Politics & Power Quote by Mary McCarthy

McCarthy lands the punch by flipping the usual transatlantic stereotype: brash, cash-soaked Americans versus refined, above-it-all Europeans. Her target isn’t the heiress so much as the comforting fiction both continents tell about themselves. The “American heiress” is a ready-made symbol of new money searching for old legitimacy; the joke is that if she wants to “buy a man,” she shops where titles, accents, and pedigrees still circulate like luxury goods. Romance becomes a market, marriage a merger, and Europe a showroom for status.

Then McCarthy twists the blade: “The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.” It’s an intentionally scandalous claim, less sociological finding than moral provocation. She’s mocking European self-mythology - the idea that culture inoculates against greed. By calling Europeans “really materialistic,” she implies a subtler, more cultivated materialism: not simply loving money, but loving what money can launder into “taste,” rank, and social permission.

The intent is satirical but not weightless. McCarthy is writing out of a mid-century American moment when wealth had global reach but still craved European certification. Her subtext is that materialism isn’t a national flaw; it’s a social technology. The Atlantic, in her telling, isn’t an ocean but a conveyor belt that turns dollars into distinction - and turns “civilization” into a price tag with better typography.