdick was an American political scientist, novelist, and non-fiction writer, and served in the Navy during World War II. The two met in the build-up to the Vietnam War. [3]

The authors were disillusioned with the style and substance of U.S. diplomatic efforts in Southeast Asia. They sought to demonstrate through their writings their belief that American officials and civilians could make a substantial difference in Southeast Asian politics if they were willing to learn local languages, follow local customs and employ regional military tactics.

Historical and political

The book was very much a product of its times and historical context.

In 1958 the Cold War was in full force, pitting the two geopolitical giants, the United States and the Soviet Union, against each other for military and geopolitical influence and dominance. NATO and the Warsaw Pact divided Europe into two competing visions of the world: the Western world viewed countries in the Eastern Bloc as behind an Iron Curtain, as evidenced by the failed Hungarian Revolution. The Eastern Bloc countered by portraying itself as the liberator of countries that were still in thrall to colonialist machinations, as evidenced by banana republics. The nuclear arms race was underway with the U.S. well ahead initially, but by 1955, the Soviets had exploded a hydrogen bomb and were beginning to catch up, sparking fears of nuclear armageddon.

The Soviet launching of Sputnik into orbit in 1957 gave the Soviets a huge technological and propaganda victory and sparked a crisis of confidence in the United States and worries about falling behind technologically and militarily. In Asia, the French had left Indochina in 1954 after their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the U.S. became involved in Vietnam to fill the perceived power vacuum. The U.S. and the Soviets struggled for preeminence in the Third World through proxies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

In the Middle East, the U.S. feared the spread of Communism starting in Egypt and attempted to secure the region's most populous and politically powerful country for the West by guarantees of funding for construction of the Aswan Dam, but it was eventually the Soviets who prevailed. Soviet diplomatic and political successes in the Third World left the West worried about losing one country after another to Communism [4] according to the domino theory invoked by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.[ citation needed ]

It was in this atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and uncertainty in the United States about Soviet military and technological might and Communist political success in unaligned nations of the Third World that the novel was published in 1958, with an immediate impact.

Content

The book depicts the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language, culture, and customs and refusal to integrate were in marked contrast to the polished abilities of Eastern Bloc (primarily Soviet) diplomacy and led to Communist diplomatic success overseas. [3]

Literary structure

Title

The title of the novel is a play on Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American [5] :17 and was sometimes confused with it. [3]

The "Ugly American" of the book title refers to the book's hero, plain-looking engineer Homer Atkins, whose "calloused and grease-blackened hands always reminded him that he was an ugly man." Atkins, who lives with the local people, comes to understand their needs, and offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump. [3]

Setting

The novel takes place in a fictional nation called Sarkhan (an imaginary country in Southeast Asia that somewhat resembles Laos, but which is meant to allude to Vietnam) and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed. The book describes the United States' losing struggle against Communism because of the ineptitude and the bungling of the U.S. diplomatic corps [6] stemming from innate arrogance and their failure to understand the local culture. The book implies that the Communists were successful because they practiced tactics similar to those of protagonist Homer Atkins. [3]

Category and structure

The book is written as a series of interrelated vignettes. It was originally commissioned by the publisher as a work of nonfiction, but was changed to a fictionalized novel at an editor's suggestion. The authors say in the introduction that the work represents "the rendering of fact into fiction." [3]

Plot summary

In one vignette, a Burmese journalist says, "For some reason, the [American] people 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 isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They are loud and ostentatious." [7]

The American Ambassador "Lucky" Lou Sears confines himself to his comfortable diplomatic compound in the capital. The Soviet ambassador speaks the local language and understands the local culture. He informs his Moscow superiors that Sears "keeps his people tied up with meetings, social events, and greeting and briefing the scores of senators, congressmen, generals, admirals, under secretaries of state and defense, and so on, who come pouring through here to 'look for themselves.'" Sears undermines the creative efforts to head off the communist insurgency.

Characters in real life

According to an article published in Newsweek in May 1959, the "real" "Ugly American" was identified as an International Cooperation Administration technician named Otto Hunerwadel, who, with his wife Helen, served in Burma from 1949 until his death in 1952. They lived in the villages, where they taught farming techniques, and helped to start home canning industries. [8]

Another of the book's characters, Colonel Hillandale, appears to have been modeled on the real-life U.S. Air Force Major General Edward Lansdale, who was an expert in counter-guerrilla operations. [9] [10]

Popularity

The book was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in the Fall of 1958, and came out as a Book of the Month Club selection in October. [1]

The book became an instant bestseller, going through 20 printings from July to November 1958, remaining on the bestseller list for a year and a half, and ultimately selling four million copies. [1] The book caused a sensation in diplomatic circles. John F. Kennedy was so impressed with the book that he sent a copy to each of his colleagues in the United States Senate. The book was one of the biggest bestsellers in the U.S., has been in print continuously since it appeared, and is one of the most politically influential novels in all of American literature. [1]

After the book had gained wide readership, the term "Ugly American" came to be used to refer to the "loud and ostentatious" type of visitor in another country rather than the "plain looking folks, who are not afraid to 'get their hands dirty' like Homer Atkins" to whom the book itself referred.

Reviews

Given the mood of fear and uncertainty in the U.S. at the time due to Sputnik and other perceived failures in the struggles of the Cold War, a book about diplomatic failures in Southeast Asia was well-aligned with the Zeitgeist and primed to catch attention. The book was lavishly praised in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Book Review, and the Chicago Tribune, with reviewers adding their own anecdotes about boorish behavior on the part of Americans abroad. A reviewer in Catholic World linked it to The Quiet American and said that the book was trying to answer some of the questions raised by Greene's book.

Reviews in some news or opinion publications reflected the varying opinions extant during the Cold War public debate. A reviewer in Time called it a "crude series of black-and-white-cartoons" while the Saturday Review, and The Nation also disapproved of overly simplistic characters. [5] :16

Impact

Contemporary reaction

The book was published in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration. Reportedly as a result of the book, Eisenhower ordered an investigation of the U.S. foreign aid program. As the presidential campaign of 1960 heated up, the issues raised in the book became a campaign issue for the Democratic Party. [5] :17

Presidential politics

Lasting impacts in the Kennedy administration included President Kennedy's national physical fitness program, his statement of America's willingness to "bear any burden" in the Third World, the founding of the Peace Corps, the build-up of American Special Forces, and emphasis on counterinsurgency tactics in fighting communists in South Vietnam. [1] According to British documentary film maker Adam Curtis, Senator and future U.S. President "John F. Kennedy was gripped by The Ugly American. In 1960, he and five other opinion leaders bought a large advertisement in The New York Times, saying that they had sent copies of the novel to every U.S. senator because its message was so important." [11]

President Lyndon Baines Johnson made reference to the term Ugly American in his Great Society speech to a 1964 university graduating class, [12] and it was by then used as a pejorative expression for generally offensive behavior by Americans abroad. [13]

Peace Corps

Senator Hubert Humphrey first introduced a bill in Congress in 1957 for the formation of a Peace Corps aimed primarily at development in the Third World, but "it did not meet with much enthusiasm" [14] and the effort failed. The Ugly American was published the following year. Senator Kennedy first mentioned the idea of creating a Peace Corps during his campaign for President in 1960 [15] and in March 1961, two months after his inauguration, Kennedy announced the establishment of the Peace Corps. [16] Kennedy and other members of the administration viewed the Peace Corps as their answer to the problems described in The Ugly American. [17]

Criticism

Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen alluded to the book or quoted from it, either as commentary or to further their objectives, or to criticize it. Senator J. William Fulbright, powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, criticized the book from the Senate floor, declaring that it contained "phony" claims of incompetence, and that it was a follow-up to McCarthy era treason charges. [5] :17–18 Historian Daniel Immerwahr wrote that the book promoted the idea that Americans, if they conducted themselves properly, could solve the problems of the Third World. [18]

Long-term impact

The title entered the English language for a type of character portrayed in the book. The book is one of a very few works of fiction that had a profound and lasting impact on American political debate, along with such works as Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle . [5] :15

In 2009 an article appeared in The New York Times Book Review about the book's impact since it was first published. The reviewer wrote that "the book's enduring resonance may say less about its literary merits than about its failure to change American attitudes. Today, as the battle for hearts and minds has shifted to the Middle East, we still can't speak Sarkhanese." [3]

A 2011 book on Arab–American relations took its title in part from the book, recalled the sense of diplomatic bungling in Southeast Asia portrayed in the book, and pointed out that many Arab commentators likened American mistakes in Iraq to those in Southeast Asia. [19]

Lederer and Burdick later published a 1965 novel called Sarkhan, about the Communist threat and Washington politics in Southeast Asia. [20] After thousands of copies which had been available in bookstores seemed to disappear from the shelves, the authors became convinced that government agencies were behind an attempt to suppress the book. After a decade of unavailability, it was republished in 1977 under the title The Deceptive American. [21]

1963 film

The film version of the novel was made in 1963 and starred Marlon Brando as Ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite. The Ugly American received mixed reviews and did poorly at the box office. [22]

See also

Notes

    Related Research Articles

    The domino theory is a geopolitical theory which posits that increases or decreases in democracy in one country tend to spread to neighboring countries in a domino effect. It was prominent in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s in the context of the Cold War, suggesting that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow. It was used by successive United States administrations during the Cold War as justification for American intervention around the world. Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower described the theory during a news conference on 7 April 1954, when referring to communism in Indochina as follows:

    Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Dean Rusk</span> American statesman (1909–1994)

    David Dean Rusk was the United States secretary of state from 1961 to 1969 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the second-longest serving Secretary of State after Cordell Hull from the Franklin Roosevelt administration. He had been a high government official in the 1940s and early 1950s, as well as the head of a leading foundation. He is cited as one of the two officers responsible for dividing the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.

    <i>The Quiet American</i> Novel by Graham Greene

    The Quiet American is a 1955 novel by English author Graham Greene.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Lansdale</span> United States Air Force and CIA officer

    Edward Geary Lansdale was a United States Air Force officer until retiring in 1963 as a major general before continuing his work with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lansdale was a pioneer in clandestine operations and psychological warfare. In the early 1950s, Lansdale played a significant role in suppressing the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines. In 1954, he moved to Saigon and started the Saigon Military Mission, a covert intelligence operation which was created to sow dissension in North Vietnam. Lansdale believed the United States could win guerrilla wars by studying the enemy's psychology, an approach that won the approval of the presidential administrations of both Kennedy and Johnson.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Vietnamization</span> Policy of American withdrawal from South Vietnam near the end of the Vietnam War

    Vietnamization was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnamese forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops". Brought on by the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive, the policy referred to U.S. combat troops specifically in the ground combat role, but did not reject combat by the U.S. Air Force, as well as the support to South Vietnam, consistent with the policies of U.S. foreign military assistance organizations. U.S. citizens' mistrust of their government that had begun after the offensive worsened with the release of news about U.S. soldiers massacring civilians at My Lai (1968), the invasion of Cambodia (1970), and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers (1971).

    "Ugly American" is a stereotype depicting American citizens as exhibiting loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior mainly abroad, but also at home. Although the term is usually associated with or applied to travelers and tourists, it also applies to U.S. corporate businesses in the international arena.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Walt Rostow</span> American economist, political theorist and government official (1916–2003)

    Walt Whitman Rostow was an American economist, professor and political theorist who served as national security advisor to president of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969.

    Eugene Leonard Burdick was an American political scientist, novelist, and non-fiction writer, co-author of The Ugly American (1958), Fail-Safe (1962), and author of The 480 (1965).

    William Julius Lederer, Jr. was an American author and naval officer.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Anthony Dooley III</span> American physician

    Thomas Anthony Dooley III was an American physician who worked in Southeast Asia at the outset of American involvement in the Vietnam War. While serving as a physician in the United States Navy and afterwards, he became known for his humanitarian and anti-communist political activities up until his early death from cancer. After his death, the public learned that he had been recruited as an intelligence operative by the Central Intelligence Agency, and numerous descriptions of atrocities by the Viet Minh in his book Deliver Us From Evil had been fabricated.

    This is an introduction to some of the books and novels written about Southeast Asia.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Fukuda Doctrine</span> Japanese foreign policy doctrine

    The Fukuda Doctrine is a Japanese foreign policy doctrine, based on a 1977 speech by Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda, stating that Japan would never become a military power. On the contrary, the policy proposes to enhance relations with Southeast Asian countries in wide-ranging fields, as well as to increase cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its member countries. The Fukuda Doctrine serves as the foundation of Japanese diplomacy toward the rest of Asia.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">John F. Kennedy</span> President of the United States from 1961 to 1963

    John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK and by the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person to assume the presidency by election and the youngest president at the end of his tenure. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his foreign policy concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat from Massachusetts, Kennedy served in both houses of the U.S. Congress prior to his presidency.

    United States involvement in the Vietnam War began shortly after the end of World War II in Asia, first in an extremely limited capacity and escalating over a period of 20 years. The U.S. military presence peaked in April 1969, with 543,000 American combat troops stationed in Vietnam. By the conclusion of the United States's involvement in 1973, over 3.1 million Americans had been stationed in Vietnam.

    CIA activities in Vietnam were operations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam from the 1950s to the late 1960s, before and during the Vietnam War. After the 1954 Geneva Conference, North Vietnam was controlled by communist forces under Ho Chi Minh's leadership. South Vietnam, with the assistance of the U.S., was anti-communist. The economic and military aid supplied by the U.S. to South Vietnam continued until the 1970s. The CIA participated in both the political and military aspect of the wars in Indochina. The CIA provided suggestions for political platforms, supported candidates, used agency resources to refute electoral fraud charges, manipulated the certification of election results by the South Vietnamese National Assembly, and instituted the Phoenix Program. It worked particularly closely with the ethnic minority Montagnards, Hmong, and Khmer. There are 174 National Intelligence Estimates dealing with Vietnam, issued by the CIA after coordination with the US intelligence community.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">1961 in the Vietnam War</span>

    The year 1961 saw a new American president, John F. Kennedy, attempt to cope with a deteriorating military and political situation in South Vietnam. The Viet Cong (VC) with assistance from North Vietnam made substantial gains in controlling much of the rural population of South Vietnam. Kennedy expanded military aid to the government of President Ngô Đình Diệm, increased the number of U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam, and reduced the pressure that had been exerted on Diệm during the Eisenhower Administration to reform his government and broaden his political base.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">1958 in the Vietnam War</span>

    In 1958, the upswing in violence against the government of South Vietnam continued, much of which was committed by the communist-dominated insurgents now called the Viet Cong. In South Vietnam, President Ngo Dinh Diem appeared to be firmly in power, although many American officials expressed concern about the repressive nature of his regime. The United States continued to finance most of the budget of the government of South Vietnam. North Vietnam continued to campaign for reunification with the South while focusing on its internal economic development, but pressure from hard-pressed communists in the South was forcing the North to contemplate a more active military role in overthrowing the Diem government.

    The United States foreign policy during the presidency of John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963 included diplomatic and military initiatives in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, all conducted amid considerable Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe. Kennedy deployed a new generation of foreign policy experts, dubbed "the best and the brightest". In his inaugural address Kennedy encapsulated his Cold War stance: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate".

    <i>The Ugly American</i> (film) 1963 American film

    The Ugly American is a 1963 American adventure film directed by George Englund, written by Stewart Stern, and starring Marlon Brando, Sandra Church, Eiji Okada, Pat Hingle, Judson Pratt, Reiko Sato, and Arthur Hill. It is based on the 1958 novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The film was released on April 2, 1963, by Universal Pictures.

    <span class="mw-page-title-main">Cold War in Asia</span>

    The Cold War in Asia was a major dimension of the worldwide Cold War that shaped diplomacy and warfare from the mid-1940s to 1991. The main countries involved were the United States, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, South Korea, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Taiwan. In the late 1950s, divisions between China and the Soviet Union deepened, culminating in the Sino-Soviet split, and the two then vied for control of communist movements across the world, especially in Asia.

    References

    1. 1 2 3 4 5 Hellmann, John (July 1983). "Vietnam as Symbolic Landscape: The Ugly American and the New Frontier". Peace & Change. 9 (2–3): 40–54. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0130.1983.tb00494.x. ISSN   1468-0130.
    2. Immerwahr, Daniel (2019). "The Ugly American: Peeling the Onion of an Iconic Cold War Text". The Journal of American-East Asian Relations. 26 (1): 7–20. doi:10.1163/18765610-02601003. S2CID   186928922.
    3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Meyer, Michael (12 July 2009). "Still 'Ugly' After All These Years". Sunday Book Review. New York Times. Archived from the original on 2015-10-24. Retrieved 2015-05-27.
    4. Johnson, Claudia Durst; Johnson, Vernon Elso (2002). The Social Impact of the Novel: A Reference Guide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 308. ISBN   978-0-313-31818-4. LCCN   2001055624. OCLC   144683798 . Retrieved 14 June 2016.
    5. 1 2 3 4 5 Hellman, John (1986). American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN   978-0-231-05878-0. OCLC   12052089 . Retrieved 14 June 2016.
    6. Paul Hollander (1995). Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational . New Brunswick, N.J. USA: Transaction Publishers. p.  399. ISBN   978-1-4128-1734-9. OCLC   30701897. It was the highly popular message of the book that Americans abroad, and officials in particular, were both totally ignorant of local customs, social norms, and culture and cheerfully insensitive to the feelings and beliefs of the peoples they were seeking to defend from the communist threat. "The Ugly American" became a stereotype of the American abroad universally disliked...The novel also conveyed that the few Americans who were knowledgeable of and interested in foreign countries are systematically weeded out from foreign service. The novel's Ambassador Sears thinks of the natives as "little monkeys" and had no idea where the country was located in which he was given the job as a political reward. He was among the American officials described by one of the articulate natives as people who cannot grasp the power of ideas (unlike the communists) and who were sent over to "try to buy U.S. like cattle".
    7. Lederer, William J; Burdick, Eugene (1958). The Ugly American. The Norton library. Norton. ISBN   9780393318678. LCCN   58007388 . Retrieved 17 May 2015. p. 145
    8. Clifford, Robert L.; Hunerwadel, Helen B. (1996) [1993]. "Chapter 1: Burma Beginnings and Point Four". In Arndt, Richard T.; David Lee, Rubin (eds.). The Fulbright Difference. Fulbright Association series. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. pp. 20–24. ISBN   978-1-56000-085-3 . Retrieved 18 July 2011.
    9. Blum, William (2003) [1st pub Zed:1986]. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. London: Zed Books. p.  125. ISBN   978-1-84277-368-0. OCLC   53391104 . Retrieved 5 May 2016. By August, only days after the close of the [July 1954 Geneva] conference, the team was in place. Under the direction of CIA leading-light Edward Lansdale, fresh from his success in the Philippines, a campaign of military and psychological warfare was carried out against the Vietminh. (Lansdale's activities in Vietnam were depicted in The Ugly American and The Quiet American.)
    10. Immerwahr (2019), p. 8.
    11. How to kill a rational peasant
    12. Wikisource:The Great Society
    13. "Ugly American: Definition of Ugly American by Merriam-Webster". Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 2015-05-18. an American in a foreign country whose behavior is offensive to the people of that country
    14. Humphrey, Hubert H (1991). The Education of a Public Man. p. 184. ISBN   9780816618972.
    15. "Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy". Peace Corps. November 20, 2013 [1960]. Retrieved 2015-08-03.
    16. "Executive Order 10924: Establishment of the Peace Corps. (1961)". Ourdocuments.gov. Archived from the original on 2004-03-18. Retrieved October 16, 2011.
    17. Watts, Steven (8 November 2016). JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 215. ISBN   978-1-250-04998-8. OCLC   1013885328 . Retrieved 23 October 2018.
    18. Immerwahr (2019), p. 19-20.
    19. El-Bendary, Mohamed (2011). The "ugly American" in the Arab Mind: Why Do Arabs Resent America?. Potomac Books, Inc. p. 9. ISBN   978-1-59797-673-2. OCLC   764650565 . Retrieved 26 June 2016.
    20. Lederer, William J.; Burdick, Eugene (1965). Sarkhan . McGraw-Hill. OCLC   1061482.
    21. Lederer, William J; Burdick, Eugene (November 1977). The Deceptive American. W. W. Norton. ISBN   978-0-393-08802-1. OCLC   3203901.
    22. "Top Grossing Films of 1963". 2013-09-06. Retrieved 2015-05-18.