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"All Americans are hero-worshippers": American Observations on the First U.S. Visit by a Reigning Monarch, 1876
By Phil Roberts, University of Wyoming
When Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, visited America in 1876, he planned to assess industrial and technological innovation on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and to pay visits to men whom he admired. Most Americans were fascinated by the emperor, even though his visit came at an awkward time. During the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, America was hosting an emperor—and from the last major slaveholding country. This article reviews newspaper accounts of the visit and analyzes the ambivalence displayed toward his visit. Americans were supposedly devoted to equality. Nonetheless, wherever he went during his three-month sojourn, the emperor was met by admiring crowds. One newspaper explained: "It is not the monarch so much as the novelty that attracts in this country." This article views the visit not from Dom Pedro's impressions of America, but from American responses to the visit of a hereditary monarch—the first to travel around America during his reign. The paper concludes that centennial-year fascination with royalty generally overcame historic contempt for hereditary privilege and lack of interest in royal visitors. Such ambivalent attitudes toward visiting royalty continue into the present day.
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Thousands of Europeans and foreigners from elsewhere in the world traveled about America in the nineteenth century and wrote down their impressions of what they had seen. Many such accounts appeared in newspapers in their home countries or showed up in book form for readers curious about America and things American.1 Historians draw from these writings both a sense of what foreigners thought about the United States and how they interpreted American life to their fellow citizens in Europe and elsewhere.2 This study takes the opposite tack, however. It examines American commentary on a visiting foreigner, Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, who came to the United States during the 1876 Centennial Exposition. What did American observers say about what he saw, how various groups of people viewed him, where he traveled, and what he told his hosts about the places he had seen? In learning what Americans wrote about this celebrity visitor, one also learns about how Americans thought of themselves in the centennial year of American independence. From the numerous accounts of Dom Pedro's visit, one sees how journalists reassured themselves and their readers as to America's belief in egalitarianism and its rejection of hereditary rule. |
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In the twenty-first century, American tabloid journalists still gain readership by reporting on the comings and goings of "the royals." Even though the foibles, excesses, and pronouncements of hereditary monarchs rarely amount to matters of state, even the mainstream press contains regular accounts of royal lives. The phenomenon is hardly modern. Observers have long commented on American ambivalence toward royalty. The attitudes have ranged from adoration and envy to bemused contempt. As James Bryce noted in the late nineteenth century, there already existed a tendency in America to "relish and make the most of such professional or official titles as can be had; it is a harmless way of trying to relieve the monotony of the world." But he also added, "If there be, as no doubt there is, less disposition than in England to run after and pay court to the great or the fashionable, this is perhaps due not to any superior virtue, but to the absence of those opportunities and temptations which their hereditary titles and other social institutions set before the English."3 |
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