All of these books, history and fiction, drop into the American mind
during its early springtime the seed of antagonism, establish in fact
an anti-English “complex.” It is as pretty a case of complex on the
wholesale as could well be found by either historian or psychologist.
It is not so violent as the complex which has been planted in the German
people by forty years of very adroitly and carefully planned training:
they were taught to distrust and hate everybody and to consider
themselves so superior to anybody that their sacred duty as they saw it
in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the
priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex
dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English
com-plex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it
savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would
tell you---it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of
American men and women of every grade of education and ignorance should
automatically exclaim whenever the right button is pressed, “England is
a land-grabber,” and “What has England done in the War?”
The word complex has been in our dictionary for a long while. This
familiar adjective has been made by certain scientific people into a
noun, and for brevity and convenience employed to denote something that
almost all of us harbor in some form or other. These complexes, these
lumps of ideas or impressions that match each other, that are of the
same pattern, and that are also invariably tinctured with either a
pleasurable or painful emotion, lie buried in our minds, unthought-of
but alive, and lurk always ready to set up a ferment, whenever some new
thing from outside that matches them enters the mind and hence starts
them off. The “suppressed complex” I need not describe, as our English
complex is by no means suppressed. Known to us all, probably, is the
political complex. Year after year we have been excited about elections
and candidates and policies, preferring one party to the other. If
this preference has been very marked, or even violent, you know how
disinclined we are to give credit to the other party for any act or
policy, no matter how excellent in itself, which, had our own party been
its sponsor, we should have been heart and soul for. You know how
easily we forget the good deeds of the opposite party and how easily
we remember its bad deeds. That’s a good simple ordinary example of a
complex. Its workings can be discerned in the experience of us all. In
our present discussion it is very much to the point.
Established in the soft young minds of our school boys and girls by
a series of reiterated statements about the tyranny and hostility of
England towards us in the Revolution, statements which they have to
remember and master by study from day to day, tinctured by the anxiety
about the examination ahead, when the students must know them or fail,
these incidents of school work being also tinctured by another emotion,
that of patriotism, enthusiasm for Washington, for the Declaration of
Independence, for Valley Forge--thus established in the regular way of
all complexes, this anti-English complex is fed and watered by what we
learn of the War of 1812, by what we learn of the Civil War of 1861, and
by many lesser events in our history thus far. And just as a Republican
will admit nothing good of a Democrat and a Democrat nothing good of
a Republican because of the political complex, so does the great--the
vast--majority of Americans automatically and easily remember everything
against England and forget everything in her favor. Just try it any day
you like. Ask any average American you are sitting next to in a train
what he knows about England; and if he does remember anything and can
tell it to you, it will be unfavorable nine times in ten. The mere word
“England” starts his complex off, and out comes every fact it has seized
that matches his school-implanted prejudice, just as it has rejected
every fact that does not match it. There is absolutely no other way
to explain the American habit of speaking ill of England and well of
France. Several times in the past, France has been flagrantly hostile to
us. But there was Lafayette, there was Rochambeau, and the great service
France did us then against England. Hence from our school histories we
have a pro-French complex. Under its workings we automatically remember
every good turn France has done us and automatically forget the evil
turns. Again try the experiment yourself. How many Americans do you
think that you will find who can recall, or who even know when you
recall to them the insolent and meddlesome Citizen Genet, envoy of the
French Republic, and how Washington requested his recall? Or the French
privateers that a little later, about 1797-98, preyed upon our commerce?
And the hatred of France which many Americans felt and expressed at that
time? How many remember that the King of France, directly our Revolution
was over, was more hostile to us than England?