The Ugly American

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

The Ugly American is the title of a 1956 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. It became a bestseller, was influential at the time, and is still in print.

The novel described how the United States was losing the struggle with communism—what was later to be called the battle for hearts and minds—in Southeast Asia, through arrogance and failure to understand the local culture. In the novel, a Burmese journalist says "For some reason, the 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're loud and ostentatious." The phrase "ugly Americans" came to be applied to Americans behaving in this way.

Ironically, the "ugly American" of the book title actually referred to one of the heroes, a plain-looking engineer who lives with the local people, comes to understand their needs, and gives genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump.

Another of the book's heroes, Colonel Hillandale, appears to have been modelled on the real-life Air Force Lieutenant General Edward Lansdale, an expert in counter-guerrilla operations.