All it took was Soviet propaganda for me to look at my own country and its history from a different POV. But that same propaganda did not work on the majority of Soviets! To illustrate this point, consider that my family was in the Soviet Union in 1969 when the Manson murders occurred. Never missing an opportunity to demonstrate the evils of the West, there were Soviet television reports on it as well as articles in Pravda. My mother was a fan of Sharon Tate and was quite distraught. My father was speaking about it to a Soviet acquaintance and the acquaintance replied, "Oh, Zhenya, tell your wife not to worry. You don't believe that happened do you? You can't believe that happened. It was printed in Pravda!" My father tried, in vain, to convince a lot of his contacts over there that Sharon Tate had indeed been murdered. None of them believed him. They all said, "Nothing like that happens in America. It is the land of milk and honey."

Arguably, no people thought as highly of the US and Americans as the Soviet people. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, though, a lot of those rose glasses are becoming clear. The past 3.5 years have made those glasses crystal clear. As a Brit friend of mine said recently, "It is going to take generations of Americans to rebuild your [the US] reputation around the world."

If so, isn't it curious that the height of our reputation occurred when our most racist post-antebellum laws were still on the books and being enforced?

It'd be almost as if Europe didn't really give a tinker's damn about racism.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that the Marshall Plan contributed significantly to the esteem with which the US was held following WWII. Britain received much more than even Germany did through the Marshall Plan.

To suggest no one looked the gift horse in the mouth, while perhaps understandable, is unsettling. Such a position implies that post-WWII Europeans didn't care who gave them the money to rebuild. They'd take it from anyone without regard to the contributors decency or ethics. A variant of the Soviet apologist's "Stalin was brutal. But he inherited a nation using wooden plows and turned it into a nuclear power," if you will.

Neither you nor I were alive then. But, you are there and have grown to adulthood there. I'd normally be inclined to defer to you on this point. But the fact remains that at the height of our reputation we were deeply flawed, particularly on matters of race (and, not to put too fine a point on it, remain so today). But the UK is far from being without sin in this regard. I think you'd have to admit that the Brexit vote was won by appealing to racism far more than the uncountably many non-race based false claims made by Leave leaders.

So, was it blindness (willful or otherwise) or common bigotry that allowed our reputation to achieve its height in Europe in an era when our government was passing and enforcing the most racist laws in our post Civil War history? I cannot say I know the answer to that question. You're in a better position than I to answer that question, so feel free to choose the one that suits you best.

For my part, it still seems incongruous that we could be thought of so highly when our Federal Government was doing things like requiring clauses in deeds to read, "this property will never be transferred to ownership nor rental by Blacks" in order to gain a Fair Housing Administration loan and in the era of apartheid.