INTRODUCTION

IN 2010, the Arizona Department of Education decided to require schools not to employ anyone with a heavy foreign accent to teach students just learning to speak English. Officials argued that students who do not know the language—children of immigrants—should have teachers who can best model how to speak English. My fellow Romanian-born writer and university professor Andrei Codrescu commented sarcastically: “Come to think of it, the Arizona law doesn’t go far enough. People with accents should be banned from any profession that involves communication. Politics, for instance. Henry Kissinger’s accent would surely qualify for the ban.”¹ Kissinger’s successful career was the exception rather than the norm among immigrants. The intimidating barrier posed by a new language keeps them not only away from employment opportunities but also out of the public sphere. Politics often seems reserved for the native, those born and raised in the homeland.²

Yet despite such challenges and restrictions, accented voices (Codrescu’s included) are heard in American public discourse. Whether or not they are models for correct grammar or proper pronunciation, some of them have made deep changes in American culture and society. It is, however, not just how their voices sound in English but, more importantly, what they say, their observations and their visions. Four foreigners in particular, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said, took American politics in new directions. Their ways of thinking stood both inside and outside America. All four were outspoken critics of and dissenters from what was considered at the time mainstream thinking and official political discourse in the United States. Their opinions were often dismissed in America with the argument that, as foreigners, they could not have an accurate understanding of an exceptional political system like American democracy.

Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said relied on their cultural strangeness to formulate bold visions and introduce American audiences to radically different political perspectives. This book examines their contribution to American political discourse through what I term the “stranger persona,” a strategic blend of detachment and involvement, of familiarity and strangeness projected by an author in discourse. I develop the concept of stranger persona to analyze the ways in which foreignness can constitute a strategy of rhetorical invention in response to a political and historical tradition that represents foreigners as dangerous and inferior. I examine these four intellectuals’ criticisms of American society and politics around highly sensitive and controversial issues that affected the way in which Americans defined themselves as a nation in times of crisis: the emergence of totalitarian regimes; the desegregation of schools in the South; the counterculture movements and the New Left; the détente policy of relaxation in the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and America’s relation with the Arab world and Israel.

As scholars and cultural critics, Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said have an indisputable fame in American intellectual life. My selection of these four particular intellectuals is based on the prominence they achieved in the United States but also on the fact that all four became involved in American, rather than exilic politics.3 They were not the only prominent intellectuals of foreign origin who took an interest in American politics. Leo Strauss, for instance, is broadly considered to have played a key influence on conservative politics in post–World War II America.⁴ His books, it is rumored, lay on the night table of many congressmen and White House officials. The Russian-born Ayn Rand was a personal friend of Alan Green-span, former chairman of the Federal Reserve.5 The Republican senator Paul Ryan credits Rand with a formative role in shaping his political views.⁶ At the other end of the political spectrum, Albert Einstein was a pacifist and passionate critic of big corporations’ destruction of the environment. More recently, the British-born Tony Judt and Christopher Hitchens were distinguished scholars as well as vocal commentators in American politics.

None of these intellectuals, however, embodies the combination of scholarly or artistic capital with active participation in American political discourse in quite the same way as the four I discuss. Strauss, to my knowledge, never wrote political commentary and did not take a specific stance on a contemporary political matter. Einstein was a scientist rather than a philosopher. Rand left an intellectually mediocre body of work that cannot sustain a serious scholarly investigation.⁷ Judt and Hitchens, impressive as they both were, did not achieve quite the same reputation as Said, for instance, nor were they as “foreign” as Marcuse, if only because they did not have to learn a new language or flee political persecution in their own country. Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism was highly influential in the Cold War ideological battles, but her political involvement on the American scene went far beyond this one book as she commented on events and situations that were specific to American politics and history, from the desegregation of schools in the South to the Vietnam War. Marcuse’s critiques of capitalism are thought to have influenced the New Left movement, with which he was closely connected. Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of political prisoners in the Soviet gulag and his denouncement of communism as a totalitarian ideology and a crushing regime played an important role in America’s Cold War politics. Finally, Said lambasted the United States for its support of Israel but also tried to mediate between the United States and the Arab world, both through his interventions in public debates and by participating in secret negotiations.

Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said are not usually studied as immigrants, although much has been said about them as philosophers and writers with strong political views and commitments. Yet they were not spared the difficulties that immigrants arriving in America experience: culture shock, adjustment to new customs, (re-)building a career, making new friends—in other words, having to create new habits and new routines in order to make their existence in the United States meaningful and fulfilling. Examining their philosophical-political work as the expression of an immigrant consciousness affects how I read their texts. I examine the contrast, even conflict, between their political ideas and style and what most American readers believed. Lack of familiarity with a political culture became a source of insight, no matter how paradoxical this might seem.

The practices of statecraft rely on strict differentiations between citizens and aliens.8 This book argues that the distinction is also salient for understanding the dynamic of political discourse when it involves disagreements between the foreign born and the native born on matters that directly concern the nature of a polity—such as the type of organization it prefers, its values, or its attitude toward other nations. In the exchanges I analyze, these foreigners argued as citizens, regardless of the identity that was stamped on their passports. Even Solzhenitsyn, who is the only one in the group not to have acquired American citizenship, addressed his American audience using the rhetoric of citizenry (in a commencement address). Arguably, Arendt, Marcuse, and Said were more involved civically in America than Solzhenitsyn; his Harvard address might seem an isolated case in his political activity, which was focused on his native country (though I argue that it was not). Yet all four shared, in degree and scope, their rejection as foreigners, and all four made similar use of a stylistic of foreignness as a source of insight. Often the response to their criticism addressed them as noncitizens, again regardless of their actual status. They belong together not because they were similar in views or immigration status but because they were treated so.

Of the numerous definitions of the nation, Jürgen Habermas’s puts in perspective how strange, not just foreign, those who come from another country appear to us: “a nation of citizens (as) composed of persons who, as a result of socialization processes, also embody the forms of life in which they formed their identities.”⁹ Different national communities have different forms of life, even when they might seem universal. The solidity of Arendt’s marriage to Heinrich Blücher, who was involved for several years with a friend of the couple, was a constant source of surprise (and probably gossip) among American friends who saw it as the product of the interwar Berlin culture, with its relaxed sexual mores and tolerance for extramarital affairs. Margarette von Trotha’s film vividly captures the difference between forms of life for Arendt’s German circle in New York and her American acquaintances: at a gathering in Arendt’s elegant apartment, Mary McCarthy and an American professor of German studies from the New School watch from a distance the excited conversation in German of the hostess and her German guests. Neither can follow the discussion, and the movie makes it clear that this is not a matter of linguistic difference.10 We presume the foreigner’s way to be different even before we know it for what it is or even though we might be familiar with it. Said recounted frequent inquiries from colleagues and students who wanted to know what he eats for breakfast and how his residence looks, as though his political views and Palestinian identity made it seem implausible that he could live like so many other Americans who drink coffee in the morning and rent an apartment.

How these intellectuals were perceived in the United States affected the reception of their ideas. Classical theories of rhetoric would explain this phenomenon as a problem of ethos. Rhetoric handbooks recommend that attempts at persuasion strive not just to present a logical sequence of arguments (logos) but also to project credibility (ethos).¹¹ The presence of the latter is all the more important because, as Eugene Garver explains, “we infer from ethos to logos.”¹² If we trust the speaker, we are more likely to attend carefully to and even be convinced by his or her arguments, irrespective of their inherent merit or logic. Communication relies on a “labor of codification and normalization” of linguistic strategies, patterns of argumentation, stylistic choices, dramatic personae, and emotional display (or its avoidance).¹³ This labor emerges as a generalization of existing usages that belong to a dominant group. The official language—in the United States, American English, through status and use if not law—functions as the most palpable proof of what is ultimately a projection, the idea of a unified, coherent community of individuals willing to trust members of their national community more than they are willing to trust outsiders. Those who are already inside the national polity are loosely subjected through habit to the norms and codes of the standard language rather than explicitly coerced to follow certain rules that bestow on them their status as natives. They have a citizen’s ethos, unavailable to newcomers or outsiders who are introduced to these linguistic codes and norms by those not only authorized to impose them but also deemed the ideal representatives—such as a teacher who can model good English by not having an accent.

Rather than stay away from the public sphere because they lacked a citizen ethos, the four intellectuals I discuss in this book turned this lack into a rhetorical strategy, taking it on as a part they would play in the theater of American politics, a persona. Their stranger persona had both a cognitive and a stylistic component: it was a way of generating original ideas—as in the rhetorical canon of inventio—and of arranging them in patterns of argumentation—dispositio. As such, their political discourse is significant beyond these intellectuals’ own ascent to or fall from political authority. Across the period spanned by their writings—close to half of a century—the backlash against foreigners raises questions about the inclusiveness of the American polis and the strength, or rather rigidity, of its national bond. The American response to the stranger persona persisted despite changes in the political climate and variations in the national origin of the foreign critic in question. The Russian anticommunist Solzhenitsyn was dismissed in equal measure as the German socialist Marcuse, the German liberal Arendt, or the Palestinian anti-Zionist Said. All four shared the same fate, no matter how different their political views or cultural background. They got caught in a clash of vision and style, a clash between “us” and “them” that resonates all too powerfully with the so-called clash of civilizations, no matter how much the participants in this political discourse were all intellectuals in the Western mold.

I am aware that putting too fine of a point on the foreignness of these intellectuals is risky. It ignores differences among them, ignores the extent to which some changed over the years spent in America, reifies the category of American intellectuals, and creates a dichotomy between the native and the foreigner that is far too simplistic given the overall cosmopolitanism of both American and European intellectuals after World War II. American-born intellectuals not only differed greatly by ideological beliefs, styles of thought, taste, and values but also conceived of their own Americanness differently depending on their social background. Some were children of immigrants and still felt like new arrivals. Some struggled financially more than the immigrant intellectuals. Some had lived abroad, and others had never left their country. No doubt, intellectuals have complex ties to a national polity and challenge the simple dichotomy of belonging versus not belonging. As a sociological category, intellectuals have always been part of a transnational rather than national order, even before terms like transnation alism and cosmopolitanism became fashionable. According to Jacques Le Goff, in the Middle Ages the category of intellectuals consisted of scholars, mainly humanists affiliated with a European university, committed to abstract ideals rather than particular institutions.14 Medieval intellectuals were heavily involved in translation projects, actively pursuing knowledge assumed to transcend cultural and national borders—just as they themselves did. Richard Pells views modern intellectuals as, by the very nature of their mission, outsiders or marginal in relation to any form of power—whether represented by the state, the market, or the university—so as to be able to reflect critically on it.¹⁵ Yet at the same time, no matter how unencumbered by national or political interests, intellectuals have historically been central to the formation of national consciousness. Paradoxically, they are both involved in and detached from the national order.

Yet it would be impossible to deny that uprooted intellectuals face a different predicament than their native-born colleagues. The four I study here wrote and thought differently, even when agreeing with American intellectuals or communicating with American friends and even though they saw America as their own country. They frequently engaged in philosophical, cultural, and political debates with American-born intellectuals. Sometimes, their intellectual training, artistic taste, and social status formed a strong shared foundation for agreement. But their national origin never went unnoticed or was completely forgotten, and this is not a trivial point. Arendt was a German Jew who had come to America as an experienced political activist and thinker. The German cultural and political tradition that had shaped her intellectual and personal identity, as well as Marcuse’s, was markedly different from that of her American friends. Solzhenitsyn’s anticommunism was the stance of a political dissident from the Soviet Union. While his enemy was the Communist Party in power in the Soviet Union, for American anticommunists the enemy was often more broadly defined, and it extended to the people of the Soviet Union, and specifically to Russians. Said, although he had spent his entire adult life in the United States, had a different perspective on Israel as a Palestinian whose family were victims of Israeli policies than American critics like Noam Chomsky. In the United States, these intellectuals shared a stranger’s ethos not because they were immigrants (not all were) or because they opposed government policies but because they faced the common predicament of being on the fringes, marginalized and disenfranchised when their criticism of America offended patriotic sensibilities. Although they differed widely in political agenda, intellectual vision, and style, they were also similar insofar as they shared the rejection of the foreigner. Their foreignness was projected on them, no matter how different their political views and status.

All four were foreigners also because, while they lived in America, they did not identify the United States as their sole or main national affiliation. Their interest and involvement in American politics did not preclude Arendt and Marcuse from maintaining an interest in postwar Germany, manifested in frequent trips, writing, and public lecturing. Said traveled extensively to the Middle East and increasingly assumed a Palestinian identity. Solzhenitsyn never became a naturalized American citizen and indeed returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His stay in the United States, however, was almost two decades long. He became a fixture in American political discourse, appearing often in public at lectures and meetings, publishing in highly visible American media outlets, and, most important, being frequently invoked by American commentators. All four used their familiarity with other cultures and traditions as a strategy for questioning the American way though their American critics dismissed this as mere lack of familiarity with America. They charged that without an intimate knowledge of American practices and traditions, the foreigner had no solid foundation upon which to formulate a valid opinion and thus no right to pass judgment. A respectable American scholar once argued that since Arendt never had a driver’s license, she could not have been able to travel much in America and therefore could not be familiar enough with American society.16

Arendt admitted that she had never traveled to the South, but she still expressed her views on the desegregation of schools in Arkansas, arguing against the use of federal troops. Many American intellectuals disagreed with her perspective, but some dismissed her right to weigh in and question the government’s decision (especially since it received wide support from American liberals). When Solzhenitsyn criticized the role played by the media in manipulating public opinion in the United States, American critics on the left and the right dismissed his position as that of a Russian who had no experience with democratic institutions. Marcuse’s criticism of American capitalism was often met with complaints that he was merely a hostile and ungrateful foreigner. Said’s attacks of American Zionism brought him the charge of being not just anti-Semitic but also anti-American. Such charges denied them a fundamental right, “the recognition of the individual as a being who is entitled to moral respect, a being whose communicative freedom we must recognize.”17 Being dismissed or shut down as a foreigner constitutes the mark of a xenophobic politics that deems the foreigner’s position wrong by default.

To accept that a foreigner’s political views might be right is not a sign of tolerance but of recognition, in the sense proposed by Paul Ricoeur, which I discuss in the conclusion. Such a shift requires a reframing of our understanding of the relation between foreigners and the nation-state beyond the perspective inherited from the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. For Kant, foreigners had the right to hospitality, not to be “treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.”¹⁸ Dismissing the foreigner’s views and arguments as wrong because they are a foreigner’s is a way of treating him as an implicit enemy. The Kantian conception of a foreigner’s rights assumes the foreigner as visitor. The hospitality was temporary as foreigners may have been welcomed in the land but were also expected to leave. But in a country like the United States, whose national identity is founded on the myth of an immigrant past, foreigners have historically also enjoyed the right to stay and acquire full political membership in the nation. Such membership requires the right to be not only physically present on American land but also present in American public discourse by being granted freedom of speech and also political recognition.

To unsettle the habit of mind that deems the foreigner wrong by default requires more than mere shedding of prejudice, if this is even possible. It demands a rethinking of the traditional narrative that records and interprets encounters between Americans and foreigners coming to this country, the tropes on which this narrative relies, and the symbolic constructions it makes available. In the remaining part of this introduction, I outline briefly the contours of this narrative, focusing on the ambiguous figure of the foreigner who ventures to criticize America.

THE FOREIGNER AS ENLIGHTENED TRAVELER

From the early days of the republic, a steady stream of Europeans traveled to the United States and produced a literary tradition of American travelogues. The key representative of this tradition inaugurated a discourse of praise that was hard to rival. Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America in 1831, accompanied by Gustave de Beaumont, to study the penal system of the country. Both voyagers were public prosecutors, and the purpose of their trip required them to spend most of their time and attention on American jails. The result, however, is much different from the somber account one might have expected. As we know, the book turned out to be more than a presentation of American legislation. Democracy in America has been repeatedly hailed, in the words of the editor of the Perennial edition, J. P. Mayer, as “the most comprehensive, penetrating, and astute picture of American life, politics, and morals ever written—whether by an American or, as in this case, a foreign visitor.”19 Thirteen editions were published during Tocqueville’s life alone, followed by dozens more after his death. Democracy in America is a canonical text for political theory, still recognized today as a key contribution to the study of democracy. It is also a canonical text for American history insofar as it is read as an accurate depiction of American life. These two levels of significance can be easily conflated. Democracy in America has been depicted as making the case that American politics is synonymous with democracy, in other words, that democratic governance originates in distinctly American practices and institutions. Sheldon Wolin has argued that Tocqueville’s ability to understand and theorize democracy at a time when it was still a new form of politics was directly determined by his firsthand experience of American life.20 Tocqueville’s account, then, represents not just the recognition of America’s greatness but also the highest compliment ever paid to it.

But was this really a foreigner’s compliment, or rather self-flattery? Ali Behdad has drawn attention to the American secondary sources of Tocqueville’s account, suggesting that their effect on Democracy in America was far greater than that of the author’s direct experience. Following William E. Connolly, Behdad claims that Tocqueville’s travelogue was “constructed from the dominant archive of the nation—works such as Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of the New England, 1620–1698 and Nathaniel Morton’s New England Memorial.” Rather than documenting the workings of American democracy, Tocqueville was a symbolic witness to its existence as it had already been established by American commentators through whom he had discovered it. Tocqueville also relied on non-American sources, such as travelogues by eighteenth-century European travelers, adopting their Enlightenment ontology along with its racial overtones. This European influence comes through in his depiction of Native Americans, which focuses on their inability to assimilate into “the political economy of white civilization.” Such a perspective was not only convincing for an American audience but also convenient. “Above all, what made Tocqueville a ‘friend’ to Americans,” Behdad suggests, “is not the political theory of democracy he gave them but a canonized history of how their nation-state was imagined in an ‘exceptional’ way by pilgrims.”²¹

Tocqueville’s account was flattering to Americans because it praised their country and also implicitly criticized Europe, specifically France, his own country, the bastion of European civilization. In the preface, the author insists that the American context is unique and that he did not wish to present it as a model for political life in Europe. At the same time, he writes, “American institutions, which for France under the monarchy were simply a subject of curiosity, ought now to be studied by republican France.”²² This was a weighted statement when it appeared in the preface to the edition published in 1848, the year of European revolutions that brought national emancipation in several European countries.

Since the book was intended for a French audience, its author makes it clear in the introduction that his interest in the subject—and theirs, he implies—was not just “to satisfy curiosity, however legitimate; I sought there lessons from which we might profit.”23 In the particular context of the book’s production—postrevolutionary France with its emergent political landscape defined by republicanism—such lessons were directly connected to the “shape of democracy itself . . . its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions. I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope there from.”²⁴ The most important lesson America offered to Tocqueville and his French readers was one in equality, from “political mores and laws” to “opinions, . . . feelings, . . . customs.” While describing equality as “the creative element from which each particular fact (in America) derived,” Tocqueville took great care to present equality as a political condition not dependent on American life and thus exportable and importable:

When I came to consider our own side of the Atlantic, I thought I could detect something analogous to what I had noticed in the New World. I saw an equality of conditions which, though it had not reached the extreme limits found in the United States, was daily drawing closer thereto; and that same democracy which prevailed over the societies of America seemed to me to be advancing rapidly toward power in Europe.²⁵

The America seen by Tocqueville was a source of political inspiration for Europe. Such a model had to be presented carefully to audiences reluctant to admit that they needed one. “Anyone who supposes that I intend to write a panegyric is strangely mistaken,” warns Tocqueville, a classic instance of someone who protests too much, indirectly admitting his anxiety over appearing so admiring of a country other than his own.²⁶ Yet in his effort to avoid being seen as a proselytizer, he ended up not only presenting America as a paragon of democracy but also promoting American democracy as a natural political order toward which all civilized nations would ultimately gravitate.27 Tocqueville’s legacy was a narrative of enchanted self-discovery in the eyes of the foreigner, a satisfied confirmation that to be American is to be superior, an important reassurance for a nation remembering its birth as emancipation from a European power.

This discourse of praise sits in tense relation with a discourse of harsh criticism, associated mainly with British accounts. To the nineteenth-century British traveler, Simon Schama writes, “the hallmark of Jacksonian America seemed to be a beastly indifference to manners, the symptom of a society where considerateness to others was a poor second to the immediate satisfaction of personal wants.”²⁸ Schama reminds us of Frances Trollope, wife to the novelist, who made her own literary reputation on the basis of a single book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, a highly critical portrait presenting to European audiences a boorish materialist people.²⁹ Her account was popular with the British because, as Schama points out, the American Revolution was still relatively fresh in the minds of readers pleased to receive confirmation of their own stereotypes of Americans. However, the book was also noted in France and seemed to have informed the views of influential authors such as Stendhal and, later, Charles Baudelaire. In 1842, Charles Dickens published his American Notes, a travelogue documenting his voyage through New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati and into Illinois. Dickens’s dark vision, centered on disrepair, immorality, and insanity, emerges partly from the sites he visited—prisons and asylums—and partly from his own novelistic aesthetic. He was hardly a chronicler of idyllic, happy settings. Schama notes the climax of Dickens’s dark representations in his rendition of a key cultural trope in American self-representation, the Mississippi River. Observing it from Cairo, Illinois, Dickens offers a dystopian vision of the American rundown town: “The hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it.”³⁰

Matthew Arnold did not think there was anything worth seeing in America, and his decision to avoid it reveals a common stereotype about the U.S. as an intellectually and culturally barren country.³¹ Schama credits Rudyard Kipling with introducing the idea of an America moving away from this position of inferiority to Europe and being on the verge of an “imperialist awakening”—a view that would lead to twentieth-century anti-Americanism that saw America as a superpower trying to take over other national cultures through pernicious influences such as Coca-Colaization if not direct military means. Finally, for Schama, the most important recurrent complaint in European intellectuals’ representation of Americans is their arrogant sense of national pride. America’s “national egocentricity” contributes, according to the European writers Schama reviews (and with whom he agrees), to its cultivated isolation and emphasis on its exceptional-ism. These are attitudes that lead to defensiveness rather than openness to the criticism of outsiders.

In the aftermath of World War II, as the United States strengthened its economic and political presence in Europe, anti-Americanism intensified. European resentment imagined a greedy imperialist America, as I show in chapter 4. At the center of this anti-Americanism was the perception of difference—America as unlike the rest of the Western world yet also determined to attempt a cultural and economic invasion of Europe. Some European intellectuals traveling to America after 1945 conveyed this general resentment toward America, only to admit to their change of heart upon discovering a fascinating and complex nation. Albert Camus, who came in 1946 at an invitation from the exiled École Libre, found himself waxing poetic, in the diary entries recorded in his notebooks, about American restaurants, women, and architecture. For the most part, however, Camus was not very interested in the United States, and his trip to New York was only the first leg of a longer voyage to Mexico and South America. He liked the rain in New York more than the city itself. Upon entering the New York Harbor on arrival, he observed “in the distance, the skyscrapers of Manhattan against a backdrop of mist.” This vista prompted the following comment: “Deep down I feel calm and indifferent, as I generally do in front of spectacles that don’t move me.”³²

A year later, in January 1947, Simone de Beauvoir arrived in New York with a letter of introduction from her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre. After spending two months in New York, where she met with the most prominent American intellectuals of the time, she traveled from coast to coast by train, bus, and automobile. Many French intellectuals rallied behind Sartre and de Beauvoir in their infatuation with the Soviet Union, but in America the ideological climate was much more muddled by the split between anti-Stalinists, anticommunists, and anticapitalists. In America Day by Day, de Beauvoir declares herself in love with America, especially New York, a city whose contradictions and complexities seduced her to the point that she claimed in her journal to love it as much as she loved Paris. Her reflections on American life and society are not only insightful, as many American critics have hailed them, but also infused with affection and admiration. Even when arguing intensely with American intellectuals over politics, or when she disagreed vehemently with their position, de Beauvoir found Americans welcoming and open, concerned with making a foreign guest feel at home and at ease. From taxi drivers (a category she grew especially fond of) to the fiercely political editors of the Partisan Review—whose politics differed from hers—Americans struck the French guest as committed to surrounding themselves “with a climate of trust, cheer, and friendship.” The American “benevolence,” as she called it, was not only rare or inexistent in France as a social feeling toward others, but also extended toward anyone, including foreigners. “I am a foreigner: this seems to be neither a defect nor an eccentricity here,” noted a surprised de Beauvoir. Although grateful each time a newly made acquaintance organized a party for her, which opened new doors and made new contacts, de Beauvoir’s overall characterizations of American (especially intellectuals) are critical. Her criticism is not harsh but is firmly delivered, which makes the praise seem condescending. The reproaches she levels at Americans differ from the old epithets, and it was not Americans’ superficiality, boorishness, or obsession with material values that disappointed de Beauvoir, but their lack of wisdom:

If Americans have so little sense of nuances, it isn’t that they are incapable of grasping them . . . but that they would be troubled by them. To accept nuances is to accept ambiguity of judgment, argument, and hesitation; such complex situations force you to think. They want to lead their lives by geometry, not by wisdom. Geometry is taught, whereas wisdom is discovered, and only the first offers the refreshing certainties that a conscientious person needs. So they choose to believe in a geometrical world where every right angle is set against another, like their buildings and their streets.33

Presenting the American intellectual as unable to cope with uncertainty, the foreign visitor is simultaneously asserting her own superiority. She is wise. The implicit contrast serves as a way of elevating the foreigner. This trick may have been all too obvious to the American intellectuals who interacted with de Beauvoir during her visit, and it certainly irritated them once her book was published. “Indeed, ‘authoritative’ was the word for her on most subjects,” wrote William Barrett in his reflections on her trip; he had read de Beauvoir’s travel memoir and did not agree with most of her characterizations of America. His response to her representation of America, however, is more than disagreement. Barrett dismisses de Beauvoir as a foreigner prone to misunderstanding because of a basic lack of linguistic proficiency. While de Beauvoir admits she had difficulty understanding English at times, Barrett portrays her as barely knowing any English at all. Her linguistic incomprehension becomes pure arrogance, as Barrett sneers: “I wondered at times why she had come here at all, since she already had her case complete on us and our country. Perhaps it was only to add some confirming details to the picture she already had. She seemed to me like a traveler carrying an invisible visa form in which all the main items had already been entered and she had only to fill in a few blanks.”³⁴

In September 1947, the journal Commentary published an article by Mary McCarthy, titled “America the Beautiful,” which offers a portrait of American culture using the pretext of a foreign visitor, a female “Existentialist” who had asked about the uniquely American characteristics. The rather transparent reference to de Beauvoir, who had met McCarthy in New York, is part of a broader rhetorical strategy in McCarthy’s piece, which uses the motif of the foreigner as an inquisitive mind to contest for anyone except the native the ability to form accurate impressions of a culture or a nation. Reporting that the visitor had asked to be shown a distinctly American thing—whether a food, a sight, or an institution—McCarthy derides the very attempt at distinguishing America in a way that might impress favorably a European visitor. “For the visiting European,” she quips, “a trip through the United States has, almost inevitably, the character of an expose, and the American on his side is tempted by love of his country to lock the inquiring tourist in his hotel room and throw away the key.” By contrast, McCarthy feels no compulsion at acknowledging the inferiority of America by European standards, manifested in the less impressive architecture, food, even women’s fashion. Yet she also argues that such inferiority is precisely the result of America’s immigrant heritage. If Europe appears more cultured and civilized than America, McCarthy argues, it is because of the “thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their suffering with them.” Europe’s shortages have become American’s abundance. The chiasmic relation posited by McCarthy between Europe and America—“the concavity of hunger” in one converted in the “convex of abundance” in the other, as she memorably put it—establishes an antagonism that makes criticism of America ring hostile, always reproach rather than mere observation.35 “America the Beautiful” bespeaks a hurt national pride, yet McCarthy spent many years living in France and her closest friend in America was not a fellow American but a German Jew, Hannah Arendt. The America McCarthy defended from a European’s scorn was a culture she criticized more harshly than most foreigners. Why, then, would the foreigner seem so especially cold, detached, and unsympathetic?

USURPERS AND ENEMIES

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, war-torn Europe began to send to America not curious visitors who could make insightful (or even condescending) observations about a complex country from the blurred landscapes captured from a train window, a few handshakes with the locals during an overnight stop, or distant vistas seen from the balcony of a Manhattan apartment. Those arriving now knew their stay would be longer and that they would need to make an effort to function in American society, if only to survive. Walter Lacquer speaks of an entire elite generation of scholars who were immigrant children, arriving in America with their families escaping Nazi Germany.36 For them, returning to Germany after the war was not an option. The fact that the majority of these intellectuals came from Germany or from regions once in the Habsburg Austrian Empire deeply marked the position of the foreigner as intellectual in America. The wartime German intellectual became the paradigmatic representation of an alien and evil influence infiltrating American minds, its marked difference from the Puritan and Anglo-Saxon mold of America a threat greater than if it had been any other sending nation.

The wartime mass migration of intellectuals marked an important shift, yet one insufficiently noticed in a political culture built on the self-image as a nation of immigrants. Whether contested or accepted, the iconology of immigrant America has always implied an ethos of hard work, but most often physical work; determination, but often conceived as physical endurance; intrepidness, but mostly as practical spirit rather than reflection; and, finally, optimism and hopefulness, not the pessimism or skepticism of those who had seen their ideals betrayed or destroyed—this was what Americans expected in their immigrants. A case in point is the account of the rescue mission that brought Walter Benjamin from France into Spain as recounted years later by an assimilated immigrant, Lisa Fittko. A German Jew and guide to hundreds of political refugees who crossed the mountains from Nazi-occupied France into Spain, Fittko recounts Benjamin’s rescue with disdain rather than admiration, focusing on a symbolic element that identifies him as an intellectual: a heavy briefcase, carried along with much effort by an ailing Benjamin, which slowed him and the rest of the group. This lost burden, presumed to have been Benjamin’s last manuscript, is a vestige of the European world of ideas, but for Fittko it was merely a nuisance:

I had my hands full guiding our little group upward. Philosophy had to wait until we were over the mountain. I was busy rescuing some human beings from the Nazis, and here I was with this odd character, Old Benjamin, who under no circumstances would let himself be parted from his ballast, the black leather briefcase. And so, for better or worse, we had to drag that monstrosity over the mountains.³⁷

Dark irony has it that the thinker of the messianic internationalist order arrived at the Spanish border on the only day that passage was closed. Benjamin committed suicide. Fittko and the others crossed into Spain the next day. In a narrative of survival that represents the foreigner as a hero facing extreme danger and overcoming it, the death of the intellectual is not only anticlimactic but also a symbolic dramatization echoing the frontier myth: to succeed takes physical endurance in a hostile environment, courage, and determination, not intellectual sophistication. Fittko’s depiction of the briefcase suggests an anti-intellectualist bent that was shared by many Americans and used especially aggressively against foreign intellectuals.

In turn, the European intellectuals who came to America had their own reservations about this country. This was not where most of them would have preferred to be, if they had had an option. Many of those who had to flee Germany (or, shortly afterward, Austria and France) had already been exiles in other European countries and only embarked on a transatlantic voyage when nothing else seemed to work. It was not easy for them to travel to the United States. Immigration policies passed in the 1930s and 1940s imposed strict visa quotas and made entry to the United States difficult by increasing the number of requirements imposed on those who applied for visas.38 Against the general reluctance of American society to allow more foreigners—even enlightened ones—into the country, a few foundations, organizations, and academic institutions (notably Rockefeller, the Emergency Rescue Organization, and Columbia University), aided by key public and political figures (notably Eleanor Roosevelt) helped large numbers of European intellectuals arrive safely in the United States.

Once here, these formed the classical “receiving networks” that facilitate the entry of fellow nationals.³⁹ The European intellectuals already in America often filled out affidavits of support for visas that would get others out of countries newly fallen under German control. Such documents confronted the immigrants with the American bureaucracy and killed any illusion they might have had that prestige and talent were welcome in the New World. For some, entering the country posed such difficulty that it left them with a strong feeling of being undesirables in America. In some cases, this feeling even led to suicides, as Stefan Zweig’s example shows. For others, like Thomas Mann, immigrating to America was the final recourse they had postponed as long as they could, rather than a choice embraced happily. All struggled with the bureaucratic hurdles of immigration. A few who were already internationally renowned came as part of a contingent that benefited from the financial support and moral lobbying of the Emergency Rescue Committee. Formed in June 1940 at the initiative of prominent immigrants already in the United States, the Emergency Rescue Committee was trying to compensate for a highly restrictionist immigration policy. Through its appointed representative, the journalist Varian Fry, the committee identified exceptional European intellectuals whose lives were in danger and arranged for their visa formalities and trip to New York. While awaiting departure, the fortunate chosen stayed at Fry’s luxury villa, Bel Air, a name that came to symbolize the paradox of the intellectual refugee, both deprived (awaiting an entry visa) and privileged (guaranteed a safe haven in the midst of a world in political turmoil).

It is hard not to have mixed feelings—like Fry himself—about this rescue mission and not to question its elitist bent and emphasis on intellectual value over political involvement. Among those he helped to bring into the United States were more avant-garde painters and poets than anti-Nazi dissidents because he was “employed by a committee that depended for its financial support on an American public that was largely indifferent to the fate of the masses of unknown refugees.”40 And while Fry managed to extend his list beyond his assigned roster of “celebrity refugees” by applying criteria other than intellectual merit, the contingent he brought into the United States came under the joint premise of political innocuousness and a peculiar kind of racial neutrality. Arendt, for instance, was included in this rescue effort not because she was Jewish or a political dissident in Hitler’s Germany but because she was regarded as an outstanding philosopher. But in the political turmoil of the war years, intellectual merit was hard to separate from a political agenda. Some of Germany’s luminaries held socialist views at a time when American officials and segments of the public dreaded socialism and readily equated it with Stalinism. The relation between political activists and intellectuals engagés was already fraught in Europe; in America, it would become explosively dangerous as being involved in politics could be equated with being a radical and potential anarchist.41 In a period of five years, between 1953 and 1958, the Immigration and Naturalization Service completed 60,371 investigations of foreign-born residents deemed “subversives.”⁴²

Yet the European intellectuals arriving in America had the appeal that the continent that had sent them had exerted on Americans for centuries: sophistication and erudition. But this fascination was paralleled by a similarly long-standing distaste for the Old World and another set of features associated with it: old-fashioned ideas, rigidity, and lack of progress. European intellectuals had to carve out a difficult niche in response to the admiration lavished upon them simultaneously with contempt. These opposing responses were strangely synergistic in their outcome, which was to peg onto real people generic descriptions designed to stress difference and incompatibility. What resulted was a frequently invoked clash between mindsets and worldviews, in Francis Goffing’s rendition, a clash between the European mind, “hierarchical, systematic, and abstractly conceptual in its analysis of the world,” and the American mind, “lateral, free-wheeling, and concretely empirical.”⁴³

Perhaps even better representatives of this European mindset than their German colleagues, French intellectual war refugees were an ephemeral presence on the American scene. In the early 1940s, several prestigious French intellectuals escaping the Vichy government found refuge in the United States. The Catholic and socialist thinker Simone Weil, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the Nobel laureate poet Saint-John Perse, and many others lived and worked in New York without being perceived by most Americans as a cultural or political threat. In turn, they did not show much interest in participating in American politics as their focus remained on France and its own political situation. In a letter to Lévi-Strauss, Archibald MacLeish encouraged all French exiles to keep their eyes on France, and so they did. All of them returned promptly after the war and France’s liberation. Their decision can be explained partly on the strength of their ties to France, but they also experienced a different clash with the American public. From 1942 to 1944, Mount Holyoke College hosted several encounters between American intellectuals and French exiles. Modeled after the Pontigny entretiens—a series of lively dialogues in a picturesque setting in southern France sponsored by the philanthropist and intellectual M. Paul Desjardins—these encounters produced some interesting exchanges but were short-lived. Rather than establish a deep French-American connection, they proved its impossibility. As Laurent Jeanpierre points out, “Pontigny-en-Amerique acknowledged—and, to a degree, mourned—the passing of the old-style French intellectual . . . his notion of ‘good will’ had failed . . . and that failure had called into question the European—and above all, French—model of the ‘universal intellectual.’”44

Unlike the short-lived Pontigny-en-Amerique or the New York–based École Libre, the academic institutions formed around the German scholars were more prominent, and some became landmarks in American higher education. The New School, along with the Graduate Faculty, and the Institute for Social Research—all based in New York—were not only havens for displaced scholars but also highly productive intellectual centers that formed a strong reputation and launched their own intellectual traditions, sometimes against a rather cold, if not downright hostile reception. Despite the significant impact in America of the work done under the auspices of the Institute for Social Research, its leaders, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, experienced major difficulty in their early years at Columbia University, their host in New York. In addition to having to face the anti-Semitism of those years in forms that were unfamiliar to them, they got caught in scholarly disputes concerning the legitimacy of their methodological approach, which was deemed by the Americans too abstract, insufficiently empirical, and devoid of practical applications. Recalling his experience with the Princeton Radio Research Project and the difficulties he encountered in modifying his usual frame of work, Adorno confessed that he felt “a strong inner resistance to meeting this demand by turning [himself] inside out” and insists that he “probably couldn’t have done it even if [he] had wanted to more than [his] intellectual orientation made possible.” Aside from his own professed unwillingness to change in order to be accepted into his new scientific circle, Adorno was disturbed to discover “a certain resentment” toward himself in American colleagues. “The type of culture that I brought with me,” he reflected, “appeared (to Americans) to be unjustifiable arrogance. (They) cherished a mistrust of Europeans such as the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century must have entertained toward the émigré French aristocrats. However little desire I, destitute of all influence, had to do with social privilege, I appeared . . . to be a kind of usurper.”45

The reference to class as a metaphor of political rivalry is not incidental in Adorno’s reminiscences. European intellectuals like him clashed with their American counterparts in part because they represented different class mentalities. Regardless of their socialist agenda, Germans like Adorno had a solid bourgeois background. In America, their intellectual partners were more often first-generation college graduates. Yet the particular metaphor of political rivalry chosen by Adorno also reveals the fear that Americans had no real sympathy for the European intellectual refugees. Americans tolerated but did not approve of them. Accurate or not, such belief could explain the unwillingness of many European intellectuals to become involved in American politics, even though so many were highly politically aware and had been politically involved in their own countries.

The European intellectual refugees were frequently accused of not really understanding America. Some readily admitted to being rather perplexed by this country, and many writers whose outlet for creative expression was entirely dependent on language were discouraged by their struggles with English (the American exile put a tragic end to several promising literary careers). In 1941, the New York–based German Jewish newspaper Aufbau published an almanac for recently Americanized immigrants to familiarize them with American institutions and life. One section was devoted to American English, and it introduced the immigrants to bizarre (to them) and colorful colloquial terms that captured their sense “that American culture is like these idioms—glib, sensual, mercenary.”⁴⁶

Even when Adorno and other foreign intellectuals had become household names in the mainstream American academic and intellectual milieu, their style, if not the content of their work or their method, continued to be attacked. Regardless of how well some actually did speak and write in English, all of them faced the assumption that their discourse must be deficient. And the assumption moved surreptitiously from the level of pronunciation and vocabulary to logic and content. Adorno is a case in point. As he recounts, when his book Der Philosophie der neuen Musik (The Philosophy of New Music) was being translated for publication in the United States, the American editor requested a rough draft of the translation. “Upon reading it, he discovered that the book (the original book) with which he was already familiar was ‘badly organized’ [schlecht organiziert]. In Germany, I said to myself, despite everything that had happened there, at least I would be spared this.”47

The comparison between the harassment received from a publisher and anti-Semitic Nazi Germany is doubtless over the top. Indeed, in the next sentence Adorno himself retracted the analogy: “Compared to the horrors of National Socialism my literary experiences were insignificant trifles.”⁴⁸ Yet such “trifles” played a key role, by his own admission, in his decision to return to Germany after the war. Adorno did not simply object to being corrected by native speakers. He resented the implication that his approach needed correction because it was that of a foreigner. The implication may have existed. As I have already mentioned, Simone de Beauvoir’s English fueled not just criticism but the rejection of her views of America as inaccurate and misconstrued.

Many German intellectuals were, like Adorno, Jews. In the United States they came up against the stereotype of the “smart Jew,” which functioned as a strategy for “articulating Jewish difference” in post-Holocaust America. While seemingly a positive one, the image of the “smart Jew” was more ambiguous than it appears not only because it served as a strategy for imagining a unitary category of the Jew primarily in order to differentiate it from Americans but also because it hides a negative stereotype underneath a seemingly positive representation. In his analysis of popular representations of the “smart Jew” in American film, novels, and popular culture, Sander Gilman has found that the Jew’s intelligence is always pinned against a flaw, be it moral or physical. The “smart Jew” is especially depicted as lacking virtue, which renders intelligence useless. The fact that in many representations of the “smart Jew,” he or she is also either a victim or needs to be rescued from a dangerous situation suggests that “intelligence, especially when connected with the supposed superiority of the intellectual, is clearly an insufficient quality in this world.”49

For the newly arrived European Jew, being Jewish posed additional challenges because their particular kind of Jewish identity was disconnected from the emancipatory discourses on Jewish American identity emerging in the aftermath of the war. The postwar conception of Jewishness in America, coming out of “university campuses, rabbis’ studies and the pages of Jewish and non-Jewish periodicals, grounded Jews in American patterns—and thus, American success.”⁵⁰ But where would the non-American Jew, who had no recourse yet to “American patterns,” fit? The foreign origin of European Jews coming to America was not easily compensated by a shared religion, especially when the newcomers did not go to live in a New York settlement. However lucky they were in this regard, they also missed out on a sense of shared identity and stood out as different.

When not perceived merely in broad terms as European or Jewish, the foreign intellectuals’ reception was heavily dependent on representations about their national origin. For most German intellectuals, such perceptions posed significant problems around the war years. During the war, elite journals like Commentary and The New Republic published mostly negative articles of “works by German exiles . . . (which) would routinely fault their ‘Germanness’ and their Teutonic clumsiness.”⁵¹ The Federal Bureau of Investigation had an even more severe and more consequential indictment of German authors on account of their national origin. Several exiled German writers, most famously among them Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, were suspected of communist activity and placed under surveillance.⁵²

In April 1949, Life magazine launched a series of attacks against Thomas Mann based on the accusation that he was a “communist dupe,” along with Albert Einstein and several American intellectuals. In April 1951, the Los Angeles Times published on its front page the news that Mann had been put on a list of forty people considered by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as affiliated with communist organizations. Mann had never become involved in American politics proper, and the focus of his political activity in exile remained Germany. His views of America were a mix of high praise and rather condescending generalizations. His correspondence with German friends is peppered with phrases such as “the good-natured barbarians” (the Americans) and “curiously emptied and amiably stereotyped” (about American faces).53 Already in 1946, Mann started to worry about the political situation in the United States, which he deemed dangerously similar to the one in Germany right before the ascent of fascism to power. By the early 1950s, Mann was making dark predictions about the fate of democracy in America and was afraid that his American passport would be revoked and that he would be forbidden to ever enter the country again (he had returned to Switzerland). While the 1950s were a politically difficult time for many intellectuals and artists who lived in America, including those born here, the danger was markedly increased for a foreigner. This was a time of deportations increasingly decided on ideological grounds.⁵⁴ Foreignness made immigrant intellectuals politically suspect. As targets of the state that had taken them in, they were reminded of their difference. Mann left America disappointed and humiliated. The man who had once seen in President Theodore Roosevelt a political god (and had immortalized him in Joseph and His Brothers) also saw in President Dwight Eisenhower the reincarnation of Field Marshal Hindenburg.⁵⁵ Some Americans accused him of being a communist. Mann, in turn, was convinced that many Americans were rising fascists.

Such cross-firing gives a measure of the clash between American intellectual and media circles and European intellectual refugees. Brecht, who also eventually left the United States, was placed under even more intense political scrutiny than Mann. Unlike many of his fellow Germans in exile, Brecht had come to America excited to join a culture embodying everything he could no longer find in Germany: vitality, imagination, and non-conformism. In 1920 he had written in his diary: “How this Germany bores me! . . . What’s left? America.”⁵⁶ But once he decided to emigrate, encounters with American immigration officials radically modified this idyllic image of America. After obtaining the necessary visas with difficulty, Brecht arrived in a country that was not eager to share his artistic or political vision. His publicly declared communist beliefs were enough to make him a suspect. The FBI surveillance file reveals a strong emphasis on his national status and not just ideology. Subtle shifts in word choice in the section that identifies Brecht’s immigration status illustrate how suspicious his foreignness appeared:

The records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Los Angeles, disclosed that EUGEN BERTOLT FRIEDRICH BRECHT was born at Augsburg, Germany on February 10, 1898, and that he arrived in the United States at the port of San Pedro on July 21, 1941 on the S.S. Annie Jackson from Helsingfors, Finland. Accompanying BRECHT were his wife, HELEN WEIGET BRECHT and two children STEFAN and (illegible), then eighteen and twelve years of age respectively. The above records also revealed that BRECHT married in Berlin in 1928. BRECHT declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States on December 8, 1941, at Los Angeles.57

Standard, routine information—date of birth, nationality, marital status—suddenly suggests a clandestine status, prompting the use of verbs like “disclose” and “reveal” instead of neutral ones like “show” or “state.” The suspiciousness is later reinforced through the inclusion of an excerpt from Brecht’s literary work, titled “On the Designation ‘Emigrant,’” in which the author takes poetic license with the status of the German refugees, lamenting that “we didn’t emigrate, we, of our own free will, choosing another country. . . . The country that accepted us is no home, but a place of exile. We sit restlessly as near the Border as possible, waiting for the day of our return, observing every little change beyond the Border, questioning every newcomer eagerly, forgetting nothing and giving up nothing.”⁵⁸

The poem included in the file is meant as evidence that Brecht could not have been genuinely interested in American citizenship. The FBI file presses the non-assimilability of the foreigner on moral, not merely legal, grounds: Brecht appears cunning and untrustworthy and his petition for American citizenship a devious ploy rather than the expression of a genuine commitment to the new country. The capitalization of a common noun into “Border” sanctifies the limit that sets apart citizens from noncitizens. This restless being who hovers around the “Border” is the ultimate embodiment of nonbelonging: the foreigner lurking on the margins of to the nation.

In a country that was highly suspicious of the newcomers, citizenship and visa requirements became moral tests rather than mere bureaucratic procedures. One of the key concerns American officials had vis-à-vis foreign intellectuals was their political activity in the homeland and the risk that it might be resumed in the United States. But political missions have different meanings in different contexts. Being socialist in Weimar Germany was not the same as being socialist in America. Caught between different cultural and ideological worlds, anxious to be allowed to stay in America and evade a tragic fate in Europe, some foreign intellectuals hid their political beliefs. As Heilbut comments, “many people felt insecure even in their citizenship, and regarded the course of their emigration as a transit from affidavit to subpoena.59

Over time, such anxiety, along other disappointments the émigrés experienced in America, became grave enough to convince them to leave. Whether they died, like Zweig, returned to their homeland, like Brecht, Adorno, and Horkheimer, or chose another European destination, like Mann (who left the United States for Switzerland), European-born intellectuals were a diminished presence in Cold War America. As the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern and Central Europe, a new category of intellectual refugees started trickling into the United States. Yet those fleeing Stalin were neither as numerous nor as famous as those escaping Hitler had been. Later, political dissidents, such as the Czech Václav Havel and the Polish Adam Michnik, remained in their homelands and suffered imprisonment and other kinds of persecution. Eastern European dissidents could and did emigrate to France, Germany, or Britain rather than the United States as Western European states were closer and now also secure (unlike during World War II). The intellectual refugees who came after 1956 (the year of the Hungarian Revolution) or after 1968 (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) were less politically minded, even if they were escaping political persecution. The Polish poet and philosopher Czeslaw Milosz, who immigrated to America in 1960, became known mainly as a poet and literature professor at Berkeley rather than as the author of The Captive Mind, his critical account of communism as a totalitarian ideology. The Eastern and Central European intellectuals fleeing communist dictatorships found a sympathetic reception, at least among anticommunists.60 Since Cold War America fashioned itself as the political and cultural opposite to the world these refugees left behind, they were all the more welcomed because they reinforced the American “narrative of choiceworthiness,” to use Bonnie Honig’s term.⁶¹ The very presence of a Solzhenitsyn, Milosz, or Nabokov confirmed America’s ascendancy over the Soviet Union and its satellite states. At the same time, they were still foreigners, inheriting the profile of the World War II intellectual refugee: admired, envied, feared, and resented. Even a fierce anticommunist like Solzhenitsyn had an uneasy reception in American intellectual circles, including the most conservative anticommunist ones because he was so strikingly Russian, as I discuss in more detail in chapter 4. Like shared religion or, in time, even a shared language (with many foreign intellectuals publishing and lecturing in English), shared ideological beliefs did not eliminate the gulf between the foreigner and the native.

The history of foreigners’ discourse about America is a mix of praise and criticism as America itself changed in their perception from an exotic sojourn and locus of wonder to a more accessible and familiar destination, albeit also a final one. The reception of this discourse in the United States reflects a pattern of rejection that is more than just xenophobic. Foreigners represent “agents of legitimation,” expected to confirm and renew a nation’s positive self-image.⁶² Whether they extolled the virtues of American society as a model for the rest of the world or provoked Americans to assert the exemplarity of their nation, the foreigners’ discourse activated a narcissistic impulse that makes one impervious, if not allergic, to criticism. At the same time, the foreigner’s linguistic difference, as nonnative speaker of English (when not completely unacquainted with the language) became an iconic representation of inferiority.

“I still speak (English) with a foreign accent and I often don’t speak idiomatically,” admitted Hannah Arendt in an interview given when she had already lived for several decades in the United States.⁶³ Her admission sounded both confessional and apologetic, as though she had failed some important test, no matter how much she had published in English or how important her works had been, along with her lectures at the New School and the University of Chicago. It was the test of linguistic membership in the nation. The mark of the stranger persona is deviation from the “universe of sedimented discourse” that persuasion draws upon, not just a national language but also a stock of familiar arguments and common stylistic patterns.64 Native speakers also deviate from conventions and norms, whether they make grammatical mistakes, have a regional accent, or issue unorthodox claims, but their departures can pass for provisional and perfectible or merely original. The stranger persona, on the other hand, is not just eccentric but also heretic. It reinforces exteriority to the imagined community of the nation and renders it dangerous. As Pierre Bourdieu put it, authority comes to language from the outside—the nation-state.⁶⁵ What identifies speakers as citizens or noncitizens, more than documents, is the way they speak. It is no coincidence that, at the same time the Arizona Department of State prohibited the hiring of teachers who spoke English with an accent, the state introduced new deportation procedures that allowed law enforcement to demand identifi cation documents from people suspected of being illegal aliens. What made them look foreign was sometimes how they sounded.

In chapter 1, I examine the political tradition of foreignness in theories of democracy and its effect on creating a discursive polis in which the available means of persuasion, as Aristotle defined rhetoric, are restricted to citizens. Reading theories of the nation-state alongside the sociology of the stranger and the development of a political style centered on citizen-orators, I argue that foreignness affords insights otherwise unavailable but that it is also highly constrained historically and conceptually, and thus rhetorically unstable. In the case studies that follow, I offer four instances of the stranger persona, each shaped by the historical and political context in which these foreign intellectuals built their American political career. I focus on their most controversial writings, in which they made claims either directly about or highly consequential for U.S. politics. In chapter 2, I examine Arendt’s criticism of the use of federal troops in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the scandal surrounding her “banality of evil” thesis as it emerged from the New Yorker reports on the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Both these works led to a vilification of Arendt in American intellectual circles and continue to provoke interest decades after their initial publication. Arendt was in many ways the most important protagonist in my cast of characters. Her ideas resurface in the work of the other three, whether the influence is acknowledged or not. She is the first, chronologically, to have launched a career of political commentary in and on America (even though Marcuse arrived in New York two years before her, he remained initially within the bounds of his circle of German associates). Arendt also offers the most comprehensive discussion of estrangement, rather than merely using it as a technique. Even though she put it under the rubric of the pariah, Arendt envisioned a stranger persona that inspired much of my own thinking in this book. Finally, the Arendtian works I study in this chapter contain a critique of American society (explicit and implicit) that captures the political agendas of the other three, no matter how different they were.

In chapter 3, I analyze the critique of capitalism presented by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man and Essays on Liberation but also in lesser known public speeches. I argue that Marcuse saw American capitalism as the most dangerous embodiment of a political and economic system present in other Western societies as well. In America, this fervent critic of the bourgeoisie and former revolutionary during the Berlin 1919 uprising found himself in the belly of the beast. I analyze Marcuse’s relationship with the American student radicals and the making of his reputation as their alleged guru. In chapter 4, I examine Solzhenitsyn’s 1976 commencement speech at Harvard University, in which the Soviet dissident appears as a fierce critic of the United States, and the paradoxical response it received in America, both a dismissal of his arguments and a reaffirmation of his understanding of the role America should play as an imperialist power. Solzhenitsyn’s political views differed substantially from those of Arendt, Marcuse, and Said, and this contrast is, in part, what justified my selection. The rejection of completely different, indeed, opposed political agendas reveals the magnitude of the reluctance to accept a foreigner’s perspective, no matter what this perspective was. In chapter 5, I investigate Said’s political activism on behalf of Palestine and his criticism of Zionism as the founding ideology behind Israeli policies in the Middle East, compatible, in his view, with the key tenets of Orientalism and American imperialism. I analyze Said’s political rhetoric not only in his political journalism but also in his scholarly and literary work, especially Orientalism and his memoir Out of Place. I make the case that Said strategically used a stranger persona based on his origin as a Palestinian despite the fact that he had inherited American citizenship from his father and had lived most of his adult life in the United States.

My analysis of these intellectuals’ political texts places them in the “spaces within which the dialectic of political rights and cultural identities unfolds,”66 identifying the traditions of thought and social practice that may have shaped some of their views and considering the ways some of these views could also have been relevant to the American polity. To study their stranger personas, I analyze these intellectuals’ stylistic devices as techniques of estrangement, in the sense originally proposed by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, but I adapt this to the specific task of rhetorical invention in political discourse and trace their use of specific rhetorical tropes, from analogy, metonymy, and synecdoche to narrative techniques and irony or despair. Yet it is not a particular trope that uniquely defined the styles of these four intellectuals as much as the very tropological nature of their political discourse, which constituted a way of departing from shared understandings and casting into question common assumptions.

Foreigners being introduced to new customs and practices, in some cases vastly unfamiliar to them, can have some problematic cultural blind spots. I do not deny or overlook this. Yet lack of familiarity with their new culture not only does not justify dismissal but can also lead to missed opportunities. What the reception of these four intellectuals illustrates is the rhetorical dynamic of a political culture that retains a habit of exclusion even as it purports to be committed to pluralism. In the conclusion of this book, I consider the implications of the stranger persona for a polity, beyond the particular reception of these four intellectuals, for eliminating this habit of exclusion. The political membership for foreigners I argue for in this book requires a modification in the very positioning of these intellectuals in the foreign/native binary. The distinction was affirmed by those who responded, especially those who responded critically, to the political ideas of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said. Yet the stranger persona used by these four intellectuals constitutes a discursive avenue into a polis that does not operate along this distinction anymore. By that, I do not mean that I advocate a political world without nation-states but that I see major political risks in promoting an oppositional rhetoric that takes the distinction among nations at face value and essentializes it to represent a distinction among individuals and among ideas. A language habit even more deeply entrenched in political discourse since the Cold War, the argumentation framework built around the insider-outsider distinction is what a stranger persona can throw into question. The rhetorical merit of these four intellectuals is that they created an argumentation stance that undermines the assumption that the commitment to a polis cannot be shared beyond national origin, cultural background, or common life experiences. Thus, the main contribution of this book regards the political implications of the stranger persona as a discursive phenomenon, which need not be restricted in use to individuals who were born in another country. We can all do with an increased dose of estrangement in political discourse. We should look at our civic world with the eyes of a stranger, but not any stranger: one who is involved and committed to the society in which he or she lives. An intimate stranger, just like an intimate friend, can be not only a trusted aid but also a source of enlightenment.

This is all the more the case for these four intellectuals, who were exceptional individuals. The story of their involvement in American political discourse is not simply one of triumph or rejection.67 Perhaps their most impressive achievement is that they got to the forefront of public discourse and captured the attention of American audiences against a long tradition of American discourse sneering at criticism from foreigners or treating it with condescension. None of them faced the obstacles of a political refugee from Kosovo or Somalia. They were not illiterate, destitute, or racially different from many Americans. They came well equipped with the rhetorical ability required for political participation. The controversies that ensued as they tried to make their voices heard in American discourse represent a litmus test for the negotiation of discursive and political rights that could be afforded to all foreigners, regardless of their profession, prestige, or rhetorical prowess.